If the Tamils were Irish, would we be screaming to send them back?

For a nation that prides itself on the have’s helping the have not’s, we should be hanging our heads in shame given the racist hysteria surrounding the arrival of the persecuted Tamils on boats in British Columbia.
The stereotyping of all Tamils and those on the boat as being associated with the Tamil Tigers is akin to labeling those wanting to flee the security crisis in Northern Ireland as IRA terrorists.
We need to ask ourselves if the Tamils were Irish, would we be screaming so loud to send them back?
What is even sadder is that many of those spouting their ignorant assertions are new Canadians who have established themselves in this great nation of compassion after leaving their homelands.
To understand why the Tamils would sell everything they have and risk their lives on a perilous sea journey, one needs to understand the Singhalese bigotry which has used its Parliament, to marginalize over one million Tamils with race-based legislation.
The Tamils were forced into rebellion because of the disenfranchisement and discrimination against the Tamil minority in a predominantly Buddhist country.
Sri Lanka does not believe that the true test of a majority is how it treats its minorities.
Instead, the hard-line administration of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse used a violent oppression to end the 26-year-old war with the Tamil Tigers, who were fighting against what is essentially an apartheid regime.
This left hundreds of thousands of people displaced, devastated and shipped to army camps. The conflict killed well in excess of 70,000 people.
Rights groups say thousands of civilians were killed towards the end of the war, an allegation denied by the Sri Lankan government, which has refused international requests for an independent investigation into widespread allegations of abuse by the military during the conflict.
Instead, the Sri Lankan government has set up its own Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission to hear about the war crimes. That is like Hitler asking his generals to find out if his Nazi troops were unkind to Jews.
The zeal with which Sri Lanka wants to obscure international scrutiny of its actions against the Tamils has also led to President Mahinda Rajapakse to silence his former army chief General Sarath Fonseka, who led the offensive against the Tamil Tigers.
Fonseka had planned to release incidents of military atrocities while campaigning against Rajapakse in a bid to become president. For that, he was court martialled last week and faces jail time.
Over the past two years, Canada has accepted more than 90 per cent of refugee claimants from Sri Lanka, after studying their case histories, which is similar to that of the 500 Tamils that arrived on the MV Sun Sea last week.
We already know why they are fleeing. Just because they come in boats does not make them any different.
So instead of reacting with unjustified fears, uninformed opinions and unbalanced judgment, which has given traction to anti-immigration sentiments, those screaming “send them back” should ask themselves what they would do if they were a Tamil in Sri Lanka.
And those saying “they are all going to go on welfare” should ask themselves when was the last time they were approached by a panhandler of Asian descent.