Man rewrites refugee crisis to highlight hypocrisy of right-wing America

A man has "rewritten" the refugee crisis in a response to the growing clamour of right-wing America to bar Syrians from entering the country.

Thomas Keegan, an actor from Washington, has written about an imaginary world in which the crisis is happening in the US and it is Americans fleeing from the destruction of their cities rather than Syrians.

“You cannot believe it has come to this,” he writes. “You are 10th generation American (of course you’re not because this is America, not Syria, where that’s actually a reality, but stay with me). You make the impossible decision to carry your small children and what possessions and valuables you can/have left, and you WALK to Canada.”

Mr Keegan likens the refusal to take Syrian refugees in to a fictitious scenario in which Canada turns Americans away because of mass shooter and white supremacist Dylan Roof, a white American Christian responsible for the deaths of nine people at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

He ends the post saying: “This is my American truth: I would rather die, with hope in my heart, in a country that opens its arms to those in need, than live, ashamed, in one which turns its back.”

Mr Keegan’s post has been widely praised and already shared more than 25,000 times.

The post was written after US politicians overwhelmingly approved a bill that blocks resettlement of refugees fleeing Syria and Iraq in the US.

In the past week, Republican presidential candidates Ben Carson and Donald Trump have both been heavily criticised for their negative portrayals of refugees and Muslims.

Only 1,500 Syrian refugees have been accepted into the US since 2011, according to The Telegraph. Refugees must go through a vigorous “vetting” process before being resettled in the US, which can take two to three years to complete.