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Once the Europeans know that their democratic friends are ready to take in their fair share, it will become easier for them to take theirs, and the momentum might emerge to reform the 1951 Refugee Convention, so that all those fleeing civil war, state collapse and murderous militias will get the same protection as those fleeing a well-founded fear of persecution.

Let’s remember that we used to be able to rise to the occasion. My country, Canada, sent a government minister to Vienna in late 1956 to support a processing center that took in hundreds of Hungarians and airlifted them to Canada after the Soviets crushed the Hungarian uprising. The Hungarians themselves seem to forget that they, too, were once refugees. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States received hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese boat people. There were voices, on both occasions, that warned, this will trigger a flood. It did — and what excellent citizens these Vietnamese and Hungarians have been.

The Vietnamese and Hungarians were fleeing Communism. What’s holding back sympathy for the Syrians? They’ve been barrel-bombed in Aleppo by their own regime, they’ve been tortured, kidnapped and massacred by miscellaneous jihadis and opposition militias. They’ve been in refugee camps for years, waiting for that cruelly deceiving fiction “the international community” to come to their aid. Now, when they take to the roads, to the boats and to the trains, all our political leaders can think of is fences, barbed wire and more police.

What must Syrians, camped on the street outside the Budapest railway station, be thinking of all that fine rhetoric of ours about human rights and refugee protection? If we fail, once again, to show that we mean what we say, we will be creating a generation with abiding hatred in its heart.

So if compassion won’t do it, maybe prudence and fear might. God help us if these Syrians do not forgive us our indifference.

Michael Ignatieff is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.

