Ben Carson holds Arab nations responsible for Syrian refugees

Following up a strategic visit to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, Ben Carson blasted Syria's Arab neighbors for their failure to accept and provide for the massive displaced populations flowing over their borders. "The media has focused on Europe and the United States' willingness or unwillingness to welcome these refugees. This focus is all wrong. The solution to the Syrian refugee crisis is with Syria's neighbors," Carson wrote in an op-ed for The Hill.

Experts on the refugee crisis disagree with Carson's assessment of the situation, however. Speaking with Reuters, Melanie Nezer, a policy director at the Jewish nonprofit agency HIAS, explained that the neighboring nations of Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan have already taken in massive amounts of refugees; one in every four people in Lebanon, for example, is a refugee.

"They can't absorb all these people and they really need help from the rest of the world. We can't just say to these countries that the burden is completely on them," Nezer said. "I could watch brain surgery for a day or two; that doesn't make me a brain surgeon. You cannot get an appreciation for the scale of this crisis and the global implications of it by spending a day or two talking to a few refugees in one location."

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