George Clooney: Irish Were Treated Terribly in America
> And Not Accepted
James O'Shea, Irish Central, 16 March,2016
George Clooney speaks to Syrian refugees about how tough it is for new immigrants often.
Photo by: The White House / Pete Souza
George Clooney talked about his Irish ancestry and its importance while visiting Syrian refugee families in Berlin.
Clooney and wife Amal made a video about their own roots to help the Syrian refugees settle.
Clooney spoke about his Irish roots and stated the way Irish immigrants were treated when they traveled to America, which he described as a "country of immigrants."
"I'm of Irish descent and in America, 100 years ago, we were refugees, my family. Irish were treated terribly in America for a period of time and not accepted, and America learned to accept all of these ideas," Clooney told a number of families in the refugee camp. "It's what our country is, a country of immigrants."
"We have not recently done a very good job of remembering who we are. And being here and talking with you is important to remind them of who we are. And who we have always been - which is you."
Amal Clooney, a British-Lebanese human rights lawyer, talked about her own experience seeking asylum.
"My own family is from Lebanon and they also ran away from a war, and were lucky enough to be accepted by a European country in 1982 when the violence there was really bad. And many years later, everybody's doing well and my father has returned to Beirut. I hope that, as you say, you will be able to go back to a safe and free Syria," she said.
Clooney The Hail, Caesar! star said: "It's too much to talk about giant numbers, it's actually easy to dismiss giant numbers.
"But it's very hard to dismiss a young child sitting on the ground crying when her mother is telling the story about how she left, how she grabbed her daughter and sat on the ground and said, 'If I die, I want to die by a bullet because it would be quicker'.
"We, as what we like to think of as a civilized world and nation, always look around at the end of these tragedies and say, 'If we knew, we would have done something'. And the reality of it is of course - we know."
Read more:
Court records show George Clooney’s Irish family had their land stolen
.