Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is a show you can either hate or love — but one you definitely cannot ignore. On the last week of September, the political commentator-comedian >resurrected an American soap for a migrant teenager from Syria, a small contribution in the face of what has been going on in Europe.
If you’ve been following the issue, you would’ve seen beleaguered refugees flocking to Germany, Greece, Hungary for better lives — some braving the Mediterranean Sea and ending up alive, and some like three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, washed up on the shore of Turkey, lifeless. The other side to this story, and one that Oliver brought to his audience’s attention, was the hostility faced by the refugees and migrants. Tackling this in a fierce, almost 18-minute segment, Oliver featured clips of politicians and conservative media channels that portrayed some section of the refugees with racist and xenophobic tones.
The team also got their hands on registration forms used by some countries to process the influx of refugees seeking asylum. The refugees, he notes, aren’t allowed to work in the time in between the return to their homelands. With his Birmingham accent, he also scoffs, at the baffling logic that countries like Slovakia and Hungary use to keep migrants away. The Netherlands’ MP Geert Wilders appears in a video with the message, “No way, you will not make the Netherlands home”, and the Hungarian Prime Minister asks refugees not to come because it’s “too risky” and that they cannot guarantee acceptance. This video sees Oliver at his hilarious best, giving us a glimpse of those dimples every time he gets ecstatic and makes fun of European red tape.
But most importantly, Oliver also features 16-year-old Syrian refugee Noujain Mustaffa, who made the 20-day journey to Germany in a wheelchair. Noujain, who suffers from cerebral palsy, told reporters that this journey had a lot of firsts for her like riding the train, travelling in a ship and that she “enjoyed it”. And that’s because of the situation she had to escape from. “Imagine you’re 16 and you’re always afraid to be dead at any minute,” Noujain says, and adds that she wants to be an astronaut who finds an alien and meets the Queen. What’s even more heart-warming is how she learnt English — “At home with my favourite TV show, Days of Our Lives with Sami and EJ.” That was enough to make Oliver exclaim, “How could you not want this girl in your country?”
So as part of the segment, Oliver arranged for a little reunion of Noujain’s favourite characters from Days Of Our Lives (EJ dies in the original series). Sami tells EJ that she cannot imagine how horrible his resurrection must’ve been. And EJ on his part remarks that it was nothing. “You know what’s hard? Coming from Syria to Germany... You know there are some amazing people coming through that border. I read about this incredible 16-year-old girl from Kobani called Noujain Mustaffa. She’s our kind of people. Maybe we’ll get to meet her one day.” There has been no confirmation on whether Noujain has seen the clip, but a little gesture like this from Oliver has indeed gone a long way.
>Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is available on YouTube.
