Syrian girls inspire UNICEF envoy Liam Neeson

Liam Neeson, back row in black, yells as he poses with Syrian and Jordanian students at a community center in Amman, Jordan. (AP)

AMMAN, Jordan: Liam Neeson got a little break from being famous. Sitting on the floor of a community center courtyard with two dozen local teens, he listened attentively as young Syrian refugees — who had no idea that he’s a Hollywood star — talked about the struggles of exile.
“They are all our children,” Neeson, a goodwill ambassador for the UN child agency, later said.
On Tuesday, Neeson and his son Micheal, 21, visited a community center in a working-class neighborhood of Jordan’s capital of Amman.
Ahmed, a 15-year-old Syrian, said he used to get into fights with a Jordanian boy from the neighborhood. Now they are like brothers, he said. Reema Mohammed, 15, a refugee from the Syrian capital of Damascus, said a Jordanian girl in her school used to bully her and that the center’s program helped her handle the situation.
Neeson later said in an interview that he was particularly inspired by the Syrian girls.
“I thought they would be more oppressed because of their culture, and of course because of the ordeals they have been going through, coming from Syria, the horrors there,” he said. “These girls I met, yesterday and ... again here today, they are so positive, so eager and keen to learn.”
“I asked them ... what their goals were in life, in an ideal world what would they want to be,” he said, adding that responses included mathematician, engineer, police inspector and teacher. “To see these girls being empowered by education and the focus in their eyes was incredibly humbling and very moving,” he said. Asked about the backlash against Syrian refugees in Europe and the US, Neeson said that “we in the West tend to have a bias” against Muslims.