Obama meets 6-year-old who offered home to Syrian boy

President Obama brought in a six-year-old boy for an Oval Office visit to thank him for opening his heart and home to another young boy victimized by Syria’s civil war, telling him he’d read the boy’s letter “to everybody.” 

“You -- being so nice and kind, hopefully makes other people think the same way,” Mr. Obama told Alex, who was wearing a new suit for the occasion.

Here’s the video the White House tweeted of their meeting:

Alex is the boy who famously wrote to the president in September with an offer to adopt Omran Daqneesh, a five-year-old Syrian boy whose home was leveled by airstrikes. Video images captured the immediate aftermath, as a rescue worker pulled Daqneesh from his home and carried the bloodied, soot-covered boy into a waiting ambulance. He sat dazed and silent, and as the images circulated around the world, he became the embodiment of the human costs of the Syrian conflict.

From half a world away, in Scarsdale, New York, Alex saw the images and wrote to the president, “We will give him a family and he will be our brother.” The White House posted a video of Alex reciting the words he wrote.

“Dear President Obama, remember the boy who was picked up by the ambulance in Syria?” Alex asked in the video. “Can you please pick him up and bring him to our home?”  

Alex said he has a friend at school from Syria, and “we can all play together.”

The video went viral, with millions of views on Facebook.  And the president talked about Alex at his farewell address at the U.N., too, holding him up as someone to learn from because he’s not “cynical, or suspicious, or fearful of other people, because of where they’re from or how they look or how they pray.”