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Syrian Refugee Crisis (aka: Muslim Exodus and Europe)

George Wallace said:
The media seem to be focused on migrants from Syria, but the migrants are from Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea, Libya, and dozens of other African, Middle Eastern and South West Asian countries.  How some of them passed through IS controlled nations would be an interesting question to ask. 

They may not have even passed through IS controlled territory, and arrived in Turkey via other legitimate means.  There is also a huge market right now for forged Syrian ID documents for evidence to support a ref claim.  In addition there are individuals who are now arriving in Europe and immediately ditching their actual identities and claiming Syrian citizenship.
 
WRM in The American Interest on the migration crisis and what it measn for Europe and the West:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/09/11/wrm-in-the-wsj-the-migration-crisis-and-europes-crippling-doubts/

The Migration Crisis and Europe’s Crippling Doubts
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead puts the European immigration crisis into context:

What we are witnessing today is a crisis of two civilizations: The Middle East and Europe are both facing deep cultural and political problems that they cannot solve. The intersection of their failures and shortcomings has made this crisis much more destructive and dangerous than it needed to be—and carries with it the risk of more instability and more war in a widening spiral.

The crisis in the Middle East has to do with much more than the breakdown of order in Syria and Libya. It runs deeper than the poisonous sectarian and ethnic hatreds behind the series of wars stretching from Pakistan to North Africa. At bottom, we are witnessing the consequences of a civilization’s failure either to overcome or to accommodate the forces of modernity. One hundred years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and 50 years after the French left Algeria, the Middle East has failed to build economies that allow ordinary people to live with dignity, has failed to build modern political institutions and has failed to carve out the place of honor and respect in world affairs that its peoples seek.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the Great Wave of immigration from the Middle East and North Africa is crashing into a continent beset with its own problems:

In Europe and the West, the crisis is quieter but no less profound. Europe today often doesn’t seem to know where it is going, what Western civilization is for, or even whether or how it can or should be defended. Increasingly, the contemporary version of Enlightenment liberalism sees itself as fundamentally opposed to the religious, political and economic foundations of Western society. Liberal values such as free expression, individual self-determination and a broad array of human rights have become detached in the minds of many from the institutional and civilizational context that shaped them.

Capitalism, the social engine without which neither Europe nor the U.S. would have the wealth or strength to embrace liberal values with any hope of success, is often seen as a cruel, anti-human system that is leading the world to a Malthusian climate catastrophe. Military strength, without which the liberal states would be overwhelmed, is regarded with suspicion in the U.S. and with abhorrence in much of Europe. Too many people in the West interpret pluralism and tolerance in ways that forbid or unrealistically constrain the active defense of these values against illiberal states like Russia or illiberal movements like radical Islam.

Europe’s approach to the migration crisis brings these failures into sharp relief. The European Union bureaucracy in Brussels has erected a set of legal doctrines stated in terms of absolute right and has tried to build policy on this basis. Taking its cue from the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other ambitious declarations and treaties, the EU holds that qualified applicants have an absolute human right to asylum. European bureaucrats tend to see asylum as a legal question, not a political one, and they expect political authorities to implement the legal mandate, not quibble with it or constrain it.

As ever, we highly recommend you read the whole thing.
 
Thucydides said:
My sympathy for the child, but most certainly not for the father. I hope we ensure that this disgusting human being NEVER arrives in Canada under any circumstances:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/europes-migrant-crisis/migrant-crisis-father-of-dead-toddler-a-people-smuggler/story-fnws9k7b-1227523338355
LIES!  All lies!  (at least according to the CBC)  Add this to the "he was a quiet guy, kept to himself" file?  ;)
 
Article from the American Interest that says Germany may end up regretting its generous refugee program. Posted under the usual caveats of the Copyright Act.

THE REFUGEE CRISIS: Insane Asylum
ADAM GARFINKLE

Germany’s warm welcome to Syria’s refugees is earning the country good press, but it may also be sowing the seeds of long-term agony.

I happened to be in Germany when the current refugee/asylum crisis struck. Indeed, for about a week I was in Berlin, the capital, in the Kreutzberg section of town, which happens to be about as multicultural as any thirty square block area in Germany. I did a “brown bag” seminar, as they are called, at the Aspen Institute, and also lucked into a fairly long meeting with an old friend who now works as a special assistant to the German President, Joachim Gauck. All anyone wanted to talk about, really, was the refugee crisis, and the first feeling that came to the fore was how proud—indeed astonishingly so—everyone was at the outpouring of welcome encouragement, volunteerism, and outright nobility on display in Munich and elsewhere around (most of) the country. Even columnists in Handelsblatt were blushing with pride.

Sober souls, my old friend among them in the 1994 “disappearing” black office building right next to Bellevueschloss, the President’s sprawling office complex, are counting mounting costs and waiting for the next shoe to drop. They know it will, even as they share in the wonderment that refugees far away in the Middle East could think of Germany as a country of hope. Few people say it out loud, but it’s the image of Germans welcoming “others” on in-bound trains from the east—from Hungary, very telegenically, when I was there—that arrests their attention. What a contrast with the pictures of other Germans in an earlier time shipping “others” to the east, on out-bound trains, to places like Treblinka and Auschwitz.

Germans say they have an identity problem, and so they do. It’s mainly because they believe it to be so, in other words. But there are also reasons beyond self-perception. This is neither the time nor place to go into why this is, but certainly what has happened in recent days has transformed the question of Germans’ self-image. It hasn’t answered the question, but it has rephrased it in what most take to be a felicitous way. It goes something like this: We may not know exactly who we are, but whoever we are, we’re better people that we have feared we might be. We believed we could change. Now we see, at an unexpected moment of testing, that we have changed. The earth no long shakes under our feet as much as it did even a month ago.

That is the sense of things, as I observed it, and it seems to me, further, to be infusing in the German elite a greater sense of self-confidence and willingness to lead within European affairs—at least for the time being. It has certainly transformed Chancellor Merkel from an austerity scold to someone with what we could call, for lack of a better phrase, abundant moral capital in a part of the world that values such a thing far more than it does other virtues of leadership.

What sort of sound is that other shoe going to make when it finally does drop? Truth be told, the German leadership—and the EU leadership as well, with Mr. Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg in the lead—are planting the seeds for long-term agony. That agony will comes in three forms: the economics of the welfare state; the self-blinding politics of multiculturalism; and security.

As to this third matter, DNI General James Clapper’s warning earlier this week, that this surge of Arabs into Europe is a security nightmare in the making, is surely correct. I tried to express this at a dinner in Warsaw on Tuesday evening, with an assortment of Poles, Germans, Norwegians, Brits, a Ukrainian, and some miscellaneous others present. I predicted that within five years Poland will be forced to erect passport control at airports for incoming European flights. (In case you are not aware, there are none now. We flew from Berlin to Warsaw by way of Munich, and when one lands there is simply no passport control at all—meaning that any non-EU national who can get into Germany and pay for a ticket to get to Poland can indeed fly to Poland without anyone so much as asking his name or how long he intends to stay.) They all said I was wrong, but just a few days ago look what the Danes did: They basically sealed the border to rail and road traffic from Germany. And they are right to do it. If only a tenth of one percent of these Arabs are or are turned toward salafi-based political violence for any number of reasons we can all think of, then Germany will have a problem that will shred its esteemed privacy laws to bits, whether Germans like it or not.

I confess do not understand Juncker’s thinking. With the Schengen Zone in effect, what is to keep arriving refugees in the place to which they are originally assigned—assuming for a moment that some form of his share-the-burden scheme is agreed to? After a year or a month or even a few days they can pick themselves up and come to Berlin, can’t they? Or Paris? Even if they are not supposed to, they will do it anyway—and who is going to stop them now? What Germans, in the mood the country is now in, are willing to shove them on a train against their will heading back east? (Imagine what those photos would look like . . . some ass will surely airbrush “Arbeit macht frei” into the pictures.) Why would a Syrian family want to stay in Poland, where everyone quietly hates them, when they can come to Berlin, where nearly everyone, in public anyway, professes to love them?

Meanwhile, the moral hazard problem is getting entirely out of control. The word is out in Syria, and Iraq, and Lebanon, and among Palestinians in various places: They see the pictures, they send the men, then comes family reunification, and the next thing you know, in as little as a year or so, there are five million Levantine Arabs clotting about in German cities.

I do not wish to delve into the economic side of the story. The numbers are too soft in every sense, and I am not very good at the bean-counting business. I will only note that many Germans seem to think that the Levantine Arabs now entering their country by the hundreds of thousands will act like their Gastarbeiter Turks. They are in for a shock. Many also think that they’re getting the cream of the educated crop from Syria. I heard several people note that the people coming are young men, coming not directly from Syria but from camps in Jordan and Turkey. They are presumed to be engineers, doctors, and the like, and given Germany age-cohort picture, the consensus among the saintly is that they will boost the German economy in the not-too-distant future. This means that they know not the first thing about the real status of education in the Arab world. Only a very tiny percentage of these asylum seekers are well enough educated to hold down a middle-class enabling professional job in an economy like Germany’s.

So the sound of the other shoe will consist of gunfire and bombs, most likely, and the sucking sound of cash exiting the coffers of the still very generous but increasingly fiscally fragile German welfare state. And what of the politics?

The Left’s normative seizure of Germany is truly amazing. Even the Chancellor, who by German standards is far from a raving leftist, appears to firmly believe that everyone must be a multiculturalist for moral reasons, and that people who want to preserve the ethno-linguistic integrity of their communities—whether in Germany or in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere—are acting out of base motives. One even sees self-righteous criticism of the Australians now in the German press. The German leadership’s understanding of its moral obligation is without limit, and they refuse to limit in any way the number of refugees who can be taken into Germany, or the speed with which they may come. But more in Europe—a place of bloodline nationalisms compared to the U.S. creedal version—than in the United States there is a moral basis, too, for a community’s own sense of self-determination, which presumes the right of self-definition and self-composition. That is not racism in Europe any more than nervousness about immigrants is racism here in the United States. Wanting one’s own community to be a certain way is not aggressively or actively prejudicial against others, any more than declining to give money to a beggar on a city street is morally equivalent to hitting him in the head with a crowbar. It is simply preferring the constituency of a high-social trust society, from which, social science suggests, many good things come: widespread security, prosperity, and a propensity toward generosity being prominent among them.

It is, in my view, better morally to respect the dignity of difference than it is to try to expunge it though the mindless homogenization of humankind, which is the unstated premise at the base of the “thinking” of much of the EU elite. What better way to get rid of pesky nationalism than to get rid of nations, eh? One can hardly blame contemporary Germans for this sort of thinking, for their own nationalism turned out to be rabidly illiberal at one point in their history. But it is nonetheless an error of moral reasoning. Asylum seekers distort the moral choice with the intensity of their need, and their innocence, but the point is that what we see in Western Europe is not a case of what is moral versus what is base, but two kinds of rights, incommensurate (à la Isaiah Berlin) as they are, clashing. This basic truth seems to have gone missing in Germany lately, and, unfortunately, its expression in Hungary comes from a man who is toxic morally and opportunistic as well, and so gives that side of the argument a very bad name.

What the Europeans are doing, under the aegis of the European Union, but really at the instigation of Germany most of all, will have two basic political effects. First it will split the EU east and west, possibly even more bitterly than the economic woes of the past five years have split north and south. Second, it will reshape politics within West European countries.

As to the former effect, think about Poland for just a moment. When Poland re-emerged into independence after World War I, it was a highly heterogeneous place. And that was troublesome, to put it mildly. The situation of most other Central and East European states was roughly comparable. Thanks to World War II and then the Russian insistence on a postwar territorial settlement of a certain kind, far more homogenous states emerged from the bloodbath. Poland today is vastly more homogeneous, both in ethno-linguistic and sectarian terms, than it ever was, and Poles by and large seem quite happy with the current situation—and they are doing well as a society by most measures partly because of it. Why should they jump for joy when Mr. Juncker and the Commission in Brussels tell them that all this needs to end? They clearly are not jumping for joy, and the pressure from without is bound to help President Duda’s party in next month’s parliamentary elections.

To Poland’s west we are about to witness the biggest boon for right-wing xenophobes since the 1930s. All this moral unction reminds me of the reality-challenged 1920s in Europe, which gave rise to the very ugly 1930s (and yes, there will be a sharp economic downturn to speed the effect; it’s already begun, in China, because we have allowed a half dozen major regional business cycles with their own, often balancing-out, dynamics to coalesce into one huge global business cycle), and we all know what happened next. How is the thinking in Berlin now different in essence from the calamity of Kellogg-Briand and Locarno? It is downright Kantian: The ethereal categorical imperative über alles. It also seems to me very Christian in the sense that it represents a tilt of intentions over consequences—and Kant was, remember, a Lutheran Pietist, so we know where his basic intellectual urges came from. Indeed, the denizens of the German Left seem to me a very religious people, only they think they’re secularists just because a clutch of proper names has changed, and they don’t often go to church anymore, but rather collect for the functional equivalent of communal worship in political meetings, university seminars, and protest rallies.

For all this we can blame the Nazis, because the moral ricochet over time is clear, and it is in many ways very noble. It’s nice that the Germans want to be moral, isn’t it? But absent a heavy doze of Niebuhrian moral realism, they now risk letting dead Nazis derange living thought from beyond the grave. At this point, sober Germans are worried about money, about what all this will cost. But this is not really about money. It’s about much more important kinds of business, political business ultimately, and politics is trump.

I would love to be proved wrong about all this. But the derangement of moral reasoning in Western Europe seems so advanced and deep that it is hard to be optimistic. One fears that if reasonable people do not somehow apply a brake to this wild excess of selfless saintliness, unreasonable people eventually will. And guess who might still be around to cheer, encourage, and perhaps even arm the unreasonable? Yes, Vlad the Putin himself, as he is indeed already doing in a minor key. Then there will be a problem, and it will ultimately be a problem for Americans as well as for Europeans. Doesn’t it always go like that, again, whether we like it or not?

Anyway, folks, that’s my slant on this week’s news from Germany and Poland. Darn good beer in both countries, however. So not all the news is bad.

Adam Garfinkle is editor of The American Interest.

Aricle Link
 
This is something that all are going to have to be prepared for:

Paris, 30 Aug 2015

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=45f_1441705296
 
George Wallace said:
This is something that all are going to have to be prepared for:

Paris, 30 Aug 2015

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=45f_1441705296

George the comments below state this is an old video from years ago and there are other videos with the same footage posted in the comments as well. Although I'm running directly off the comments below the video it might not be legit for this year and has a different cause.
 
The Saudis' response to outside accusations that they're not taking in refugees:

Canadian Press

Saudi Arabia says 2.5M Syrians have been sheltered, hundreds of thousands given residency
The Canadian Press
By Adam Schreck,

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Saudi Arabia said it has taken in about 2.5 million Syrians on religious and humanitarian grounds in the years since the country's conflict began and has offered residency to hundreds of thousands, as it sought to rebut suggestions that oil-rich Gulf states should do more to address the plight of refugees fleeing civil war.

The official Saudi Press Agency quoted an unnamed official at the Foreign Ministry as saying the kingdom does not consider those it has taken in as refugees and does not house them in camps "in order to ensure their dignity and safety."

The OPEC heavyweight is not a signatory to the U.N. Refugee Convention, which outlines the rights of refugees and obligations on those countries that are party to it.
Saudi Arabia did not specify how many of those Syrians admitted remain in the country, saying only that those who wished to stay — a figure it put at "some hundreds of thousands" — have been granted residency status.

(...SNIPPED)
 
Matt Davies, staff editorial cartoonist at Newsday (New York), offers his views on how both Europe and the USA are reacting to the Syrian refugee crisis:

CO4JmHDUcAElFg5.jpg:large
image.jpg

Source: Newday

Canadians, and especially Canadian politicians should put our (modest) efforts in proper perspective.

The best thing we can do ~ sending money ~ is what we are doing: sending money to where it will do the most good. The next best thing would be to send even more aid to, especially, Jordan, to help that country provide for the refugees there. The last thing we might need to do is to provide refuge, here, for seniors, women and children, not for any able bodied men between the ages of 18 and 55 who should be back in Syria fighting against IS* and Assad, not hiding behinjd their wives and mothers' skirts here in Canada.
 
As I was preparing to board the bus to Kingston I saw some stuff on the news which indicates that the European governments are starting to wake up to the seriousness of the crisis.

Austria temporarily closed the border and mobilized military forces to assist in securing the borders, while Germany also closed their borders temporarily and will institute ID checks and screenings when the borders reopen. I also caught the tail end of a "news ticker" which seemed to indicate that European navies are being given orders to turn back "refugee" ships, but I was not quite clear on that one.

How much longer before Europeans mobilize military forces to close their borders to these migrants? And after that , how long before the European public demands they be sent back (and takes steps to ensure this happens)?
 
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/14/refugee-crisis-eu-governments-set-to-back-new-internment-camps

To your point Thuc.
 
E.R. Campbell said:
Rick Hillier says the CF can help to bring 50,000 here; with all due respect to the retired CDS: that's crazy!
Roméo Dallaire ups the ante ....
Retired lieutenant-general and former senator Roméo Dallaire says Canada has the capacity to take in between 80,000 and 90,000 Syrian refugees, and he dismisses security concerns over accepting them as a "smokescreen."

Reacting to former chief of the defence staff Rick Hillier's push for 50,000 Syrian refugees by Christmas, Dallaire said Hillier was "dead on," but his figures were "at the bottom end of the requirement." ....
 
Hungary closes the EU border ro refugee's.Smart move although the article paints the government as "right wing". ::)

http://news.yahoo.com/border-free-europe-unravels-migrant-crisis-hits-record-110230875.html

SERBIAN-HUNGARIAN BORDER (Reuters) - Hungary's right-wing government shut the main land route for migrants into the EU on Tuesday, taking matters into its own hands to halt Europe's unprecedented influx of refugees while the bloc failed to agree a plan to distribute them.
 
tomahawk6 said:
Hungry closes the EU border ro refugee's.Smart move although the article paints the government as "right wing". ::)

....

Freudian much?  >:D
 
Well you know you're not you when you're hungry... perhaps they should airdrop some Snickers.
 
George Wallace said:
I would suggest that the migrants are moving for economic reasons, as opposed to the refugees fleeing from persecution from an ethnic or religious majority.  When I see a Pakistan being interviewed by the media (probably because he could speak English and no translation was needed), I would say he was a migrant.  The migrants from Libya and other North African nations, coming from Eritrea, Ethiopia and other African nations; I would call migrants.  Christians, Kurds and other non-Islamic religions fleeing persecution in Syria, Iraq, etc.; I would call refugees.

So you're calling people from Libya, and muslims from Syria and Iraq "migrants" as opposed to "refugees"? I'm pretty sure they are leaving the region for more immediate reasons than economic reasons, George. Sure, economic reasons are part of it, but you can't really divorce economic from security concerns can you? There is no economy left in Syria (as a result of the conflict), and as such, these people have no way of earning money to feed their children.
 
crowbag said:
There is no economy left in Syria (as a result of the conflict), and as such, these people have no way of earning money to feed their children.

Sure there is. They buy and sell children to have sex with.

If you have enough kids you could probably buy a suite here

politifact%2Fphotos%2Fninawa.jpg
 
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