[alieneu]

Do you support open borders for refugees in EU?

There is a online voting site on this matter: https://refugee-crisis.eu/

Too bad it's voters amount are quite low, but would be interesting to see Europe's voice.

[noir]

What is odd in this article by the leading pro Arab propagandist?

Refugee crisis: Thank God for Germany taking responsibility - the rest of Europe appears to have forgotten the age-old lessons of history

Robert Fisk Wednesday 9 September 2015 17:54 BST
Thousands of years of our history can be traced via the movements of refugees. Often, they have been welcomed, and the societies receiving them enriched. Yet the same mistakes keep being made. Robert Fisk hopes we get it right this time

Click to follow
The Independent Online

web-refugees-8-getty.jpg
Refugees try to break through police lines in Morahalom, Hungary Getty Images
In 1940, when we Brits were hourly awaiting German invasion, civil servants in Kent were told that refugees on the roads were to be ordered into the fields. But if they refused, they were to be “shot”. Even when my Dad, who was a superannuated World War One veteran, gave me this Roneo-ed document when I was a schoolboy in the 1960s, I realised how frightful it was. He was a local Home Guard commander in 1940 - yes, Dad’s Army - and I even sent a photocopy of it to the Imperial War Museum. “Shot.” Not execution after lawful judgement, mark you. Shot. Montgomery wasn’t going to have refugees clogging the highways of Britain as they had in France when they prevented the movement of his troops towards Dunkirk. A few dead Brits were a small price to pay if we had to stop the Wehrmacht.

“Refugees” was always a dodgy word. People seeking “refuge”. From what? The idea, my Dad thought then, was that “refugees” were running away. That’s why the British government put up posters, telling the people to “Stay Put”. Don’t hinder our troops. Don’t get in the way. Don’t be a nuisance. People fleeing for their lives – and caring for the lives of those they loved – were always a pest. Soldiers first! We were worried about an invasion of German soldiers. The last thing we wanted was an invasion of refugees.

Real invaders were frightening enough: Attila; Genghis Khan – whose ruins still lie amid the modern-day ruins of the Citadel of Aleppo; and the Crusaders – assaulting the Byzantine Christians as well as the Muslims and Jews of Jerusalem; and then the Prophet’s army. Roman history suggests that the Germanic tribes may have had good economic reasons to move towards the Mediterranean – but I doubt if the Romans were preparing flagons of water and sandwiches when the Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths were at the gates of Rome.

And we could trace their paths, the verbal tracks of these invader/refugees. At university, I studied linguistics and spent weeks tracing the Ungrian language group who trekked up through the Baltic to Finland, the Latin language moving through what we now call the “Romance” language countries, how Gaelic moved from Ireland to Scotland. Having taken a Gaelic course for my PhD thesis in Dublin, I can actually read Scots names in the original. And when I was reporting the Balkan wars – I called myself the Ottoman Correspondent, as opposed to the expert journalists who lived there – I could see how the language of the Arabs passed through Turkey and became Serbo-Croat. In Arabic, “gezira” means “island”. In Serbo-Croat, it means “lake”. Near enough. It took me longer to work out Gorni Vakuf in Bosnia. “Vakuf” – a familiar enough second name to a town – was the Balkan corruption of “waqf” – in Arabic, an Islamic endowment.

web-refugees-3-reuters.jpg
A policeman pushes refugees behind a barrier at Greece's border with Macedonia, near the village of Idomeni, Greece (Reuters)
Migration is history, but history moves in mysterious ways. In his own PhD thesis, that great Yugoslav novelist Ivo Andric explained how the Turks divided the Orthodox and Catholic Christian peoples of the Balkans, how the Slav converters to Islam were used to break the Christians apart – because they were the middle classes and wanted to keep their lands under Ottoman rule – and, of course, poor Andric died before the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Muslims would later call him a war criminal. The commander of a concentration camp, a man called Popovic, would later tell me that Muslims should be called “Turks”. Those Slavs who converted to Islam in the 14th century could never have guessed the fate of their Bosnian Muslim descendants.

Nor could the 18th century Volga Germans – invited to Russia by the Tsar because of their engineering prowess – ever have imagined that the Tsar’s Communist successors would accuse their descendants of collaborating with the very same Wehrmach whom my Dad was supposed to fight – refugees alllowing – in 1940. Nor, let us face the facts, could the tens of thousands of Muslims who are now European citizens have thought that a creature like Isis would emerge to cast them all in the clothes of suspicion. But I remember chatting to a French policeman in Paris during a French Muslim demonstration and he used the word “beure” to describe them: not “beurre” as in “butter” but “beure” as in “Arab” spelled backwards with a French accent.

In graphics: Refugees in the EU

Yes, it’s a slippery road from invader to refugee to emigrant to citizen. And woe betide those who think the words can’t go in the reverse order. The English kept sending their finest to Ireland so that they would seed the good Irish ladies with their best. Over three centuries, we “Angles” actually believed we could woo the Gaels. But over and over again, the English turned into the Irish. They “went native”. They rather liked Ireland. They became Irishmen. Good Protestants became good Catholics. In fact, they became good Irishmen.

Now to politics, and, yes, there are some refugees – some who can’t “stay put” – who are very much our responsibility. Palestinian refugees, in their hundreds of thousands, are our responsibility. We think, because we made conflicting promises to their grandparents and the Jews a hundred years ago, that this somehow lets us off the hook. But for a Palestinian in the Lebanese refugee camps today, they wake up every morning in dirt-caked shacks amid sewage-washed alleyways. And for them, now, today – they are living the immediate results of the Balfour declarations. Indeed, for them, Lord Balfour signed his 1917 declaration, promising Britain’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, only yesterday, last night. The ink is still wet on the paper. The Americans were too close to history to shrug off their debt to Vietnamese refugees. The burden of guilt was too close to the television screen. Yet for the more fossilised among us, things are less clear cut in the face of Iraqis, some of whom are among Europe’s newest refugees. After all, didn’t some of us die for their liberation from Saddam? How dare they come wandering to us for a new home?

And yet we all have our Ukip/Daily Mail moments. I had mine in Oslo Central Station in the winter of 2012 when I was on my way to Sweden, for The Independent, to investigate how Swedish explosives had found their way to anti-Assad rebels in Aleppo. (Memo to readers: they were in Volvo truck-alert braziers to be used on snowy Scandinavian roads – and were sent with all Volvo lorry exports to pre-war Syria.) But in Oslo station, I found gangs of feral young Pakistani men in leather jackets, prowling the passenger concourse at 6am to prey on the tired passengers. They were robber gangs, a part of the station’s life. And I found myself asking why these Pakistani youths wanted to bring the Karachi mafia to this beautiful country and to its educated, generous people? Not long afterwards, I asked myself the same question about the people from the same country who had abused young women in a British city.

web-refugees-7-ap.jpg
Refugees are housed in tents on the premises of the former Schmidt-Knobelsdorf barracks, in Berlin (AP)
When I was at school, an idiotic vicar (“Religious Affairs Teacher” was his preposterous title) tried to persuade us pupils that Christianity was all about being “tested”. God was setting us tests, you see, not just giving us instructions to obey (as he – God, not the Vicar – supposedly did to Muslims). But post-war Europe – or at least the geographically western sector of Europe – is indeed now being tested. We thought that our Judgement Day would involve a test of our war-loving nature: did we or did we not resist the temptation of a Third World War once Hitler was dead?

We passed that test. Rather well. But now it turns out that the real test is based not on our supposedly belligerent nature, but on our own preaching and sermonising and proselytising. We had lectured the Muslim Arab dictatorships (whose criminal bosses we propped up with money and weapons and torture-training) on the need for human rights, equality and justice. But then, suddenly, from this very land-mass, came a benighted people in their hundreds of thousands – perhaps thousands of thousands – who decided that in their moment of agony, they would like to throw their lives into the hands of these beautiful people who had been teaching them for so many decades about the benefits of heaven on earth. This immensely wealthy paradise – a land of milk and honey in the most literal sense in any supermarket – had for years been talking of its promise and its human goodness, of its immensely high standards of law and justice. Now these people would like to have some of it.

And we – in this critical hour in the history of our continent, in the history of the EU, in the story of what was once called “Christendom” – we failed the Great Test. Our state-of-the-art nations did not want these wretched people. They became bloodsuckers, human mosquitoes, people-smugglers, a “swarm”. And if the rags of our integrity as human beings have been salvaged these past few weeks, this is due to the dour, rather sour Protestant ethics of an east German hausfrau who history may (or may not, for let us remember her people’s grandfathers for whom my Dad was supposed to shoot his own refugees) say has saved our soul.

web-refugees-9-getty.jpg
11th January 1939: A camp leader ringing the dinner bell at a camp for young Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, at Dovercourt Bay near Harwich (Fox Photos/Getty Images)
But if our generosity stretched that far in welcoming Belgian refugees in the First World War, Jewish refugees before the Second World War, Germans afterwards, Hungarians fleeing the 1956 uprising, even a few Chernobyl survivors (some soon to die), they usually had two things in common. They were white – or as near as much as makes no difference – and they were European and – or as near as much as makes no difference – were from our monotheistic world. The Bosnian refugees of the early 1990s were mostly Muslim, of course, but they looked like and were Europeans, and their version of Islam was for us picturesque rather than religious: snow-covered mosques rather than hot Kabaas, a whiff of eastern cuisine washed down with slivovica, Ramadan-and-one-for-the-road.

But these chaps today, camping opposite Dover, for example, as my Dad’s racist friends used to say, were “black as the ace of spades”. Or a bit black. Or brown. Even the Ethiopian Christians – who passed the Christianity test – failed the colour bar. That is why, I fear, we wept for poor Aylan al-Kurdi. His Muslim religion (such as he would have understood it at that age) was cancelled out by his Kurdish origin – the Kurds being a brave warrior people whom we regularly admirer, support and usually betray. We mourned for him not just because he was an innocent three-year old but because he was a white innocent three-year old.

Only one more remark remains to me, and I say it now for the first time in my life, as the son of a father who fought the Kaiser’s arms on the Somme, and of a mother who repaired radios on damaged Spitfires during the Second World War.

Thank God for Germany.

Tomorrow: Kim Sengupta and Memphis Barker explore strategies for resolving the crisis

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 93715.html

[Potemkin]

What is odd in this article by the leading pro Arab propagandist?

You mean aside from the fact that he says essentially nothing in a very elegant and well-written style? His ideas, such as they are, are too shallow, moralistic and flimsy to be described as 'odd'. There's actually very little in his article which anyone could object to, or indeed think about, which is why I don't usually bother reading Robert Fisk's work. It's mostly about his own life history and his 'feelings' anyway, which seem to interest Robert Fisk enormously but which don't interest me at all.

[noir]

@Potemkin

The issue is the history of British Arabism and European Arabophilia.

Only few decades ago, the main pro Arab propaganda was the Arabs are indigenous, "like us the British" and therefore deserve our sypathy against the settler colonials state.

Here what he wrote in 2006

Transcript Robert Fisk "The Conquest of the Middle East"
Let me just take you back for a moment. A little bit back down memory lane on the Palestinians.

I want to give you two or three quotes just to see your reaction to them. It's different between here and the United States, I tell you.

I quote Antonius, the eminent historian George Antonius, the Edward Said of his time. Fearing what he, Antonius, called an unpredictable holocaust of Arab, Jewish and British lives, help for the Jews of Europe, he said must be sought elsewhere than in Palestine.

It is 1938 remember:

"The treatment meted out to Jews in Germany and other European countries is a disgrace to its authors and to modern civilisation. Posterity will not exonerate any country that fails to bear its proper share of the sacrifices needed to alleviate Jewish suffering and distress. To place the brunt of the burden upon Arab Palestine is a miserable evasion of the duty that lies upon the whole of the civilised world. It is also morally outrageous. No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another. The cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of the Arabs from their homeland and the relief of Jewish distress may not be accomplished at the cost of inflicting a corresponding distress upon an innocent and peaceful population."

It's astounding that such remarks so prescient in view of the Palestinian disaster a decade later should be written in 1938.

Today he asks Europe to accept settler "refugees".

[fokker]

Do you support open borders for refugees in EU?

There is a online voting site on this matter: https://refugee-crisis.eu/

Too bad it's voters amount are quite low, but would be interesting to see Europe's voice.

It's good to see Americans and World voting for Europe.

[Potemkin]

Today he asks Europe to accept settler "refugees".

The situations are not really comparable. The refugees from the Middle East are not going to be displacing the current population of Europe - they have no intention of doing so and they are not capable of doing so even if they did intend it. Europe in the 2010s is not Palestine in the 1940s.

[noir]

@Potemkin
Wrong! At that time the Jews didn't want an independent state! At least not the mainstream and the leadership. They wanted to be a British dominion like New Zealand or Australia. Only British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, refusal to allow the entrance of the refugees (under the Arab pressure) sparked the Jewish insurgence and later the demand for Jewish state. You are confusing the history.

Bevin's junior minister was Labour MP Christopher Mayhew who funded both the Arab lobby in Britain CAABU (The Council for Arab-British Understanding), LMEC (Labour Middle East Council), and the Arab lobby in EU, PAEAC (the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation).

Appearing on the BBC’s ‘The World Today’ programme in 1968, he stated that I never felt it was right to ask us to impose on the Arab world hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants. And if I may say so, if it’s not irrelevant, the controversy about immigration in Britain today (echoes of Enoch Powell’s racial rhetoric), when we are asked to have in Britain a comparatively negligible number of immigrants and yet we visited on the Arab world with force of arms, comparatively millions of people of different religion, different custom, different race.

Labour MP Richard Crossman had anticipated this kind of argument twenty years earlier. English anti-Zionism, he suggested, was based on a deep fear of invasion. ‘The Englishman thinks of Zionism as something synthetic and unnatural,’ he wrote, adding that Zionism appeared as ‘the product of high powered American propaganda.’ Such formulations led many Englishmen to look at Palestine and see ‘the Arab as defending his 1,000-year old civilization against the invader.’

The PAEAC in EC/EU which he co-founded - with French Gaullist MP (UDR) Raymond Offroy - in 1974 is responsible for EU Arab agreements concerning immigration, which will be instrumental in changing the European demography. Call it Karma

[noir]

The situations are not really comparable. The refugees from the Middle East are not going to be displacing the current population of Europe - they have no intention of doing so and they are not capable of doing so even if they did intend it. Europe in the 2010s is not Palestine in the 1940s.

As welfare refugees they are parasites, better to them not to replace anyone but the Islamic invasion will bring a demographic changes albeit not immediately.

[Potemkin]

As welfare refugees they are parasites, better to them not to replace anyone

Meh, Europe is wealthy enough to survive a few welfare parasites. Hell, we currently support an entire ruling class of parasites already; what's one or two more?

but the Islamic invasion will bring a demographic changes albeit not immediately.

Not immediately, and not ever. The point is that the Palestinians in the 1930s and 40s lacked the power to prevent the Jewish immigration from reaching a tipping point where they began to outnumber the Palestinians. Once that had happened, the end was inevitable for them. European populations, on the other hand, have much more power, and long, long before any such tipping point were to be reached, action would have been taken to prevent it. And judging from European history, that action might even be rather drastic in nature. The neo-liberal capitalist system itself would probably not survive the crisis, but there would be no neo-Caliphate in Europe.

[Vasili Blokhin]

@Potemkin Like I said, Communists knew had separate the religion and people from extremists. I just find the irony of Americans and Westerners criticism of Islam in general when the Bible is in someway worse in terms of violence and women than the Quran. Not to mention American fundies are doing literally the exact same thing Islamist are doing but on a small subtle scale.

Although, I wish Muslims stop pretending that Islam is a "peaceful" belief, almost none religions are peaceful and neither it should be honestly. The world/nature isn't peaceful, why should religion be any different.

[noir]

The point is that the Palestinians in the 1930s and 40s lacked the power to prevent the Jewish immigration from reaching a tipping point where they began to outnumber the Palestinians.

They had Britain.

[noir]

@Potemkin

Not immediately, and not ever. The point is that the Palestinians in the 1930s and 40s lacked the power to prevent the Jewish immigration from reaching a tipping point where they began to outnumber the Palestinians. Once that had happened, the end was inevitable for them. European populations, on the other hand, have much more power, and long, long before any such tipping point were to be reached, action would have been taken to prevent it. And judging from European history, that action might even be rather drastic in nature. The neo-liberal capitalist system itself would probably not survive the crisis, but there would be no neo-Caliphate in Europe.

Despite the history, can't see how Europe will be drastic on Muslim invasion. Do you see Sweden reclaim its sanity and nationality? More reasonable they will immigrate.

[Donna]

The real risk for Europeans is that they have imported a hostile nation-within-a-nation that is distributed through out all of the large suburban centres of the continent. It does not pose an existential threat, but it does degrade the dignity of Europeans in their own country.

[layman]

"They had Britain"

Lol eh?

We made you a country ingrate. Your first war of independence was won by British troops vs arabs.

[noir]

@layman

Bevin was very crucial then. British Mandate aside, what is interesting is that at that time racists and imperialists were the main Arab supporters. Their chief propagandist used the Enoch Powell’s discourse to defend them. In a few years the definition of "racism" will change (squeezing out anti semitism) and "anti racists" will be those who defend the Arabs.

[noir]

Recent invasion scenes. Are they refugess?

[Vasili Blokhin]

@noir GOOD GOOD.

[noir]

@noir GOOD GOOD.

Seems like reverse colonialism

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07 ... o-namibia/

[Vasili Blokhin]

@noir When Germany pay up, the country will be glad to take back their refugees.

[Jackkevin]

The EU Common European Asylum System (CEAS) is an arrangement of EU laws, finished in 2005. They are proposed to guarantee that all EU part states ensure the privileges of haven searchers and displaced people. The CEAS sets out least norms and methods for handling and choosing haven applications.