RUTHFULLY YOURS

Vienna, Austria — Lucy Balmanian’s life straddles the crisis overtaking Europe today. Born in Syria, she’s an Armenian Christian who has lived in Vienna for years, speaking impeccable English. So when she watches Austria grapple with the massive influx of foreigners fleeing war and bad economies, she shares both Syria’s pain and Europe’s concerns.

Sitting in an upscale café in Vienna’s First District, Balmanian recalls the last time she visited Damascus, in 2010. “Nobody would imagine that their lives would change so much,” she says, describing how she then felt safe and optimistic about Syria’s future. “Now, Syria is back 100 years. It will be very hard to fix everything, because not only is Syria broken; Syrians’ spirits are broken. . . . Everyone there is faced with this decision: Do we leave, or do we stay and risk losing family members? It is a jump into the void.”

That jump has also left the European Union in a state of limbo. So far this year, more than 522,000 foreigners crossed into Europe by the Mediterranean Sea alone, the majority landing in Italy and Greece, according to the September 29 count by International Organization for Migration. An additional 2,892 perished attempting the voyage.

Since January 2014 and early 2015 at least 34 Syrian child brides applied for asylum in the Netherlands, according to a leaked internal report from Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND). And 22 are on their way to Holland. A law to ban such marriages is in the pipeline, but until this new law comes into force, Dutch immigration authorities and the police cannot do anything about such marriages. According to the IND, two of the girls are only thirteen years old. And a 38-year-old man in Holland claimed to be married to a 15-year-old Syrian girl. “These girls are still children,” Ineke van Winden from the Center Against Child and Human Trafficking (CKM) told the Dutch Radio and TV station “RTV Noord” which also leaked the alarming IND findings. “They are usually coming from refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey where they are forced into early marriages,” Ineke van Winden says. The Dutch newspaper Trouw reports that three Syrian child brides are applying for asylum in Holland every week.

Criminal migrant traffickers in Europe are extremely well organized and often more powerful than law enforcement agencies or even governments. Some very efficient crime networks consist of former asylum seekers from Africa (notably from Somalia and Eritrea) and the Muslim world (notably from Syria and Iraq) who have taken advantage of liberal and humane asylum laws in Holland, Germany and Sweden. These criminals often operate along ethnic lines.

In Holland, for example, a 35-year-old former Syrian asylum seeker was arrested in the city of Eindhoven last September. He and his younger nephew, also a former Syrian asylum seeker, ran an extensive migrant trafficking network smuggling hundreds, possibly even thousands of Syrian asylum seekers to the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. They also operated in Turkey, Greece, Italy, Austria and Hungary and were making huge profits.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted that refusing to take in Muslim migrants is a “danger for Europe.” Merkel as usual had it backward. It’s her program of taking in Muslim migrants that represents the gravest threat to the freedom and future of Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Merkel may have already doomed Germany. The Bild newspaper published a leaked secret government document estimating that the number of migrants invading Europe this year might reach 1.5 million.

And that bad news gets much worse because the document estimates that each migrant will bring in as many as eight family members once they’re settled in, bringing the year’s true total to 7.36 million.

That’s almost 10 percent of the population of Germany. In just one invasion.

The deracinated romantics who set the terms of much of the debate are enthralled with diversity, deeming it a virtue to declare oneself a citizen of the world. The influx of the supposed dispossessed is the cleansing of the colonial soul, the revenge of the oppressed.

The tide of humanity rolling north across Europe evokes pity and dread in equal measures. On television the pity prevailed. Images of anxious faces, children being passed over the heads of adults on railway platforms, and of course that body, invited only one response: for mercy’s sake, let them in.

Discordant evidence was left on the cutting room floor. As downtrodden masses go, this one was relatively well heeled. It was also somewhat picky about the safe havens for which it would settle. Daniel Hannan articulated the paradox: “A refugee is someone who wants to get out of a particular country, not get into a particular country.”

The exiles were prone to be discourteous to their benefactors. The angry young men chanting on train platforms could have been Millwall fans on their way to Crystal Palace. In one sequence screened on YouTube, bottled water and food distributed by officials was churlishly hurled on the rail tracks. These were people who seemed to be starting a war, not fleeing from one.
If there were savages among them, however, they were noble savages, according to the BBC narrative at any rate, the authorised version from which few journalists are prepared to deviate. In this episode of the global battle between the oppressor and the oppressed, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was cast as a latter-day Emma Lazarus:

State lawmakers, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), and parents of Tennessee schoolkids are worried about the way children are learning about “the world of Islam” in a social studies course being taught in the state’s middle schools.

But dozens of Tennessee public school districts are using a form letter supplied by an attorney to resist efforts to tell parents and lawmakers everything they want to know about the course.

Among other things that bother parents, the kids are required to memorize the five pillars of Islam and are instructed to write “Allah is the only God,” according to WSMV-TV in Franklin, Tenn. One parent said more than 20 pages of her child’s social studies textbook is devoted to studying Islam.

That amounts to three weeks of classroom instruction, more time than is spent teaching the seventh-graders about Christianity.