Accepting These Migrants is a Huge Mistake Melanie Phillips
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4552486.ece
In Germany, posters saying “Refugees welcome” and “Nobody is illegal” have been appearing at bus stops and demonstrations. At a rally in Oxford last weekend, demonstrators held up home-made placards saying “We welcome refugees (given the chance)” and “We are all human”.
These people are merely telling us about themselves. Public expressions of compassion signify that a person is good. Their absence demonstrates heartlessness. This has been called “virtue signalling”, or mandatory emoting, and it has now reached its crazy apotheosis in the great migration crisis.
In a measured response to the refugee hysteria, David Cameron has balanced compassion with the public interest. Over five years, Britain will take 20,000 people from refugee camps bordering Syria.
The left promptly denounced this number as pitiful. Labour’s leadership hopeful Yvette Cooper further complained that Britain should take in some migrants who had already reached Europe. But doing so would further incentivise people-smuggling and cause yet more to drown in the Mediterranean. Moreover, since an unknown number of those thus accepted would be supporters of Isis or other Islamist factions, it would endanger national security.
The real point, though, is the category error. This is not a humanitarian refugee crisis. It is a political migration crisis: an enormous and unprecedented movement of peoples from the developing to the developed world which threatens to engulf Europe.
It’s complicated. The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as someone with a well-founded fear of persecution, which clearly doesn’t apply to the majority of these people who are not running for their lives.
Even the family of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, whose drowned body provoked this mass outpouring of publicly proclaimed compassion, weren’t desperate to reach sanctuary at all. They had already been living in safety for three years in Turkey.
At the same time, calling this tide of people economic migrants won’t do. Some undoubtedly are just seeking prosperity. But others understandably want to leave countries where they know they have no future.
This is because the Arab and Muslim world is disintegrating into chaos, war and terror. The ascendancy of radical Islam is producing untold barbarism. The West-imposed model of the nation state is collapsing into tribal warfare. A dying culture has turned murderously upon itself while trying simultaneously to conquer the wider world.
Given this convulsion of an entire civilisation, the line we are being fed that Britain and Europe have a moral duty to take hundreds of thousands of those who are affected is spectacularly misguided.
First, why is this our responsibility? The Gulf states have not volunteered to take a single refugee. But isn’t this migration principally the responsibility of the Arab and Muslim world?
Second, the idea that Britain and Europe can accommodate this flood of people is delusional. According to the UN, by the end of last year almost 60 million people had been forcibly displaced from their homes. Globally, one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced or seeking asylum.
Britain certainly can’t take them. Public services are already being stretched to breaking point, with a record population being further swelled by an unsustainable annual net immigration of a third of a million people.
Migrants are arriving in Europe in ever-increasing numbers because it is telling them they are welcome. Germany says it will take in up to 800,000 this year. In Italy, where the government has decriminalised illegal immigration, tens of thousands of migrants are pouring in every month from Libya and are being dumped in makeshift camps in town squares or train stations.
The emotional public reaction to the picture of drowned Aylan Kurdi is making things worse. Travel agents in the Lebanese port of Tripoli have reported a 30 per cent rise in bookings for Turkey, from where so many migrants set off for Europe, in the past week.
The consequences of this will change Europe for ever. The vast majority of this tide are Muslims. The UN estimates 70 per cent of these people are young men. If they settle in Europe, their families will probably follow.
Europe’s culture will therefore be transformed. Angela Merkel has already admitted Germany will be changed by this “breathtaking” influx.
At the same time, Britain is keeping out Christian refugees. As Lord Carey of Clifton, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has eloquently protested, Christians in the Middle East have been crucified, beheaded, raped, forcibly converted and ethnically cleansed. Yet our government has so far refused requests to grant asylum to Christians trying to flee Iraq and Syria. With few exceptions such as Poland and the Czech Republic, Europe’s Christian countries are shunning Christian refugees from Islamist terror while opening their borders to hundreds of thousands of Muslims.
Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, has said Europe should only let in Christians. For that, he has been denounced as a Nazi. But this lemming-like attitude will itself ensure that the spectre of fascism in Europe becomes a reality.
If people are abandoned by a liberal ruling class that stigmatises as Nazis all who wish to defend their culture, they will be pushed into the arms of real racists and fascists. In France, Marine le Pen of the National Front is poised to exploit the anger at what is happening. So are the ultra-nationalist Jobbik in Hungary, Golden Dawn in Greece and Vlaams Belang in Belgium.
In Britain, there has been no outpouring of compassion over the children murdered by Islamists in Syria or Iraq. No homes have been volunteered to accommodate enslaved and mutilated Somali girls.
There was no support for bombing President Assad’s army in Syria. There is no support for the boots-on-the-ground war necessary to stop Isis. There is no support for taking out the Iranian regime behind Assad’s slaughter.
Instead, as part of the Iran nuclear deal, the UK government has agreed to make available to the Iranian regime $150 billion in sanctions relief, which will enable it to create even more refugees, which Europe will then tell itself it is obliged to take in.
“Virtue signalling” is the opposite of a moral position. It entails a form of emotional bullying which is as self-destructive as it is delusional. The migrant crisis is where confused, demoralised Europe seals its fate.
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