RUTHFULLY YOURS

According to a leaked German government report, up to 6.6 million migrants — both refugees and migrants seeking a better life — are currently waiting to cross to Europe from Africa.
The “mistake” the Israelis made seems to have been that, although driven out as refugees, they exercised their right to self-determination, returned to their homeland, and turned it into one of the most successful countries in the world. The Palestinians, who had an equal opportunity to achieve that, remain in poverty and disarray, with terrorism for 80 years as their only notable achievement. If they had agreed to work with the Jews instead of fighting them, who knows where they might be today?
To begin with, there actually are no Palestinian people, as used in the current sense of the term. The Oslo Accords accurately refer to Arabs, which is what they are — Arabs who left Israel in the war of 1947-8 in order not to be involved in a conflict in which other Arabs fought with Jews and Christians and who currently make up more than a million of the Arabs now living in Israel as citizens with equal rights.

Refugees are back in the news. This summer, the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa is likely to rise significantly. According to the Daily Telegraph:

“Europe could face a new wave of migrant arrivals this summer, a leaked German government report has warned. Up to 6.6m people are waiting in countries around the Mediterranean to cross into Europe, according to details of the classified report leaked to Bild newspaper.”

With the closing of the route through the Balkans and entry via Greece, most refugees, economic migrants and asylum seekers are crossing the Mediterranean into Spain or Italy, putting those countries under enormous strain. Since 2016, Austria has strengthened border police to prevent thousands more entering from Italy, and increased the number of troops and armored vehicles on the border in 2017.

On World Refugee Day 2016, the United Nation’s High Commission for Refugees announced that there are now more displaced persons than there were after World War Two: “The total at the end of 2015 reached 65.3 million – or one out of every 113 people on Earth… The number represents a 5.8 million increase on the year before.” During the past three years, Gatestone Fellow Soeren Kern has published a strong series of well-researched articles examining the impact of the refugee crisis on Europe overall and on individual countries such as Germany and Sweden. The rise in criminality in general, rape, Islamic radicalization, and even terror attacks as a result of a barely controlled influx of migrants from mainly Muslim countries has created alarm in country after country.

The popular will regarding illegal immigration appears to have triumphed over elite sentiment—at least for now. The Senate is close to passing a House measure to build 700 miles of fence along the Mexican border, without demanding amnesty for illegal aliens or a guest-worker program as a quid pro quo. “Comprehensive” immigration reform (a.k.a. amnesty), the pet project of the Bush Administration and its conservative open-borders supporters, has for the moment foundered on political and social reality.

Anyone who still questions the wisdom of the enforcement-first strategy embraced by House Republicans (and a few staunch GOP senators such as Alabama’s Jeff Sessions) need only look at Madrid, where a conference on the European illegal immigration crisis has thrown the folly of amnesty into sharp relief. Spain is leading an appeal to other European Union members to beef up their support for a new EU border control agency. The agency, Frontex, tries to apprehend illegal immigrants as they sail from Africa to Spain’s Canary Islands. Spain’s Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos argued on Friday that the African influx threatened Europe’s entire border, not just Spain’s.

But Spain’s appeal for aid has so far fallen on deaf ears. The reason: Spain is largely responsible for exacerbating the illegal immigration problem by having granted amnesty to its illegal aliens last year, according to leading EU representatives. Nicholas Sarkozy, France’s interior minister, says that Spain’s 2005 amnesty to 600,000 illegals lies behind the explosion of illegal migration this year. Officials have caught more than five times the number of Africans trying to reach the Spanish islands in the first 8 months of 2006—24,000—than they caught in all of 2005. France experienced an identical surge in would-be “refugees” after its own amnesty in 1997, says Sarkozy. Austria’s justice minister Karin Gastinger has charged that amnesties create a “pull factor [to] the people in Africa [and] give the wrong signal.” Even Senegal, the source of most immigrants to Spain, has criticized the Spanish amnesty for encouraging illegal immigration, according to Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

Needless to say, the European experience with amnesty repeats the U.S. one. Following the 1986 American amnesty, illegal Mexican immigration surged several fold. By now, we have enough shared experience with misguided immigration policy not to keep making the same mistake. France’s Sarkozy proposes a Europe-wide ban on mass amnesties. This is one French idea that the U.S. would be wise to embrace.

If you do not have control of your borders, with a meaningful set of immigration laws and the right to keep people out of your country, then you do not really have a country.

While the public wants their representatives to control their borders, politicians seem to see only political capital in running the other way. In part this is because there appears to be some kind of “bonus” to be achieved by looking welcoming and kindly, in contrast to the unwelcoming and mean things that borders now appear to represent.

By the end of August, it was estimated that almost 12,000 people had arrived in Canada through this route so far this year. It is a number that constitutes little more than an averagely busy week in Italy at any time over recent years. But even this comparatively tiny movement across an entire year has proven too much for Canada. At the end of last month, Prime Minister Trudeau told reporters: “For someone to successfully seek asylum it’s not about economic migration. It’s about vulnerability, exposure to torture or death, or being stateless people. If they are seeking asylum we’ll evaluate them on the basis of what it is to be a refugee or asylum seeker.”

Bombings and other terrorist attacks are now a common feature of life in modern Europe. On just one day (September 15, 2017), an improvised explosive device was placed on a London Underground train, a man wielding a knife and shouting “Allah” attacked a soldier in Paris, and a man with a hammer shouting “Allahu Akbar” badly wounded two women in Lyon. As the former Prime Minister of France and the present Mayor of London have put it, perhaps this is all just a price we have to pay for living in big cities in Europe in the 21st century: we have traffic congestion, great restaurants and terrorist attacks.

Of course, the public are all the time worrying about other things — not just whether all this is just a taste of something worse to come, but whether anything might be done to stop it. While our political leaders continue to view this as a narrow security-related question, the public can see that it is also a border-security and mass-immigration issue. Across the continent, poll after poll shows the European public continuously calling for migration into Europe to be slowed down. This plea is not due to some atavistic urge or distasteful racist instinct, but something that the public seems to intuit better than their politicians — which is that if you do not have control of your borders, with a meaningful set of immigration laws and the right to keep people out of your country then you do not really have a country.

Since the upsurge in Europe’s migration crisis in 2015, when Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel unilaterally decided to suspend normal border checks and turn an already existing flow of migrants into a tidal wave, politicians and the public have divided from each other over this issue. While the public want their representatives to control their borders, politicians seem to see only political capital in running the other way. In part this is because there appears to be some kind of “bonus” to be achieved by looking welcoming and kindly in contrast to the unwelcoming and mean things that borders now appear to represent.

Politicians such as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Canada have used the opportunity of Europe’s migration catastrophe to grandstand and present themselves as offering a different way. In the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric on building a wall along the US-Mexican border, Trudeau in particular has presented himself as the yin to Donald Trump’s yang. In January, when President Trump was sworn into office, Trudeau sent out a Tweet reading, “To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength.” To which he added the hashtag, #WelcomeToCanada. In March of this year, in another clear response to the US President, Trudeau tweeted, “Regardless of who you are or where you come from, there’s always a place for you in Canada” — a tall order, given the existence of 7.5 billion people on this earth, many of whom are not already Canadian.

Until recently, the very notion that some European neighborhoods were “no-go” zones was vehemently dismissed by politicians and commentators on both sides of the Atlantic as a myth, a lie, a vicious right-wing calumny. But even as Swedish officials were denying the existence of such zones in their own country, they were secretly mapping them out and overseeing a police effort to liberate them.

The Sweden Democrats are on the rise because voters finally grasp the extent and significance of the damage their elites have been doing to their country — and the elites, both in the media and in government, are scrambling to snap into line in order to keep hold on power.

In some ways, the winds in Scandinavia may be turning, but it does not seem as if Stanghelle and his ilk are about to speak the whole truth about Islam, or to apologize for their inexcusable abuse of those who have.

Not long ago, Norwegian journalists were virtually united in representing Sweden, with its exceedingly liberal immigration policy and its strict limits on public discussion of the subject, as a model of enlightened thinking that deserved to be emulated. Meanwhile Denmark, with its far freer atmosphere of debate (remember the Danish cartoons) and more sensible border controls, was almost universally depicted in Norway as a deplorable hotbed of Islamophobia. That appears to be changing. As Hans Rustad of the alternative Norwegian news website Document.no noted recently, the term “Swedish conditions,” which some of us have been using for years to refer to the colossal scale of Sweden’s Muslim-related problems, is actually turning up these days in the mainstream Norwegian media — although the relationship of those conditions to Islam is still routinely underplayed, if not entirely avoided.

Until recently, Denmark, with its far freer atmosphere of debate and more sensible border controls, was almost universally depicted in Norway as a deplorable hotbed of Islamophobia. Pictured: A Danish checkpoint on the border with Germany, near Padborg, on January 6, 2016. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Case in point: on August 10, the daily Aftenposten ran a piece by Tarjei Kramviken about an official Swedish report stating that police, during the past couple of years, have been pursuing an organized campaign to “take back neighborhoods from criminals who have set up parallel societies.” But the attempt, the report admitted, has failed. Instead, even more such neighborhoods have sprung up, and the level of violence within them has become more common, more brutal, and more spontaneous. If a police car crosses the invisible border, it is pelted with rocks or bottles.

The neighborhoods in question are, of course, Muslim neighborhoods, and the criminals are Muslims. Although the persons in question are indeed criminals — they carry guns, sell drugs, commit burglaries, and break out into the occasional riot — the use of the word criminals seems somewhat euphemistic. We are not talking about some kind of Mafia that has moved into certain neighborhoods, taken them over, and terrorized the locals. The criminals are the locals. They are the young men who live there. Maybe not every last young man, but a high percentage of them. Some of these criminals, moreover, are mere children. One Stockholm cop told Kramviken about “five-year-olds who give the finger to the police and say nasty things.”