RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14368/refugees-turkey-unhcr

Sirwan Mansouri is an Iranian Kurdish journalist based in the Middle East.

Turkey, which is located between the Middle East and Europe, was one of the first countries to establish a UNHCR regional office in 1960, and was given economic incentives to do so. Every year after that, the Turkish government received a large budget with which to provide aid to refugees.

The UNHCR, the organization that is supposed to advocate for the rights of refugees, has done the opposite. It has placed their care in the hands of an indifferent and hostile Turkey, which they leave to its own terrible devices.

Perhaps the UN has washed its hands of the misery of refugees in Turkey — who have become virtual slaves — but the rest of the international community must hold Ankara accountable for its inexcusable treatment of people who escaped danger in their countries of origin, only to be abused by the authorities that vowed — and took money — to protect and resettle them.

Over the past half century, the Geneva-based United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has created and managed mechanisms to protect people whose lives are in danger at the hands of repressive regimes by providing them with political asylum in other countries. The war-torn Middle East has been home to the highest number of such asylum-seekers.

Turkey, which is located between the Middle East and Europe, was one of the first countries to establish a UNHCR regional office in 1960, and was given economic incentives to do so. Every year after that, the Turkish government received a large budget with which to provide aid to refugees.

With an increase in cuts to UN refugee budgets, Turkey was able to provide even less money to asylum-seekers under its auspices. When the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, a huge number of refugees flowed into Turkey from Syria and Iraq. Initially, Turkey seems to have believed that this situation could be financially lucrative, as the UN would have to increase its refugee budget for Ankara. This is not what happened, however. In fact, UN assistance to Turkish mediators, such as the Human Resources Development Fund (UNHCR) and the Association for Solidarity with Asylum Seekers and Migrants (SGDD-ASAM), was even severely reduced, and in 2018, it was cut off completely.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273979/germany-vs-populist-wave-bruce-bawer

When I was walking around Munich this weekend, it occurred to me that one reason why Germans have such a long-lasting international reputation for being brainy and scholarly and stuff is that all those hours they spend standing at street corners waiting for lights to change give them plenty of time to think. Ever since the first time I set foot in this country, several decades ago now, I’ve been stunned by the willingness of these people – in every city, and of whatever age or social station – to crowd together on curbs, with no moving vehicle in sight for half a mile in either direction, unwilling to hurry across even the narrowest of thoroughfares until a green signal gives them permission to move. My first encounter with this cultural practice was especially striking because I was from America, where individual freedom is taken seriously and where it is hard to quash the impulse to violate trivial regulations if they seem to impinge unnecessarily on one’s freedom of movement and are contrary to one’s personal judgment and/or to simple common sense.

Consider, moreover, that I come from New York, where, as they say, traffic lights are only suggestions. 

This whole German standing-at-lights business is, of course, all about obedience – about a fondness, in fact a deep-seated, inborn, and well-nigh ineradicable need, for exceedingly strict order, even in the most meaningless matters, enforced by very strong authority. That, plus an unshakable readiness to obey that authority beyond the point of rationality, in defiance of one’s own reasoning powers, and without ever giving an instant’s thought to the possible illegitimacy, imprudence, or immorality of that authority. It’s this rage for order that explains the insane level of overregulation practiced by the EU – which is, when you come right down to it, a German operation. The other day somebody said that one of the regulations the EU is currently working on is a rule setting the proper lengths for candle wicks. Only a bureaucracy run by Germans could come up with such things. 

Americans love freedom. But to Germans – at least Germans with a traditional German temperament –freedom looks terrifyingly like chaos.

That’s what I was reflecting on as I waited at one Munich street light after another on this first weekend after the seventy-fifth anniversary of D-Day – and the first weekend, too, after the announcement of the winners of the latest European Parliament elections. If not for the German fetish for authority, Americans of my parents’ generation wouldn’t have been put through so many (shall we say) inconveniences during the first half of the 1940s, and D-Day would never have had to happen, and those Normandy beaches would still have French names.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/reality-of-swedens-migration-problem/

Readers may recall a kerfuffle in February 2017, which now seems like the long, distant past. It revolved around President Trump riffing on the question of migration in front of a rally of his supporters:

You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this. Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.

As it happens, nothing had particularly happened the night before in Sweden itself. Rather, the president appeared to be referring to a segment he had seen on Fox News the previous evening, in which a journalist reported on the social and criminal problems that Sweden had been having as a result of the unchecked migration that peaked in 2015.

But such is the tenor of the times that the dominant response to the President’s statement was to ridicule it, especially by highlighting what a nirvana Sweden allegedly is. In other words, much of the political and media class in America and around the world decided to take part in covering up the problems which sudden non-European migration had brought to Sweden. In their desire to lampoon Trump they ended up colluding in a falsehood.

Just how false can once again be seen from the most recent work from Paulina Neuding, one of the most indispensable journalists not just in Europe but anywhere else. In recent years Neuding has, among other things, been keeping a tally of “explosions” in Sweden. Not metaphorical ones, but actual ones. So strangely self-censoring is the Swedish press that when explosives are used (including grenade attacks, among other hitherto un-Swedish activities) they are either ignored or reported merely as “explosions.”  Some of these do turn out to be accidents, but a great many do not, and the unwillingness of most of the media (local and international) to look into these events is one of those things that I predict historians will look back at and just whistle.

https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/the-sky-high-stakes-in-hong-kong/

In Hong Kong’s huge protest over a proposed law that would allow extradition from the territory to mainland China, there is far more at stake than “confidence” in the integrity of Hong Kong’s legal system, or the health of Hong Kong’s economy — important though those both are. The real showdown going on in Hong Kong has long been between despotism and democracy, between tyranny and the Free World. And whether we, the free people of America, and our allies, choose to think of it this way or not, the reality is that the showdown now taking place in Hong Kong will shape our future as well.

For two reasons, the people of Hong Kong — in their efforts to stop this ruinous extradition law — deserve the strongest support we can muster. One reason is quite simply that it is the right thing to do, though in international politics that is often a backseat priority. The other reason– perhaps more compelling to those inclined to think of Hong Kong as a faraway foreign place and none of our business — is that it is a high-risk precedent for the Free World to abandon its own. It invites aggression by the likes of China (and Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc.) against us and our allies. Which is what it will boil down to, if the U.S., the U.K. and other democratic powers do not find some way to buttress the demands of Hong Kong’s demonstrators. It is vital that Washington persuade Beijing and its satrap in Hong Kong, Chief Executive Carrie Lam, that it would be wise to scrap this proposed law, and moronic –or at least astoundingly expensive — to push it through.

Please, make no mistake. Officially Hong Kong these days may be a “Special Autonomous Region” of the “People’s Republic” of China, destined under treaty to fall entirely under Beijing’s jackboot in 2047. But in spirit, in character, in history, in the inheritance of British rule of law, and for another full 28 years according to China’s promise of “One Country, Two Systems,” Hong Kong is one of our own, still part of the Free World. If we do not stand up for its people, China’s rulers will all too likely read that abandonment as one more sign of Western weakness, one more invitation to commit the next act of aggression.