On Europe's "Refugee Crisis"

Macedonian police try to keep back people attempting to cross illegally from Greece.

I have been reading accounts of the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe with dismay. Why should Europe, or North America, be saddled with some kind of misplaced sense of “responsibility” for these people?  I don’t believe they should.

According to international agreements on refugees, Turkey, as the first point of refuge, should accommodate the refugees with the aim of repatriating them when conditions improve and resettling them only as a last resort. The notion of automatically resettling them all over Europe is ludicrous. The role of other countries should be to provide humanitarian aid through Turkey: food, shelter, clothing, etc. The refugees do not have a "right" to go and live where they want.

Now, to be sure, the plight of people displaced by war is terrible, and good people everywhere should want to help. But that desire to help has to be tempered by the realities of what kind of help is appropriate, how many people are truly in need of such help, and what impact that help might have on the people giving it.

If you can help others without it having a seriously negative impact on yourself or your society, then it’s the right thing to do. But if giving that help creates deep problems for your own people, or even puts your country and the lives of its citizens in peril, then it is not appropriate, no matter how sad the situation is. And it's important to note that there are other countries that should be bearing this burden far more than Europe.

For me, there are a number of points to consider, and while they may not be “politically correct,” and it might make me seen cold and uncaring, these points need to be considered nonetheless.

Who Are the Real Refugees

So much has been made of Europe’s reaction in the past few weeks because this is where most of these (illegal) migrants have been trying to go. We regularly hear stories about boats sinking in the Mediterranean Sea, and people dying trying to reach Italy from North Africa. The recent news has been mostly about thousands of people from the Middle East trying being stopped in Hungary as they try to get to Austria and other points west.

Apparently there has been a huge influx of people trekking from refugee camps in Turkey to Greece, Macedonia and then Serbia as they attempt to enter Hungary and then go on to Austria and Germany. But they are not all Syrians attempting to escape the bloodshed in their country.

People near the train station in Budapest wanting to travel to Austria.

While many of them might actually be genuine refugees from the civil war in Syria and the ISIS-led strife in Iraq, many are not. According to a September 6, 2015, article in the Washington Post, many of those trying to gain “asylum” in Western Europe are not refugees from the war-torn areas at all. There are a large number of non-Syrians pretending to be from Syria and trying to fake their way into Western Europe through this crisis.

The Post reports that there are Pakistanis, Afghans and others who carry fake Syrian identification or discard their identification papers altogether and then claim to be refugees from Syria. Near the fence that divides the border between Serbia and Hungary, the ground is reportedly littered with non-Syrian identification papers as these people throw away their real documents and then claim to be Syrian on the other side of the border.

Instead of being genuine refugees, they are people trying to escape poverty and low living conditions in their own countries by merging with the refugee streams and trying to get the same kind of asylum. They are essentially just illegal migrants taking advantage of the crisis to get into Europe. The Post article mentions the anger among many of the real Syrians when they encounter these people.

The Demise of Europe?

Western Europe is already reeling under a decades-long influx of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East. The way of life in European countries has been affected, severely in some cases. These immigrants refuse to assimilate and conform to local laws and ways, demanding instead that the host countries let them live according to their own cultural mores and, even worse, their own religious laws.

This threatens to completely destabilize Europe in the near future. Indeed, a stated goal of ISIS and similarly minded, radical Islamic groups is to establish a "Caliphate" in the Middle East and then destablize Europe so that they can make Islam dominate on that continent. Christians and other "infidels" must convert or die. They talk of raising the ISIS flag over the Vatican.

The process is already underway. There are places in Paris, Brussels and other cities where regular French or Belgian people – including the police – are afraid to go. These enclaves are called No-go Zones, and they are controlled by the immigrant groups. They impose sharia law in these zones, and the local authorities seem impotent to stop them and enforce the national and local laws.

As the numbers of these people increase in the future, they will put pressure on the host nations to change their laws to accommodate them. There have already been moves to have some countries adopt sharia into their legal systems. Thus far, these demands have been refused, but it might be only a matter of time.

By sheer force of numbers, these Muslim immigrants are on track to displace Europeans in their own countries. If it is allowed to continue, French, Italian, German and other cultures will be lost. Europe will be lost.

Can Europe really afford to absorb thousands more Middle East “refugees” who will swell the ranks of those already there?  Do they really want to hasten the demise of European civilization?

One result of this groundswell of Muslims into Europe has been the rise of nationalist groups whose rallying cry is to defend and preserve French, German and other traditions and culture. This creates a separate, but equally serious problem. But a majority of Europeans seem not to care.

Who Should Really Step Up?

Since the beginning of the conflict in Syria, which then spread to Iraq, Turkey has accommodated almost two million refugees. This is appropriate, as Turkey, like Syria and Iraq, is a Muslim nation. Many Turks are more secular and certainly not even close to the fundamentalist sorts of Muslims found in some other countries. And even though Turks are not particularly fond of Arabs, at least they share some religious commonality. 

But recently, Turkey has decided that the burden is too great, and they've been allowing - perhaps even encouraging - refugees to leave Turkey and enter Europe. 

Lebanon, which is very small and has plenty of its own problems, has taken in more than a million displaced Syrians. Jordan has taken in more than a million, and Egypt has accepted about 133,000.

Beyond these, however, the extent to which other Muslim nations have helped in this crisis is practically nothing. The worst offenders, as is often the case, are the oil-rich Gulf states. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates have given refuge to exactly ZERO.

These countries are exactly where the refugees should be going. They are Arab and they are Sunni Muslim. Culturally, linguistically and in terms of religion, the refugees would be most comfortable, most “at home” in these countries. And with all their oil money, these are the countries most able to help these people. But they do nothing.

Why isn't the world raising a stink about the inaction of the rich Gulf states and demanding that they be the ones to take in the refugees? Why is it that people are so quick to criticize the West (including those in the West) for practically everything, yet refuse to call out the Arab nations for their hypocrisy and their many practices that run completely contrary to human rights?

Even worse than doing nothing, the oil-rich Arab states have the gall to criticize Europe for the events unfolding in recent days. They refuse to help their fellow Arabs, their fellow Muslims, yet they demand that Europe and the West do more. They are singularly disgusting.

Equally disgusting was a statement over the weekend from the president of Iran who praised Europe for making accommodations for the “refugees.” If Iran was opening its country to refugees, that praise might carry some significance. But Iran has largely been financing the war and arming the government side; their responsibility for creating the crisis is almost as great as their “praise” is hypocritical.

Wolves with the Sheep

Within this influx of millions of “refugees” there are undoubtedly terrorists. Whether from ISIS, Al Qaeda or some other groups, the opportunity to infiltrate operatives into Europe through these masses is too good to pass up.

It will be nearly impossible for European authorities to adequately screen these people and identify the potential assassins, bombers and other terrorist operatives. The very fact that people are crossing with no documents, claiming to be Syrian refugees, and then granted asylum makes it clear that it’s a golden opportunity for terrorists.

Europeans need to brace for even more attacks in the near future.

What of Ukraine?

Europe’s ostensibly heartfelt embrace of these “refugees” and all the feel-good statements about helping people escaping the horrors of war look pretty weak here in Ukraine. To the best of my knowledge there has been no such outpouring of humanitarian empathy for the millions of people displaced by Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The European Union, through its Schengen visa regime, still makes it a bureaucratic hoop-jumping exercise for Ukrainians to get even a visitor’s visa. And the long-promised visa-waiver policy for Ukrainians still seems like a pipedream.

It’s hard to understand why Europe continues to put up such a bureaucratic wall to Ukrainians – who are, themselves, Europeans – while rushing to admit more and more Middle Easterners whose goal is not to become European, but to make Europe become Muslim.

And What of America?

Former Vice President Dick Cheney stated over the weekend that the crisis at Europe’s border is a direct result of the Obama administration’s botched handling of Middle East policy. He is not wrong about that, but he does seem to conveniently give his own administration a pass for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that was largely responsible for the situations that have followed. The Bush administration is at least as responsible as the one that followed.

If the U.S. had not gone into Iraq, the world might be a very different place. Iraq turned out not to have the weapons of mass destruction that were the stated reason for the invasion. And while the despotic regime of Saddam Hussein was overthrown, what has followed in the years since has been weak and unable to create any kind of stability. If the U.S. had not invaded, there might still be a relatively strong Iraq to counter Iran and the fundamentalist forces that have risen in the region.

But the Obama administration is more directly responsible for what has happened since 2010. They created the power vacuum that has been filled by Iran and Islamic extremist groups like ISIS. Their complete botching of the “Arab Spring” movements allowed Muslim extremists to rise to power in a number of countries, and Obama’s embarrassing reactions to the Syrian situation in 2011 created the mess that followed.

The USSA does bear a lot of responsibility for what is happening now, but the brunt of the consequences is falling on Europe. I wonder if Europe will survive.

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