The return of the Migrant Crisis?

Thursday's first post-Brexit vote edition of From Our Own Correspondent gave us another chance to hear from one of the BBC's most opinionated foreign reporters, their Central Europe correspondent Nick Thorpe (a regular here at ITBB during the 'now-forgotten' migrant crisis).

Here he talked about the "fateful" British vote's effect on Eastern Europe. It's provoked "shock". "anger", "fear" and "insecurity" there.

And he had a personal message for us too:

People in Britain often tell me that Europeans don't like us. My own impression is the opposite. 

Wherever I travel in Eastern Europe people tell me how much they love the British for our idiosyncrasies, our awkwardness, our stubborn pints and unconvertible inches. We're respected for keeping our own currency and resisting the faceless euro. Our diplomats are admired for helping other nations end their wars and our soldiers for doing the job they were given and then going home. 

If that positive image of Britain in Europe were more widely known in the United Kingdom perhaps the result would have been different. 

(Might it? Are you, dear reader, now feeling 'buyer's remorse'? If only you'd known how much they love us!)

And the consequences appear to be wholly negative over there (at least from Nick's account):

The departure of Britain from the UK - if that actually happens - will deprive Eastern Europe of an important ally....For the countries of the Balkans it's a disaster. 

(Now see what you've done!)

At least the following report from India from Sanjoy Majumder gave a less wholly gloomy picture. Though the first half of his report (following an introduction from Kate Adie that began, "No one knows if or when the UK will trigger Article 50...") began negatively too, with "It's a disaster" as the main "refrain" in central Delhi, and lots of talk of "turmoil" and economic concern, it did, however, go on to say that lots of Indians now see opportunities for better business deals, and for much more migration from India  to the UK. Its closing line ran as follows:

"It's not all bad news," says one business leader, with a chuckle. "We may be able to help them out of their crisis".

And then came a story you - like me - won't have heard much of at all during the EU referendum debate. It's the story that many complained at the time was being conveniently 'forgotten about' by the BBC. But now it's back on the BBC, and here's how Kate Adie introduced it:

What with Brexit, political turmoil and terrorist attacks, news of Europe's refugee crisis has dropped off the front pages.

Ah, yes, Kate! "Dropped off the front pages", has it? It's the newspapers' fault, is it? It's not dropped even more markedly off the BBC News website, and the Today headlines, and BBC One's News at Six in recent months too?

She went on to tell us something you might not have known:

On the day of the referendum vote the Italian navy and coastguard said they'd rescued 4,500 migrants during that single Thursday.

It was then back to the kind of report which we haven't heard for many months. 

Freelance reporter Lizzie Porter reported from "a makeshift Afghan village" in Greece, where "increasingly anxious" people claim to have escaped the Taliban and "the so-called" Islamic State. She tells their stories, over sweet dates and tea. She seems to believe them. A little girl inspires her with her energy, but everyone else is depressed. "Don't you people in Europe watch the news?", was a refrain. Her closing words came from 'Habib':

If you saw us now you would not believe we are human beings. Pray for us.

Potato peelings, anti-migrant sentiment and the Nazis

Kate Adie.

"The second world war ended over 70 years ago, and only those of a certain age still remember its events at first hand in Germany, and that includes those who worked at the extermination camps at Auschwitz and of course the survivors of the Holocaust. 
Of the thousands of Germans who worked at the death camps, only some of the senior figures were ever prosecuted. But now there are several trials being held in Germany, of lower ranking officials such as guards accused of being accessories to mass murder. They and their surviving victims are in their 90s, and as Jenny Hill’s been finding, it’s reminding Germany of its dark past. All the while anti-migrant sentiment is growing:

"Angela Orosz is small, energetic and she smiles a lot. I find myself laughing along with her as she tells me that her family never threw away potato peelings, preferring to eat them instead. “Potato peelings!” she exclaimed “Can you imagine?” 

Angela was born in Auschwitz. her story is an unimaginable story of human cruelty and human resilience. Her mother was pregnant when she was transported to the death camp. Somehow she survived despite the experiment she was subjected to. Somehow she sustained the pregnancy, eating potato peelings from the camp kitchen, and somehow Angela was born, concealed, and lived the first few months of her life in the camp before its liberation.  Decades later this immaculately dressed dark haired woman sits in front of me. we’re not smiling any more. “Potato peelings”, she repeats, carefully. “They saved my life.” 

Angela recently gave evidence at the trials of two SS guards at Auschwitz. A recent court ruling has made it possible for prosecutors to pursue anyone who worked in a death camp, regardless of their role. One man who’s been convicted of aiding and abetting mass murder, several others have been charged, but they’re all now in their nineties, it’s a race against time to bring them to safe justice. 

The trials fascinate and horrify Germany. They’re a searingly painful reminder of this country’s past. In the municipal blandness of the courtroom survivors recount surprisingly vivid detail. A young woman with bright red hair, shot by a uniformed Nazi; a father’s hand closing the gate on the family home before he was marched roughly away; a sewing machine, carefully, hopefully, carried into the chaos of the train to Auschwitz. It’s all recounted with quiet insistence as weak sunshine pales the wooden floor and traffic faintly murmurs past outside. 

Recently I watched as one of those survivors spoke directly to the former guard in the dock. Leon Schwarzbaum’s eyes are strikingly bright. he has a beautiful smile, but it’s often washed away by an expression of profound sadness. His whole family was killed in Auschwitz. Leon’s eyes were fixed on Reinhold Hanning who was accused of murdering tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners. Crammed together on flimsy plastic chairs, the watching journalists were absolutely still, and I realised I was absolutely holding my breath. “Mr Hanning” he began. “We are about the same age. We will soon face our final judge. I want you to tell the truth about what you did.” 

This, I thought really was Germany, confronting its past, face to face. 
I chatted recently with a lawyer who represents some of the survivors. “These trials” he told me, “really matter” His face creased, emphatic. “It’s about justice, yes, but it’s also about making sure this country doesn’t forget. It’s already forgetting.” 

I wonder whether he’s right, because it seems to me that as Germany confronts the horror of its past again, it’s also facing a stark present reality. 

The refugee crisis has revealed a painful glimpse of what the country’s president Joachim Gauck refers to as ‘dark Germany’. It’s there in the faces of screaming anti migrant protesters illuminated harshly in the headlights of a bus carrying refugees to what should have been a safe house. Or the mob, violently silhouetted by flames who clapped and cheered as a refugee home burned to the ground in front of them. And then there are the swastikas crudely splashed by night discovered by day on the walls of buildings, which house asylum seekers. There have been more than a thousand attacks like these on refugee homes in the last year. Most Germans are horrified. Even so, supports has grown for the grassroots political party in Germany which campaigns against migrants. Its leader recently proposed border guards should make use of their firearms. Germany’s constitutional court is currently deciding whether to ban another political party. The far-right NPD. Many here blame them in part for the current anti-migrant sentiment and violence, but in fact proceedings began two years ago when Germany’s 16 states petitioned the court to outlaw the party, which they claim is racist, antisemitic and has similarities to Hitler’s Nazis. 

I think back to Angela and her potato peelings. She’d also told me how she’s made her nine-year old daughter navigate the city’s subway system alone so that she could survive by herself if the Holocaust happened again. For all her determination and bravery, the circumstances of Angela’s birth have infused her life with a profound insecurity. It’s a frailty that touches Germany, even now.

That is a transcription of Jenny Hill’s FOOC (preceded by Kate Adie’s intro) I’ve done that so that you can judge for yourself. Jenny Hill (Welcome to Germany) regards all refugees fleeing from poverty or war, or seeking ‘a better life’  as unquestionably entitled to unlimited hospitality from western European countries, no matter who, why or where. 

But is the  plight of would-be migrants fleeing from poverty and war really comparable to Germany’s industrialised extermination of the Jews in WW 2? 

Does Germany’s guilt oblige European countries to absorb, permanently or temporarily, millions of destitute and desperate Muslims, when there are vast prosperous Arab countries that could accommodate them without those troublesome ideological differences? 

Did you wonder why Jenny Hill sought to sandwich the refugee crisis in between two slices of Holocaust? Well, she’s by no means the only one who does that, but it seems profoundly crass. She sees superficial similarities, so conflates the two. She alludes to ‘lessons’ that she thinks the Holocaust should have taught us. 

Not ‘Don’t tolerate antisemitism’.  The ‘lesson’ she takes from the Holocaust appears to be:  ‘opposing mass Islamic immigration is racist’ and those who do so (the far-right) are no different to the Nazis.

Is  she really equating Muslim refugees with victims of the Holocaust? Is she saying that opposing the influx of Muslim, (very likely antisemitic) refugees is racist? Have the recent  incidences of sexual harassment and violence in German cities, the rapes in Sweden and so on escaped her? 

I’d like to know what that lawyer meant by “Germany is already forgetting.” I do wonder if he meant that in the way Jenny Hill was emoting. Or the opposite. Forgetting about the consequences of antisemitism perhaps?  Never mind. 

I found Jenny Hill’s use of that ‘potato peelings’ tale cheap, inappropriate and clumsy.  

Turning tide

Woolly liberal

Woolly liberals must face truth about migrants  (Times £)

Hugo Rifkind has written an interesting piece.

“ It’s no good embracing refugees without accepting that some of their values are beyond the pale and must change.I find myself discombobulated over migration and Europe. Do you, also?”

“Do you, also?” sounds as though he's speaking with a German accent. 

“Perhaps not. Perhaps, back in September, when the tiny body of Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach, and Angela Merkel declared that Germany would take 800,000 Syrians, and the Swedes said they’d take even more, per capita, and the world’s liberals — such as me — genuflected before them, then perhaps you saw, quite clearly, where it was all going. So perhaps you aren’t discombobulated at all. The opposite, even.Combobulated as anything. 

Not me though. Firmly dis. This weekend, Mrs Merkel performed her sharpest volte-face yet (and she’s performed a few of late) saying that isf Syria and Iraq should ever again know peace (a big if, admittedly)then all the refugees that Germany has taken in should leave, and say “thanks” on their way out. 

In Sweden, meanwhile, on Friday, we were told that gangs of rightwing hooligans were roaming around Stockholm looking for brown people to punch.[...]For the woolly, well-meaning liberal - again, such as me - there’s a strong temptation to not quite think about any of this. Or, if you do have to think about it, then there’s an even stronger temptation to do so a little dishonestly”

Hugo proceeds to describe Jess Phillips’s misguided comparison between Cologne and Broad Street, Brum; then:

 “No. In fact a situation far more similar to Cologne occurred in Cairo on the night when president Morsi stepped down. Scores of women in Tahrir Square were harassed, beaten and raped by a jeering mob. And it is certainly true, then as now, that a whole host of surprising western voices piped up to condemn it. 

Some of them, than as now, seemed a lot more upset by sexual assaults conducted by Muslims than they ever seemed to be by anybody else, but that’s not really the point. Although, I cannot lie, I’d be a lot more comfortable if it were. 

[...]Yet in the end, even a woolly liberal needs to stop twisting and stare an obvious truth in the face. Leaflets are now being handed out in German swimming pools.politely explaining that women in bikinis were not to be unilaterally grabbed on the bottom. If you believe in immigration (which I do) let alone the moral necessity of accepting refugees (which I certainly do) this is the bit on which you have to dwell.Can we take in new people and make them just like us?”

(Not according to Trevor Phillips, who’s come in for stick for mentioning that Muslims aint like us, and it’s insulting of us to even expect them to become so.)  (The left does not approve.) 

“sometimes, in order to figure out your own thoughts, you need somebody to say the exact opposite. In that vein I’m grateful to Trevor Phillips[..] who said last month that continuously pretending that a group is somehow eventually going to become like the rest of us is perhaps the deepest form of disrespect”  

To do so, he added, was to suggest they just “haven’t yet seen the light”’ which is patronising and unhelpful, not least because maybe they never will. But they have to.  The lesson of Europe’s current migrant trauma is that integration - and, in the end, assimilation -  is not an option but essential. 

[...]It’s not enough for minorities to just keep their heads down. They have to change enough to not even want to. A society can have any number of foods, headdresses and religious ceremonies, but it cannot have any number of values. 

[...] For Germany, and for Sweden, though, the interesting bit is what happens next. The question is not just whether their migrants can become liberals. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, whether their liberals can stay liberal while they do.

Knit me a hairy jumper. I’m wondering if some of those woolly liberals aren’t beginning  to see the light. 

Here’s something else that caught my eye.

The Guardian is getting flak and it’s not happy. All those woolly articles are attracting avalanches of criticism.

Cologne seems to be the catalyst for some kind of turning point, although the Guardian itself is sticking to its guns. For now. Silencing the opposition can’t work for very long. Who’s going to keep on reading articles they disagree with, especially if they can’t have their say?

Lyse Doucet sees the light (at the end of the tunnel)

The more sophisticated broadcasting technology gets, the more inefficient. Delays on lines routinely disrupt the flow of human interaction on air just as leaves on lines scupper the flow of commuting. Sudden disconnections at the crucial moment, spooky echoes and fuzziness seem far more common than they used to be.

So when Lyse Doucet was explaining on the Today Programme this morning that the migrants she was mingling with were not in fact primarily from Syria, but from Eritrea, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia....(Palestine?) and all four corners of the globe, “looking for a better life”  - her mangled words came from a wind tunnel in the bowels of a cave. 

We couldn’t hear it very clearly, but despite the distorted quality of the sound, we got the gist.

Sarah Montague wondered if this was a threat to the European Union.  Mark Urban’s message seems to be getting through.

Migrants, charities, virtue signalling and mandatory emoting

Caitlin Moran, author, columnist and celebrity watcher is a punchy writer who specialises in human interest stories and light-hearted selfie-centric  observations. She also talks extraordinarily quickly.

The Times has had a hand in elevating her upwards and onwards, beyond journalism, to celebrity-hood in her own right.  It’s that Emma Thompson-Cumberbatch Benedict syndrome. 

I suppose if you’re revered by thousands, why not take advantage? Why not email a few friends (a term that can be interpreted in a way of your choice) and get them to collaborate with you to raise money for “the refugees”. Everyone’s a winner. 

Fair enough. Apparently the money raised is to go the Save the Children. What they intend to do with it I know not.

Just as long as the charities that benefit from all the fundraising confine themselves to helping orphaned children, who may willingly assimilate and absorb their host countries’ culture, which whole families or unaccompanied young men are unlikely to do.

In an interview with Anita McVeigh on BBC News 24, (thanks for the publicity?) Moran, with those annoying arched eyebrows, speed-talked her project up with all the ‘mandatory emoting‘ one would expect. 

In the interview, she stated confidently that little Aylan Kurdi’s family fled from persecution, and he ended up dead. 

It is widely believed that the father’s account is flawed, but even so, the child undoubtedly died, and the politicians of the big wide world must urgently come up with some kind of rescue plan for dealing with the exodus of families displaced by wars.As Douglas Murray says “Where is the ‘Ummah’ now?” 

But that’s not the point. It’s that failure to fully inform the viewer again. I don’t know if Moran and Cumberbatch are Corbynistas, but there are too many people amongst those pleading for more and more Syrians to be given sanctuary in the UK and Europe who seem unaware of the effect that an influx of thousands of Muslims will have on the western world.   

At least let them know.

Melanie Phillips had a full page opinion piece in yesterday’s Times. (£)

I have yet to see this view being explored  - sympathetically at least - on the BBC. I don’t claim to watch the BBC as much as I used to. Please let me know if I’m mistaken. 

Accepting these migrants is a huge mistake

Britain can’t be expected to take in a flood of displaced people that will alter the cultural balance of the country for ever.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.”

Soeren Kern, Gatestone Institute:

“Based on Pew projections, the Muslim population of Germany reached an estimated 5,068,000 by the end of 2014. The 640,000 Muslim migrants arriving in Germany in 2015, combined with the 77,000 natural increase, indicates that the Muslim population of Germany will jump by 717,000, to reach an estimated 5,785,000 by the end of 2015. This would leave Germany with the highest Muslim population in Western Europe.
By way of comparison, the surge in Germany's Muslim population would be equivalent to the Muslim population of the United States increasing by 3 million in just one year.Critics say that German officials, under pressure to solve Europe's migration crisis, are ignoring the long-term consequences of taking in so many migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.”

“Islamic Sharia law is advancing rapidly throughout Germany, with Sharia courts now operating in all of Germany's big cities. This "parallel justice system" is undermining the rule of law in Germany, experts warn, but government officials are "powerless" to do anything about it. At the same time, German judges are increasingly referring and deferring to Sharia law in German law courts.”

I’ve no idea what Caitlin Moran would have to say about any of that. We don’t know because it’s something she hasn’t written about. It’s something she might not even know about. Or care. 

The tidal wave of compassion for migrants is accompanied by a troubling absence of appreciation for the achievements and sacrifices of previous generations, fought on our behalf at enormous cost. The cavalier willingness of the politically illiterate and those raised on celebrity culture to throw it all away is what is really shocking.