Root cause of the refugees/migrants crisis in Europe

Parent Cafe
41

The phrase “Arab fear of the west and resentment at the humiliating and socially damaging effects of westernisation fuels Islamism and the spread of terrorism” speaks volumes and gets at the root of the problem: these cultures and these nations are backwards and are being pulled by the religiously extreme backwards in time. It’s fascinating though sad to read the many, many statements in the Arab world about how the West either owes all it has to Arab inventions or that the West is materially superior but morally inferior and that it needs to be brought under Islamic rule to set the world in order. (And to be fair, there are voices who say “it’s our fault” and “we need to emulate the West” but they are fewer and are outnumbered by both the religious extremists and the garden-variety devout.) In case I haven’t mentioned it, I’m an avid reader of the english press in all these countries and particularly in Egypt.

I’m trying not to be political but we spend a lot of time criticizing the Egyptian government of Sisi when the alternative was increasing authoritarian rule by the Muslim Brotherhood and their even more Islamist Salafi allies. About ⅓ of Egypt voted for the Salafis! That speaks to a point I made in first post on this topic: our naive belief that a thin Westernized caste could somehow lead these countries into the modern world through “democracy”. And yet the articles in the papers now say we should stop supporting “tyrants”, an absurd statement if you analyze it: we overthrew the tyrant in Iraq and that destroyed the country and we helped overthrow the tyrant in Libya and that country is in ruins, and we worked to overthrow the tyrant in Syria (who hangs on because he has allies) and hundreds of thousands of dead later … and the alternative to Sisi, who isn’t that kind of tyrant, is pretty awful so how exactly do these “blame the West” articles expect us to act? (I know the answer: whatever we do is wrong because hindsight will always find fault.)

I know someone whose mother lives in a third world country. She’s well off but the services there are horrible and the streets overflow … and people expect that and they can’t muster more than impotent rage against the status quo. That is also the story in Africa and the Arab states (and much of Latin America): they lack the social organization to improve how things work and to raise the expectations which become higher and higher standards which government and people then live up to. Asian countries have pulled that off.

42

Middle Eastern countries will continue to be a mess until they deal with human rights, the role of women and sectarian violence. There is nothing we can do to precipitously “fix” them short of continuing to encourage reform.

43

They’ll never be fixed while they continue to have a goose that lays “black golden” eggs, which funds their autocratic states.

44

Post #40 by Lergnom somehow reminds me of this article, especial the “debate” (in 2001) between Harold Koh and a student who was controversially admitted by then Yale’s admission dean (Shaw? He later became Stanford’s admission dean in 2006 or 2007):

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/magazine/26taliban.html?pagewanted=8&_r=1

"When he rose to speak on “Prospects for Afghanistan” at the Atlantic Council, hecklers in the audience shouted. A gray-haired woman in the audience stood and lifted the burka she was wearing over her head. “You have imprisoned the women — it’s a horror, let me tell you,” she cried. Rahmatullah was caught on videotape responding: “I’m really sorry to your husband. He might have a very difficult time with you.”

Unfortunately for him the exchange surfaced in Michael Moore’s documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11.” He appeared for about 30 seconds in the film, and it sealed his notoriety as the face of what many Americans considered to be an odious regime of terrorist-enabling male chauvinists.

Looking back, sitting in the Commons after his class on terrorism, he said that were he to do the trip over, he would be less antagonistic. “I regret the way I spoke sometimes. Now I would try to be softer. A little bit.”

The most substantive debate took place at Yale on March 27, 2001. “The Taliban: Pros and Cons” was arranged and moderated by Prof. Gustav Ranis, then at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. Ranis had recruited Prof. Harold Hongju Koh to argue the con side of the debate. Rahmatullah did not know who Koh was, and he was not impressed by what the professor had to say.

“He said, ‘Women under the Taliban cannot go to doctors,’ and I said, ‘Do you think I cannot take my daughter to a doctor?’ He said, ‘Women can’t walk outside without a male relative.’ I said, 'My wife walks outside.”’

At one point, Rahmatullah asked, “Have you ever been to Afghanistan?”

“No,” Koh said.

“Well, if you were my only source of information about the Taliban, I’d hate them too!” It was a line he also used during his “Talk of the Nation” interview.

But it might have been wise to recall the words of Rahman Baba: “An ignorant man is like a corpse.” What Koh may have lacked in personal experience of Afghanistan he had offset with time in the library. He had just finished serving more than two years in the Clinton administration as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. He arrived at Luce Hall with a five-inch stack of documents and reports.

In the audience that afternoon was Gardner Bovingdon, now a professor at Indiana University. “I remember three moments,” he says. “The first was when Rahmatullah was talking about girls’ education under the Taliban. He said, ‘It’s not that we refuse to let the girls study in school, it’s that we haven’t prepared the materials yet.’ In other words, it was just a bureaucratic problem. The entire auditorium looked at him beady-eyed. The second was when he was talking about the abridgment of women’s rights under the Taliban, and he said something like, ‘American women don’t have the right not to find images of themselves in swimsuits on the side of a bus.’ Some people in the auditorium hissed. And the third one was when Rahmatullah got to the topic of the Buddhas and said, ‘You people in the West, you don’t care about people, you only care about statues.’ Harold replied, ‘What you’re hearing this afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, is the sound of a diplomat hung out to dry.’ My real feeling was that however clever Rahmatullah was, he had not been charged to intellectually engage what Harold Koh was saying but had been told to stay on his points and not look like a fool.”

After the debate Rahmatullah offered his hand. Koh, who is now dean of Yale Law School, shook it “reluctantly,” he says, though he managed a smile for a photographer from The New Haven Register."

45

And the KSA’s exporting of ultraconservative religious doctrine.

Of course, it is oil that entangles everyone else, including the US, in that region’s international relations and foreign policy messes.

46

Just wondering, Are there conflicting religeous sectors in these countries that may get destabilize by huge influx of refuges? Before we criticize I would like to know if there’s complication for these countries.

47

@igloo
Syrians are predominantly Sunni-- same as the rich Arab states that are being criticized.

48

Igloo, does it really matter? Or are you saying that it would be ok for European countries to be destabilized by taking the refugees? Because that is what is happening and will continue to happen with 20 million Muslims trying to immigrate, many of them angry young men. Either their home countries become stabilized enough for them to stay, which isn’t likely with Iran and Russia on one side and The US and Europe on the other. Unless, of course, we decide to fight another World War and redraw the map of the Middle East. That has historical precedent for working out really well!

49

zooser, GMT’s answer clears it up. European countries are far more stable.

50

Some European countries are far more stable. Some also teeter, and all will be significantly destabilized with the addition of 20 million refugees. Moving that many people from one culture to another in a terrible economy is not a good answer. Of course, there is NO good answer, but it’s time everyone got serious.

51

I doubt Europe will take in all 20 million. What can people do when they get serious? A few years ago, controling Assad would have provided some answer. Now, you have to control ISIS and Syria.

52

??? I’m trying to understand why it’s incumbent upon “far more stable” European countries to take in all the syrian refugees, while the rich neighbouring arab countries get a pass.

KSA touts itself as a paragon of islamic virtue, and it’s uber-mega-rich, w the 4th largest sovereign wealth fund, globally. Why doesn’t it take some refugees???

.

53

Igloo, exactly. It is too late for a good answer. The question now is just how bad the situation will get and whether war will ultimately happen. Which it could. Those 20 million people won’t all go to Europe but many will. Sometimes things are really bad. I think we have to wonder where this will all end and I think the answer is nowhere good.

54

We could at least make it not get worse by keeeping Russia at bay for a starter.

GMT, what I am saying is if there’s danger to destabilize those countries, we have reason to be cautious. We don’t need another Lebanon in that region.

55

It’s going to be interesting to observe how the european countries attempt to culturally assimilate the migrants.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/world/europe/germany-welcomes-migrants-and-refugees.html?_r=0

56

Correction in my post #43:

Richard Shaw changed his job from the director of admissions at Yale to the director of admissions at Stanford in 2005, not in 2006/2007.

One controversy about one of his decisions prior to his joining the admissions office at Stanford is described (from one point of view: fighting against Russia along side with Taliban at the “right” time was “good cause”, and later being affiliated with the same “religious” organization when that group turned against us was then “bad”):

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/fund041706.asp

(I was digging out the “dirt” of a history that is “ancient”. Both the President and the director of admissions have long left their jobs there.)

"At first glance, one might view Mr. Farivar as a “Taliban-type applicant,” but his background is actually quite different from that of Mr. Hashemi. Born in 1969, he left Afghanistan with his family in 1983, during the Soviet occupation. He was educated in a refugee school set up by the International Relief Committee, although he also attended an Islamic religious school. In 1987 he returned to his native land and spent two years fighting the Soviets as a mujahideen warrior. “I wanted to fight for my country because so many around me were,” he told me.

While operating out of the caves of Tora Bora, which Osama bin Laden would later use as refuge, Mr. Farivar earned some money by writing for the U.S. government-funded Afghan Media Resource Center. One of the people he encountered was an exotic fellow mujahideen, Carlos Mavroleon. Mr. Mavroleon, son of a Greek shipping tycoon, had graduated from Harvard and worked on Wall Street. He had also converted to Islam, changed his name to Kari Mullah, and taken up arms against the Soviets.

Sometime after Mr. Mavroleon returned to his home in London, a package from him was delivered to Tora Bora by a courier. “Inside was an application to Harvard,” recalled Mr. Farivar in a 2002 New York Observer interview, “with a letter of recommendation that Carlos had written on my behalf to one of his professors there.” In early 1989, having received Mr. Farivar’s application, the Harvard admissions office suggested that in light of his spotty academic record he should consider attending a year of U.S. high school first.

Mr. Farivar was able to get into the Lawrenceville School, outside Princeton, N.J. “I got off the plane with my big Osama bin Laden beard, my Afghan rebel hat and traditional garb,” he recalled. “There I was with these 15-year-old kids. They were probably scared. I must have seemed very unapproachable, and I must have smelled.” Still, Mr. Farivar did well enough to be admitted to Harvard.

For the first two years, he kept his beard and prayed five times a day. Gradually, he made more friends and became part of campus life. He graduated in 1994 after writing his senior thesis on St. Thomas Aquinas. The next year, he landed his job at the Dow Jones News Service. When Mr. Farivar read of Mr. Shaw’s comments in the New York Times, he says, “I wondered if he was referring to me, but I had no way of knowing.” Not wanting to inject himself into the story, he said nothing. But then Benjamin Heller, one of his Harvard classmates, read about Mr. Shaw’s comment in the Harvard Crimson and contacted the paper saying that the reference might be to his friend.

"If Mr. Farivar is indeed the student “who got away” from Yale, his friend Mr. Heller says, any comparison to Mr. Hashemi would be bizarre. “If [Farivar] is who Shaw is referring to, then he is full of crap,” Mr. Heller wrote the Harvard Crimson. “Farivar was not some agent of a criminal regime like Rahmatullah Hashemi.”

For his part, Mr. Farivar says he feels pity for Mr. Hashemi. “He strikes me as either a terribly misguided person or a charlatan and con artist,” he told me. “What else can explain his almost overnight conversion to moderation? If he’s truly changed his stripes, and the world has one fewer extremist, we’ll all be better off. But I’m skeptical.”

Such skepticism seems warranted in light of the few public statements Mr. Hashemi has made since the Times broke the news of his presence at Yale. Mr. Hashemi told Tim Reid of the Times of London that he had done poorly in his class “Terrorism: Past, Present and Future,” something he attributed to his disgust with the textbooks: “They would say the Taliban were the same as al Qaeda.”

57

GMT, Germans have taken in turkeyish people in the 80s and eastern europeans in the 90s. They are no stragers to assimilation. There were problems and will be this time, too. Hopefully they are seasoned through previous experiences.

58

Well on TV that I saw a couple months ago regarding a right wing demonstration in Germany against immigrants or something similar and this Germany lady with 4 blonde girls were expressing concerned for her daughters and the immigrants.

59

@Iglooo West Germany had invited “guest workers” in the early 1960s because the economy was booming and there were not enough Germans to fill the open spots. These workers came from Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal and Turkey. While A LOT have assimilitated, some have not and there are entire enclaves of extremely religious Turks and Arabs in larger cities. East Germany had a lot of students from Cuba, Syria and other pro-communist countries. After the wall came down, Russian Jews and a few remaining Germans from Silesia/Poland took advantage of the new freedom and moved to Germany.

There are anti-Islamic or neo-fascist movements like PEGIDA in the Eastern part of the country. Newly built asylums or asylums under construction have been burnt down very recently. Germany is still very “feudal” in many ways and it is not easy to move for a German from the north to the south and vice versa. This is especially true for the smaller villages in the countryside. Germans do not use the mobility Americans have; they usually stay put in their village or city.

Integration will be extremely difficult and too many refugees in one place might lead to ghettos Paris-style with the radicalization you can see in France. Of course, the Syrians have to be helped but a huge influx in one place might lead to tremendous imbalances within a community.

60

Few, if any, countries can afford to absorb a large number of migrants within a short period, I think.

It is a touchy issue about how to help these people who want to get out from their homeland where it becomes “inhabitable” due to man-made or natural disaster.

It seems to me that, even when the dictator like Hussein was in power, people in that region has a relatively better life. Like it was said earlier on this thread: the road to hell has been paved with a lot of “gold” (i.e., well-intended efforts without any good outcome, or occasionally even worse outcome.)

Is there any cost-effective way to help these would-be migrants to stay put? (e.g., get rid of or lock up the “bad guys”?)