Thursday, March 28, 2024
Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Frederick Krantz: DRIVEN ACROSS DARK SEAS AND HOSTILE LANDS: THE MUSLIM REFUGEE PROBLEM & EUROPE

 

 

 

 

There are two key, related, and little-remarked dimensions of the current Middle Eastern migration crisis.  On the one hand, the almost complete economic and political collapse of the Muslim societies and states furnishing the millions of desperate refugees; on the other, the identity of a problematic “Europe” is threatened by the immense strains of dealing with hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants. Both Arab-Muslim and European-Christian identities are, simultaneously, being called into question.  

 

The migrants are coming above all from a disintegrating Syria, but also from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Eritrea, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and other Muslim countries. Millions of refugees are in under-funded camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, and hundreds of thousands of others fleeing Muslim failed states are risking their lives to reach Europe. For the latter (generally people with more money than the refugee camp residents) their first stops after Turkey are in southern Europe (Greece, Italy), and thence to Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia and Hungary en route to the promised lands of Germany, Sweden, and Austria. (Another route winds from Libya to Italy, France, and Spain, and thence to Belgium, the Netherlands and (via Calais) to Great Britain.)

 

These desperate people—almost 440,000 so far this year, according to the UN, twice last year’s number and growing monthly—are largely young adult males, but also include whole families and young couples with infants They pay criminal smugglers to cross treacherous waters from Turkey and North Africa to reach Greek, Italian, and French ports, on flimsy boats and inflatable dinghies, often capsizing before reaching safety (almost 3,000 have died already this year). Western consciences, long dormant in regard to the refugees—in Syria, the civil war and its refugee tide is, after all, now in its fifth year–have for the moment been touched by the recent, tragic pictures of Ayan Kurdi, the three-year-old Kurdish child who drowned off Turkey with his five-year-old brother and mother. 

 

The European Union states, wholly unprepared for the onslaught and without a common policy or enforcement mechanism, are overwhelmed. UN refugee funding this year is only 37% of the estimated $4.5 billion needed; its World Food Program is 63% underfunded, and available monies for Syrian relief are only 43% of requirement; the World Health Organization stands at only 27% of need. These figures are somewhat offset by Germany, which has said it would budget $4.5 billion in 2015, and by the EU, which is asking member-states to allocate $1.1 billion for 160,000 refugees.  Even so, needs are immense and increasing, and total available funds are scarce. 

 

Already concerned with ever- growing and only partially assimilated domestic Muslim populations, all European states save for Germany and Sweden have increasingly resisted taking in additional tens of thousands of migrants. (A recent emergency European Union conference, called by Angela Merkel, to spread responsibility around by assigning shared quotas to all EU states, failed initially over Hungarian-led eastern European resistance; a subsequent meeting affirmed the quotas but is still being opposed by the east European states, with old Balkan War rivals Croatia and Serbia once again almost at sword’s point over border-access issues.)

 

Remarkably, Germany, the major exception, initially announced it would admit over 800,000 migrants this year alone (1% of its population). Berlin’s motives are variously attributed: to an inherited, compensatory guilt over the Nazi period; to a sense, as Europe’s most powerful state, of economic and political noblesse oblige; and to an aging, less-than-replacement rate population’s desperate need for young skilled and semi-skilled labor.

 

Indeed, Germany’s readiness to violate the EU’s “Dublin regulations” for the orderly processing of refugee claims (registration, processing, and internment in the first country of refuge) was denounced by Prime Minister Orban of Hungary. Quickly putting up razor-wire fences to block access to the tens of thousands of migrants, even as he pronounced the need to preserve Hungary’s (and Europe’s) “Christian heritage” from being swamped by the Muslim tidal-wave, Orban blamed Berlin’s open-door policy for creating the crisis in the first place.)

 

While the total world refugee population has been variously estimated at between 21 and 37 million, Europe currently is looking at a potential flow of several million predominantly Muslim people annually. Currently, Syrian refugees constitute the lion’s share, 51%, with Afghans second at 15%, followed by Eritreans, Iraqis and others; many (including Balkan migrants) now claim to be Syrians in order to get preferential treatment. When tens of thousands piled up in and around Budapest, trying to transit Hungary to get to Austria, the conservative-nationalist regime there built its razor-wire walls to shut off the flow into its territory. (Now Croatia, which initially announced it would allow transit, connecting the flow to Slovenia and hence to northern Europe, has also reneged and closed its borders, creating a crisis in the formerly “borderless” (Schengen Agreement) European Union.                  

 

Some years ago French-Jewish scholar Bat Ye’or wrote a study of Muslim immigration to France and Europe called "Eurabia". She argued that a kind of deal, explicit and implicit, between Western states and Arab regimes—acceptance of large-scale Muslim immigration in Europe in return for oil sales and Western investment in the Middle East states—would change the face of the Old Continent. The result would be increasingly culturally mixed, and increasingly antisemitic and anti-Israel, European societies.

  

That vision has largely been realized, and in some ways even Bat Ye’or probably could not have envisioned. Who could have foreseen the total failure of the so-called “Arab Spring”, and the terrible ensuing, and ongoing, civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Somalia (not to mention conflicts in Nigeria [Boko Haram], Mali, Kenya, Algeria, and so on)? And how have predicted the further destabilizing impacts of the American pull-out from the region (engineered by Obama, Kerry and Hillary Clinton),  concretely sealed by the recent nuclear “deal” with terrorist-supporting Iran.

 

And now the crumbing Syrian situation  has been further destabilized by the enhanced Russian and Iranian military intervention in support of Assad (the recent introduction of Russian jet fighters, tanks, as well as Russian, Iraqi Shi’ite, and Iranian troops).  And Iran’s already deep intervention in Syria (using Lebanese Hezbollah and Iraqi Shi’ite proxies) is now replicated in Yemen, where the Iranian-backed Houthis are battling Saudi-supported Sunni forces.

 

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What is truly remarkable in all this, and yet rarely remarked upon, is the evident attraction of Western secular (and formally/formerly Christian) Europe to the Muslim-world migrants and refugees. It is largely the relatively educated and fairly comfortable Syrian and other middle-class migrants, who have the money for the travel, food, illegal smugglers, and the cellphones (which keep them in touch with those who have gone ahead and those left behind) enabling them to make the long and difficult journey. (It is the poorer Syrians—and Kurds, Yazidis, and others–pushed out by or fleeing from civil war and chaos, from ISIS, al-Nusra Front, the Taliban and the Shabab, who remain in the squalid  and under-funded refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey (2½ million in Turkey alone).

 

 And despite shared Muslim religious, and linguistic, identity, they are—as has long been the case with Palestinian refugees in Arab lands—-excluded by their Arab “host” countries from education, job training, and permanent citizen status. Nor have the wealthiest, and most sparsely inhabited, Arab states—Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (let alone Pakistan or Indonesia)—yet to accept a single Syrian or other refugee. (Recent pictures of over 100,000 large air-conditioned tents near Mecca, empty save for the few days of the hajj pilgrimage each year, have underlined this brutal Arab lack of concern, as has the patently self-serving and hypocritical Saudi offer, while ignoring the refugees, to build thousands of mosques in Europe for them.)

 

 The size and implications of this modern version of the late classical Voelkerwanderungen, the large-scale movement of whole Germanic tribes across Europe, east to west–to which, it should be recalled, Rome fell–are staggering. There is no way contemporary Europe, either in its western, let alone its less developed eastern, incarnations, can either absorb the unending migration, or enforce a general, shared and exclusionary immigration policy.

 

Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Slovenia are closing their borders; Denmark’s and Poland’s are already shut; xenophobic anti-immigrant riots have broken out in Finland. Britain (where a vote on leaving the EU is coming) and France are resisting, and Chancellor Merkel’s own Christian Democratic party, faced with growing opposition within and without, is closing the open doors of her earlier, high-mindedly moral, policy (meanwhile, here formerly sky-high popularity rating, once over 70%, has now fallen by twenty points.)

 

Europe’s assimilation record insofar as earlier Muslim immigrants are concerned is not good.  North African, Turkish, and African immigration, though smaller in annual scale, totalled over time hundreds of thousands. Well before the current Muslim wave, it engendered rising national opposition and, increasingly, restrictive legislation. Further, much of the marked rise in recent years of European antisemitic incidents, suburban violence and murder issues from Islamist immigrants and radicalized European-born Muslim youth (e.g., the Paris banlieu riots and car-burnings, French and Belgian synagogue attacks, the Charlie Hebdo and the Supermarché Kasher murders, to the killing of an anti-Islamist film-maker in Holland, the beheading of a British soldier in London, and the recent Swedish synagogue killing.)  

 

The ongoing migration crisis has revealed deep cracks in European “unity” and cultural identity. And they are far more threatening than Greece’s potential bankruptcy and threatened turn from the euro to the drachma, If it is prolonged, and without a clear resolution, it may well shatter, politically as well as culturally, the already-fragile European Union.  

 

And even as the migration waves its engenders call the post- or trans-national identity of “Europe” into question, the Arab states’ collapse itself means the end of the “Middle East as we have known it since the end of World War One. The “national” post-Ottoman Empire political constructs (“Iraq”, “Syria”; perhaps “Lebanon” and even “Jordan”) were imposed by the West European powers in and after the early twentieth century (the Sykes-Picot treaty, 1916; San Remo Conference, 1920; League of Nations 1922). They now are crumbling—but what will replace them? Al-Baghdadi’s blood-soaked “trans-national” Islamic Caliphate? a reversion to semi-anarchical local-regional tribal sheikhdoms? or an unending Hobbesian regional-religious  bellum omnium contra omnes?

 

As long as these failing Muslim states are wracked by bloody civil and confessional war–and no end is yet in sight–the desperate migrants, will be driven across dark seas and hostile lands, like a whirling crowd of lost souls out of Dante’s Inferno. And they will, ironically, seek their future in an already precariously balanced, once-Christian Europe. Where will they go, who will accept them, and with what consequences, for their former homelands and for fEurope? And when, and how, will it end?

 

(Professor Frederick Krantz is Director of

the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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