The Migrants and the Elites: Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10, 2015 — What a crisis Europe is in, with waves of migrants reaching its shores as the Arab world implodes.
Sweden’s Ugly Immigration Problem: Margaret Wente, Globe & Mail, Sept. 11, 2015 — In Europe, refugees from Syria and Iraq have been cramming the ferry-trains heading from Germany to Denmark.
The Boycott: Iceland’s Anti-Semitism Resurfaces Again: Manfred Gerstenfeld, CIJR, Sept. 24, 2015— Recent developments in Iceland fit well in the long history of that country’s anti-Semitism.
The Frying Pan and the Fire: Edward Rothstein, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 4, 2015 — Once, the Holocaust had an almost sacral quality: It was approached with fear and trembling as a cataclysm beyond comparison.
Israel’s 9/11 Memorial from Ground Zero Wreckage – A Must See!: United With Israel, Sept. 17, 2015
Driven Across Dark Seas and Hostile Lands: The Muslim Refugee Problem and Europe: Frederick Krantz, CIJR, Sept. 21, 2015
An Open Letter to Reykjavik, Iceland, On Its Eruption of Anti-Semitism: Abraham H. Miller, JNS, Sept. 18, 2015
One Morning in Poland: Marci Shore, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 11, 2015
Peggy Noonan
Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10, 2015
What a crisis Europe is in, with waves of migrants reaching its shores as the Arab world implodes. It is the biggest migration into Europe since the end of World War II and is shaping up to be its first great and sustained challenge of the 21st century. It may in fact shape that continent’s nature and history as surely as did World War I.
It is a humanitarian crisis. As Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations notes, it will not soon go away, for two reasons. First, the Mideast will not be peaceful anytime soon and may well become more turbulent. Second, “The more that Europe responds the more it will reinforce the supply of migrants. Europe is caught.” If it doesn’t respond with compassion and generosity it is wrong in humanitarian terms; if it does, more will come and the problem grows. “This is now part of the architecture,” says Mr. Haass.
Three hundred eighty-one thousand detected migrants have arrived so far this year, up from 216,000 in all of 2014. Almost 3,000 died on the journey or are missing. The symbol of their plight is the photo of the 3-year-old Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, who drowned along with his mother and 5-year-old brother when their boat capsized near a Turkish beach. Just as horrifying is what was found inside a Volvo refrigerated truck stranded on the shoulder of the A4 highway 30 miles from Vienna in late August. Inside were 71 bodies, including a 1½-year-old girl, all dead of suffocation. They’d been left there by human smugglers.
It is a catastrophe unfolding before our eyes, and efforts to deal with it have at least one echo in America, which we’ll examine further down. According to the U.N. refugee agency, 53% of the migrants are from Syria, 14% from Afghanistan, 7% from Eritrea, and 3% each from Pakistan, Nigeria, Iraq and Somalia. Seventy-two percent are men, only 13% women and 15% children. Not all are fleeing war. Some are fleeing poverty. Not all but the majority are Muslim.
The leaders of Europe have shown themselves unsure about what to do. It is a continent-wide crisis that began in 2011, as Tunisians fled to the Italian island of Lampedusa. The following year, sub-Saharan Africans who’d migrated to Libya made for Europe after Muammar Gadhafi’s fall. Since then the European response has largely been ad hoc and stopgap. European Union President Jean-Claude Juncker has proposed a “permanent relocation mechanism” with EU members taking greater shares of the refugees, but it is unclear how exactly it would work.
In many EU nations there will be powerful pushback. Like the crisis itself the pushback will build. Europe is in economic drift. As this newspaper has noted, even Germany is growing at only 1.6% a year. Welfare systems will be strained. Youth unemployment is already high. In Britain the crisis could contribute to a vote to leave the EU outright. There are fears, which the elites take lightly, that floods of displaced people will “alter the cultural balance of the country for ever,” as the columnist Melanie Phillips put it in the Times of London. The Gulf states have not offered a home to their Arab and Muslim cousins. Dutch right-wing leader Geert Wilders this week called the wave of migrants an “Islamic invasion” in parliamentary debate, “an invasion that threatens our prosperity, our security, our culture and identity.” A recent poll showed 54% of Dutch voters opposed to welcoming more than the roughly 2,000 refugees previously agreed to. Hungary is building a fence.
Reading the popular press of Europe you see the questions. Do we not have a right to control our borders? Isn’t the refugee wave a security threat? ISIS is nothing if not committed to its intentions. Why would they not be funneling jihadists onto those boats? Many things could be done to ease the crisis. States such as Jordan and Lebanon work hard to help refugees in neighboring countries and need help. Humanitarian relief is needed for the internally displaced. Go after the human smugglers, patrol the waters, take in those who are truly fleeing war and truly desire to become a peaceful part of their new, adoptive homes.
But here is a problem with Europe’s decision-makers, and it connects to decision-makers in America. Damning “the elites” is often a mindless, phony and manipulative game. Malice and delusion combine to produce the refrains: “Those fancy people in their Georgetown cocktail parties,” “Those left-wing poseurs in their apartments in Brussels.” This is social resentment parading as insight, envy posing as authenticity. But in this crisis talk of “the elites” is pertinent. The gap between those who run governments and those who are governed has now grown huge and portends nothing good.
Rules on immigration and refugees are made by safe people. These are the people who help run countries, who have nice homes in nice neighborhoods and are protected by their status. Those who live with the effects of immigration and asylum law are those who are less safe, who see a less beautiful face in it because they are daily confronted with a less beautiful reality—normal human roughness, human tensions. Decision-makers fear things like harsh words from the writers of editorials; normal human beings fear things like street crime. Decision-makers have the luxury of seeing life in the abstract. Normal people feel the implications of their decisions in the particular.
The decision-makers feel disdain for the anxieties of normal people, and ascribe them to small-minded bigotries, often religious and racial, and ignorant antagonisms. But normal people prize order because they can’t buy their way out of disorder…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
SWEDEN’S UGLY IMMIGRATION PROBLEM
Margaret Wente
Globe & Mail, Sept. 11, 2015
In Europe, refugees from Syria and Iraq have been cramming the ferry-trains heading from Germany to Denmark. But once in Denmark, many refused to get off. Where they really want to go is Sweden, where refugee policies are more generous. When the Danes said no, they hopped off the trains, and began heading toward the Swedish border by taxi, bus, and foot.
Sweden has the most welcoming asylum policies and most generous welfare programs in the European Union. One typical refugee, Natanael Haile, barely escaped drowning in the Mediterranean in 2013. But the folks back home in Eritrea don’t want to know about the perils of his journey. As he told The New York Times, they want to know about “his secondhand car, the government allowances he receives and his plans to find work as a welder once he finishes a two year language course.” As a registered refugee, he receives a monthly living allowance of more than $700 (U.S.).
Sweden’s generous immigration policies are essential to the image of a country that (like Canada) prides itself as a moral superpower. For the past 40 years, most of Sweden’s immigration has involved refugees and family reunification, so much so that the words “immigrant” and “refugee” are synonymous there (unlike in Canada). Sweden takes in more refugees per capita than any other European country, and immigrants – mainly from the Middle East and Africa – now make up about 16 per cent of the population. The main political parties, as well as the mainstream media, support the status quo. Questioning the consensus is regarded as xenophobic and hateful. Now all of Europe is being urged to be as generous as Sweden.
So how are things working out in the most immigration-friendly country on the planet? Not so well, says Tino Sanandaji. Mr. Sanandaji is himself an immigrant, a Kurdish-Swedish economist who was born in Iran and moved to Sweden when he was 10. He has a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago and specializes in immigration issues. This week I spoke with him by Skype. “There has been a lack of integration among non-European refugees,” he told me. Forty-eight per cent of immigrants of working age don’t work, he said. Even after 15 years in Sweden, their employment rates reach only about 60 per cent. Sweden has the biggest employment gap in Europe between natives and non-natives.
In Sweden, where equality is revered, inequality is now entrenched. Forty-two per cent of the long-term unemployed are immigrants, Mr. Sanandaji said. Fifty-eight per cent of welfare payments go to immigrants. Forty-five per cent of children with low test scores are immigrants. Immigrants on average earn less than 40 per cent of Swedes. The majority of people charged with murder, rape and robbery are either first- or second-generation immigrants. “Since the 1980s, Sweden has had the largest increase in inequality of any country in the OECD,” Mr. Sanandaji said. It’s not for lack of trying. Sweden is tops in Europe for its immigration efforts. Nor is it the newcomers’ fault. Sweden’s labour market is highly skills-intensive, and even low-skilled Swedes can’t get work. “So what chance is there for a 40-year-old woman from Africa?” Mr. Sandaji wondered.
Sweden’s fantasy is that if you socialize the children of immigrants and refugees correctly, they’ll grow up to be just like native Swedes. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Much of the second generation lives in nice Swedish welfare ghettos. The social strains – white flight, a general decline in trust – are growing worse. The immigrant-heavy city of Malmo, just across the bridge from Denmark, is an economic and social basket case. Sweden’s generosity costs a fortune, at a time when economic growth is stagnant. The country now spends about $4-billion a year on settling new refugees – up from $1-billion a few years ago, Mr. Sanandaji said. And they keep coming. Sweden automatically accepts unaccompanied minors. “We used to take in 500 unaccompanied minors a year,” he said. “This year we are expecting 12,000.”
Yet Sweden’s acute immigration problems scarcely feature in the mainstream media. Journalists see their mission as stopping racism, so they don’t report the bad news. Despite – or perhaps because of – this self-censorship, the gap between the opinion elites and the voters on immigration issues is now a chasm. According to a recent opinion poll, 58 per cent of Swedes believe there is too much immigration, Mr. Sanandaji noted. The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats party is now polling at between 20 per cent and 25 per cent.
Sweden is a cautionary tale for anyone who believes that Europe is capable of assimilating the hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants who are besieging the continent, or the millions more who are desperately poised to follow in their wake. The argument that these people are vital to boost the economy – that they will magically create economic growth and bail the Europeans out of their demographic decline – is a fantasy.
It’s really very simple, Mr. Sanandaji explained. You can’t combine open borders with a welfare state. “If you’re offering generous welfare benefits to every citizen, and anyone can come and use these benefits, then a very large number of people will try to do that. And it’s just mathematically impossible for a small country like Sweden to fund those benefits.” Things will get worse before they get better. As Judy Dempsey, a senior analyst at a Berlin think tank, told The Wall Street Journal, “Europe hasn’t seen anything yet in terms of the numbers or the backlash.”
Meanwhile, Sweden’s neighbour, Denmark, has cut the benefits for refugees in half, and has taken out ads in Lebanese newspapers warning would-be migrants to stay home. The Danes don’t want to be a moral superpower. They can’t afford it.
THE BOYCOTT: ICELAND’S ANTI-SEMITISM RESURFACES AGAIN
Manfred Gerstenfeld
CIJR, Sept. 24, 2015
Recent developments in Iceland fit well in the long history of that country’s anti-Semitism. Last week, the left wing majority on the Reykjavik municipal council decided on a boycott of all Israeli products. In view of the protests, the city’s mayor now wants to replace it with a boycott of settlement goods. There is more of the same. Every year, during the period of Lent before Easter, Icelanders get a daily dose of hymns full of hatred and derision for the Jews, broadcast on Iceland’s public radio station. These hymns were written in the seventeenth century by an Icelandic Christian priest, poet and inciter Hallgrimur Pétturson, many years before the first Jew arrived in Iceland. This ongoing tradition demonstrates how little Iceland has learned from the Holocaust.
In 2012, after I had drawn the attention of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to this hateful practice, Rabbi Marvin Hier and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, heads of the Center, wrote to Mr. Pall Magnusson, the General Director of Iceland’s Radio and TV. They mentioned that there were over fifty remarks about Jews in the poems, all negative. They also noted that it is considered a great honor in Iceland to be invited to read a hymn on the program. The many distinguished citizens who had accepted this distinction included a President of Iceland. The following are some examples of the many anti-Semitic slurs in these hymns: The Demand for Crucifixion//The Jewish leaders all decide//That Jesus must be crucified //The Prince of Life their prey must be//The murd'rer set at liberty…
At the time, the letter denouncing the hymn-reading practice had no result. With regard to the current boycott, however, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s travel advisory warning Jews not to visit Iceland and the angry reaction of Ronald Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress, has apparently made more of an impact. Regarding the travel advisory, Rabbi Cooper stated that “when the elected leaders of its main city pass an extreme anti-Israel and anti-Semitic law, we would caution any member of a Jewish community about traveling there.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center has also exposed Iceland’s anti-Semitism on another occasion, in the case of the Nazi war criminal Evald Mikson. At the end of the 1980s, Efraim Zuroff, Director of the Israel branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, tried to bring Mikson to trial for his involvement in the murder of Jews in his native Estonia. Mikson found a warm refuge in Iceland, where his sons played in the national soccer team. Zuroff’s justified appeals for justice against an accomplice to murder led to many Icelandic media attacks against Israel. Mikson himself died shortly after the Estonian government set up a commission to investigate his war crimes, over 10 years after Zuroff’s initial appeals. Only after Mikson’s death did the investigators find that he had indeed committed atrocities.
At that time, during a debate on the Mikson case in parliament, several Icelandic parliamentarians felt they had to comment on the Middle East and on Israel’s policies. One such was Olafur Grimsson, at that time leader of the left-wing People’s Alliance, who condemned Israeli attacks on southern Lebanese towns, and Israel’s “murder” of Hezbollah leader Abbas Musawi. Grimsson has been serving as the ongoing President of Iceland since 1996. Curiously, the First Lady of Iceland is a Jewish woman whom Grimsson married in 2003.
The current boycott of Israel was proposed by the Social Democrat Alliance. As part of the 2011 Icelandic government, they had already promised the Palestinians support for their bid for statehood at the next UN General Assembly. Ossur Skarphedinsson, the then Social Democrat Foreign Minister, is known for his frequent snubbing of Israel. During the first Gaza flotilla, some members of parliament suggested imposing sanctions on Israel, to the point of breaking off diplomatic relations. Iceland even refused to receive Minister Yuli Tamir, when she was sent to Europe during the Gaza “Cast Lead” war. Iceland’s 2005 decision to grant citizenship to former world chess champion Bobby Fischer constituted yet another shameful anti-Semitic Icelandic act. Fischer, a rabid anti-Semite of Jewish ancestry was detained in a Japanese prison at the time, and attempting to avoid deportation to the US.
Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson, an expert on the history of the Jews and anti-Semitism in Iceland, has written that several Icelandic members of the Waffen SS fought for Nazi Germany, and others served in concentration camps. He added that after the war, various former members of Iceland’s Nazi party quickly “attained high positions in society, including a couple of chiefs of police, a bank director and some doctors.”
Vilhjálmsson also describes Iceland’s 1938 deportation of an impoverished German Jewish refugee to Denmark. Icelandic authorities at the time even offered to cover all costs for his expulsion to Nazi Germany if Denmark didn’t want him. Other similar incidents became known in 1997, but did not make headlines in Iceland. In view of all this, one can only hope that even now the Icelandic government has dissociated itself from the boycott and after the boycott will probably be reduced the Wiesenthal Center will maintain its travel ban and will once again expose Iceland’s annual broadcasts of anti-Semitic hymns.
Manfred Gerstenfeld is a CIJR Academic Fellow
Edward Rothstein
Wall Street Journal, Sept. 4, 2015
Once, the Holocaust had an almost sacral quality: It was approached with fear and trembling as a cataclysm beyond comparison. Now the tendency is to think of it not as something distinctive but as something representative. What, after all, made these killings any more horrific than the tens of millions of others during World War II—on battlefields and in prison camps, in forests and over ditches, in bombed cities and wasted fields? How is the Holocaust different from other genocides? Was Hitler’s murder of six million Jews so different in kind from Stalin’s deliberate terror-famine in the Ukraine in 1932-33 that left three million dead?
Such questions lie in the background of the Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s remarkable “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” a book that extends his gripping, somber “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” (2010). In that volume’s account of purges, massacres, shootings, starvations, executions and incinerations in Germany, the Soviet Union and the contested lands in between, the Holocaust is but a subset of 14 million gratuitous yet calculated murders. In “Black Earth,” the Holocaust is the focus of attention, but we are never allowed to forget the surrounding charnel house. Mr. Snyder said that in “Bloodlands” he wanted to write a “transnational” history, taking a broad look at events from without rather than from within the world of a particular nation. “Black Earth” takes a similarly broad approach: He does not see the Holocaust as a “war against the Jews”—as the historian Lucy Dawidowicz called it—for which Hitler was prepared to sacrifice ordinary military strategy, but as an extreme example of Hitler’s wide-ranging racial obsessions.
One consequence of this approach is that the evil of the Holocaust comes to seem more organically connected to the excruciating barbarity of the bloodlands. It also alters—without eliminating—the nature of its singularity. These issues made some readers of “Bloodlands” uneasy because of a long tradition of Holocaust interpretation that, in its most vulgar form, denies either its extremity or its Jewish particularity. In the postwar Soviet Union, for example, no group, particularly not the Jews, merited special Soviet commemoration—not even at Babi Yar, the ravine outside Kiev where some 34,000 Jews had been lined up and shot by SS troops in 1941. The Soviets treated the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 as a rebellion by Communists rather than by imprisoned Jews, and they associated the Nazi death camps with the epic martyrdom of Soviets and Poles. And there were plenty of examples: a million residents of Leningrad starved to death during the Nazi siege, 3.1 million Soviet prisoners of war were shot or deliberately starved to death by the invading Germans.
A similar resistance to particularity took root in the West as the Holocaust made its way into school curricula, museum exhibitions and popular consciousness. The subject is now usually treated as a prelude to a general discussion of genocide. Broadly prescriptive lessons and homilies are proposed that will, supposedly, make another Holocaust unlikely, urging tolerance or more empathetic attitudes toward minorities. The more Holocaust education there has been, it seems, the more often the Holocaust is casually invoked in trite or meretricious comparisons.
Mr. Snyder avoids such pitfalls, and “Black Earth” is mesmerizing. It is not a conventional history. As he surveys what took place, Mr. Snyder highlights lesser known events in order to discover anomalies, phenomena that need exploration or explanation. He begins with a disturbingly vivid foray into Hitler’s mental world. He looks at the prewar attitudes toward Jews, including the eccentric approach of Poland, which was thinking, in the 1920s, of sending Jews to Madagascar and, in the 1930s, actively trained and supported Revisionist Zionist groups in the hope that they would lure Jews to a national home in Palestine. Then the Nazis took over, murdering some three million Polish Jews. In describing the era of these killings, Mr. Snyder is sometimes mordant, often shocked, always probing…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
Israel’s 9/11 Memorial from Ground Zero Wreckage – A Must See!: United With Israel, Sept. 17, 2015—The 9/11 Living Memorial Plaza commemorating the victims who died in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, is made partially from steel taken from the wreckage of the Twin Towers and is the only memorial outside the U.S. that includes the names of all who perished in the attacks.
Driven Across Dark Seas and Hostile Lands: The Muslim Refugee Problem and Europe: Frederick Krantz, CIJR, Sept. 21, 2015 —There are two key, related, and little-remarked dimensions of the current Middle Eastern migration crisis. These are, on the one hand, the almost complete economic and political collapse of the Muslim societies and states furnishing the millions of desperate refugees. The second dimension of the phenomenon is the immense strains the millions of Moslem refugees are putting on the European Union countries and the notion of a unified Europe and, indeed, on the much-vexed question of a ”European” identify itself.
An Open Letter to Reykjavik, Iceland, On Its Eruption of Anti-Semitism: Abraham H. Miller, JNS, Sept. 18, 2015 —Dear Reykjavik City Council members…You would think that your country, which routinely violates the international ban on commercial whaling—slaughtering 137 last year and turning its nose up at the very notion of endanger species—might not want to assume it has a “moral” role to play in something as long and complex as the Arab-Israeli conflict.
One Morning in Poland: Marci Shore, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 11, 2015 —Jedwabne is a small town in northeastern Poland. In September 1939, Hitler invaded the country, and Jedwabne came under German occupation—before being passed to Stalin a few weeks later and incorporated into Soviet Belarus.
