So, who are the Syrian refugees, anyway? We get a lot of visuals but they aren't helpful. The first image that most of us saw was this heartbreaking image of a drowned boy:
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| A horrifying fate |
Who wouldn't want to help prevent that? Once the Syrian refugees started to arrive, however, the images changed substantially:
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| So where are the women and children? |
These guys were waiting to board a boat bound for Athens. Not a child or woman in sight. Or is this image a more accurate depiction of the crisis?
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| Women and children galore |
That's a much more traditional scene. And what do you make of the following image?
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| Lemme get in on this selfie |
If you do a Google image search, all of these images come up on the first page or two, depending on the terms you use. And isn't that the point? How do you even know what's real?
Other people seem a lot more certain of what's happening than I am. Here's a typical social media meme, which has appeared at least 4 times on my feed in the past few days:
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| So there! |
That's a bit, ahem, categorical. On the other hand, from a right wing friend, I see this:
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| Clothes make the man |
We have more information than ever. And we have more propaganda than ever. Someone is lying. Do you know who it is? Do you really?
6 comments:
As is always the case in these dilemmas the truth is somewhere in the middle. It is likely the vast majority of refugees honestly want nothing more than chance to build their lives without fear of being randomly executed. And I'm sure that extreme Islamists are using this crisis as their opportunity to enter target countries like France. If I was a bad guy that's exactly what I would do. Personally I think those infiltrators are a very small sliver of the overall refugee population but hey, it doesn't take many to create an incident of horror as we all saw last week.
The real question is: is it right for Western governments to turn away all the refugees in order to prevent the entry of the radicals, whatever their numbers?
Perhaps the real question is this; given that we have plenty of native born criminals, why do we tolerate immigrant criminals? The most basic fact about refugees is that they are fleeing a country that is for various reasons incapable of supporting a database for background checks, no?
Hence we ought to do what we can to eliminate obvious risks before they come here, and scrutinize those who do come here carefully to avoid problems.
That said, it appears that six or more of the nine a-holes in Paris were citizens of France or Belgium, so it would seem obvious that we've got some things to do to deal with native born terrorists, too.
My soon to be son in law (a cop in Germany) tells me these are mostly young men, and very few women/kids/families. What to make of that, I'm not sure.
What I do know is that we don't have enough low skill jobs to support all the mojados as it is.
My thought is this. The West overwhelming the Middle East with its culture has caused problems. The Middle East overwhelming the West has also caused problems.
Multi-culturalism has something to be said for it. I've no doubt of it. But it is also a horrifically dangerous ideal. We used to think that if people only came in contact with freedom, with Western ideals, they would be converted. Well, maybe not.
I read this blog enough to know that you all pride yourselves on your lack of political correctness. But if you want to start throwing around blatantly racist terms, guess what? You are not politically being politically incorrect, you are being racist.
I read this blog enough to know that you all pride yourselves on your lack of political correctness. But if you want to start throwing around blatantly racist terms, guess what? You are not politically being politically incorrect, you are being racist.
I don't worry a lot about political correctness -- there's no "pride" involved either way. I also don't worry terribly much about anonymous commenters who feel they can ascribe motives to me that aren't there. I assume you object to Gino's post -- that's your right. He can speak for himself. I'm not going to delete his comment, for the same reason I don't delete your comments, but I will say this -- at least he signs his name to his comments. Calling someone a racist anonymously doesn't mark you as courageous or speaking truth to power.
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