I'm not out of touch enough to have missed this opinion. But that is not the same as saying that people should be sent back to war zones. We don't have borders with Syria.
But you are right that I don't know specifically what that Dutch politician actually demands other than closing the borders.
"In the region", you can choose whether to send them to:
1) Turkey, an increasingly-authoritarian regime which is already overflowing with millions of refugees, making money with the fanatics and holding mainstream cultural values that tend to despise people from Syria/Kurdistan/Iraq;
2) Lebanon, a country where refugees from other conflicts already account for over a third of the total population, and which is far from stable on its own (half-run by the unofficial Hezbollah militia)
3) Israel. They don't even want "their own" arabs...
4) Iraq, another war-torn country half-owned by the same petro-fanatics;
5) Iran, which is logistically very difficult (being on the other side of warzone Iraq) and, well, not great for people running from religious fanatics;
6) Jordan, another poor and unstable country already full of refugees from previous conflicts.
7) Saudi Arabia. They're the ones funding the fanatics. Enough said.
8) Egypt. Yet another dictator, vaguely more stable, as ruthless as Assad. They also have permanent Palestinian camps which have been there for decades and clearly don't want any more.
9) Palestine/Gaza or Palestine / West Bank. Let's not even go there.
Ok, let's go further then: Libya? Sorry, other war. Tunisia? Another wobbly government, and so close to Europe to make it look silly. Georgia/Armenia/Azerbaijan? Dictators, guerrillas... Yemen? Other war. Oman? Same guy has been in charge for 45 years. We can go on, but tbh, it's all like that. Countries in the region are either f*ed up, autocratic regimes, or are actively sponsoring the lunatics. Decent people have nowhere to go.
Right now, most refugees are in Turkey, Lebanon, Germany and Jordan (not counting the internally displaced). Lebanon and Jordan in particular are completely overwhelmed. What many people (such as the UK government) suggest is to help these countries cope by sending money and logistic support.
Many refugees understandably do not wish to spend the coming years in bleak refugee camps and want to leave the region. That is very understandable and in my opinion the world should agree on refugee quotas according to population size and economic strength. The world includes the United States of America that otherwise likes to make its presence felt in the Middle East.
Also, I'd like to point out that there's no Palestinian camps in Egypt that I know of but good on you seeing through all the BS that Sisi is just another ruthless and bloodthirsty dictator who is by the way a closeted Islamist who holds equally despicable fundamentalist views but he's good enough so far in hiding them under the veneer of reformist moderate leadership.
Armenia estimated 17,000
They prefer that such migrants should travel to Europe, who are naively taking those migrants in.
Meanwhile, people die.
And as for your Israel jab, they're better to the Palestinians than the Arab states in the area are. And none of the Israelis I've talked to seem to have inherently racist beliefs but many of the recently middle-eastern Arabs do. (About the Palestinians.)
Europe fully deserves the migrant crisis. It went into Middle East guns blazing, and expects to come out of it unscathed.
And help we must. We can't sit back and watch madmen kill millions, even if doing so would spite our idiot leaders (on all sides) who caused it in the first place.
I'm pretty sure the other 99.9% are hostages, and not half as committed to the bullshit as you think, except in stockholm-syndrome ways. Soon after they weren't being killed for not being fervent, they'd be as non-religious as we are.
Bush caused most of this current ISIS problem by lying about WMDs. At that point, we're the bad guys invading on a lie. It made us afraid of and hostile towards the Iraqis which caused the Abu Ghraib treatment, etc. He didn't make the terrorists but he provided them with their recruiting propaganda, made an ideal nest, and let them crawl in. It sucks, but we've got an uphill slog because we elected someone who was fine with murdering people on a lie.
No, it's not. I have no expertise in ME affairs, do you? Who is the expert? What country has successfully demonstrated they can "handle it better"?
> Bush ... lie.
Yeah, and people died. I get it. But the next guy was elected partially because he wanted to withdraw from Iraq, and we did. Power vacuum. So we go back in and then what happens when we elect someone who wants to withdraw?
I mostly agree with fineman, except that I think it's too late for backing secular resistance to have much of a point. Just like Iraq, we left them high and dry when they needed us, and so now the only chance of having any significant influence is a direct invasion, which nobody has much stomach for anymore.
I'd summarize as grow up already. The fingers of Islamist and totalitarian interference are already all over this conflict, and have been for decades. The West keeping out of it only guarantees that one or the other will win and any chance of secular democracy will lose.
"We" didn't do "nothing". Countries like France, Israel, US, Turkey and Saudi Arabia spent years destabilising Assad and funding those "opposition groups" that eventually started the civil war. Syria originally was a USSR satellite with ambitions of regional hegemony (they basically ruled Lebanon and deeply influenced Jordan), so they had to be beaten into submission. However, there was never a real plan to get involved on the ground, that was just a huge bluff; Assad and Putin saw right through it. "We" (and French elites above all) did way too much already, and it's high time we stopped.
> The fingers of Islamist and totalitarian interference are already all over this conflict
That's really rich. "Our" best ally in the region is an absolutist monarchy running an Islamist totalitarian regime, the US just sold them a new crapload of weapons... nobody gives a shit about that stuff. What "we" care about is that the "right" totalitarian mofo is in charge, like in Egypt. Everything else is theatre and propaganda.
The real solution is less weapons and more diplomacy. Get the interested parties in a room and throw away the key until they come up with a shared plan. The US/Russia agreement is a first step in that direction, next it's for Saudi, Turkey and Iran to work out an agreeable compromise and pull their weight in the right direction. Otherwise, until countries like Turkey and Saudi keep buying IS oil and selling them weapons, you can invade a thousand times and achieve nothing except increasing shareholder value in the defence sector.
Reminds me of that Adam Curtis documentary Bitter Lake[1]. I wonder if Oil Countries are the real reason these terrorist keep appearing again and again.
I bet the moment world gets rid of oil, is the day Islamic terrorist stop appearing.
A secular democracy requires some kind of enlightenment on the part of the people, and usually this enlightenment happens after a great sacrifice has been made (something on the level of a war of independence) or through the slow and steady movement towards universal suffrage by way of representation.
All that ends up happening when you give democracy to a population that is not ready for it are strongmen who vote themselves additional executive power through legislative hook or crook leading all the problems that a secular democracy is supposed to prevent.
Whether or not the West gets involved, one side will win or lose guaranteed. Trying to pick the least evil from the outside is an exercise in gambler's ruin.
At any rate, the 'secular' fighters are now more often called 'moderate' rebels. Hell, Al Queda (fighting in Syria as the Al-Nusra Front) is moderate compared to Daesh. Since 2012 they and other 'moderate' Islamist groups received funding and weapons from the US, UK, France, Israel, the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia. Many of the arms ended up in Daesh's hands anyway. One doesn't hear a lot about the, at one point much lauded, Free Syrian Army except that many in their ranks have defected to Daesh.
The stuff I mentioned above is as close to factual as it gets in this chaotic war. The information comes from so-called reliable media sources with supporting documents provided. This doesn't guarantee absolute truth of course.
It's interesting how almost every person has strong opinions about the clusterfuck unfolding in Syria/Iraq and the role Daesh plays in it, but very few of those people actually have enough trustworthy information to make an informed opinion. The fog of war and the spread of disinformation, and just plain old misinformation, is as relevant here as in any other war.
It doesn't help that Senator McCain advocated supplying Daesh with weapons to shoot down Russian fighter aircraft and even had his picture taken posing with Daesh. The US and its allies and lackeys have a rich history supporting and arming extremely vile regimes and insurgent groups when it serves their interests.
The West provided the fertile soil from which Daesh sprouted and now the chickens have come to roost. Big time.
In any type of rebellion, or any other organization for that matter, the views of the group will naturally change over time to be more in line with whatever the source of funding and resources wants them to be. Let a couple of years go by with the West providing essentially no support, and all of the support coming from the Gulf Arab states with a history of exporting extremism, and naturally any moderate groups and moderate elements in less moderate groups will wither and fade away, and the extremist elements will come to the front. The more time goes by, the harder it is to find any actual moderation to back.
Whatever moderate and secular-leaning elements there may have been at the beginning, they've long since withered and died, and there isn't much of anybody good left to back, aside from the Kurds. We have the Iranian-Russian aligned Assad regime, versus the ISIS extremists so out there that even Al-Quada is fighting them. I don't see much in the way of good options now, honestly.
It might have been different if we had backed groups heavily from the start and gotten that view-shifting effect working in our favor. Of course, it also might not have. And it's hard to fault the American people for not wanting to get deeply involved in another messy Middle-Eastern war. But if you care about spreading democracy and liberal western values, this is pretty much the worst thing to do.
But EU is IMO losing just as much. The borders are being redrawn between states, there is palpable tension between EU members(Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia). And weren't abolition of state borders and prevention of another Hitler the motivation behind EU? If so, its failing apart (not a syntax error, figure of speech).
> And weren't abolition of state borders and prevention of another Hitler the motivation behind EU?
That never was openly stated afaik but it would seem to be that the architects of the EU had as one of their main driving forces the fact that they wanted to re-structure the EU in such a way to avoid another war. The problem with their approach is that they did many things without sufficient buy-in of the residents and on top of that started out by setting up all kinds of irrational schemes inside the EU to funnel money to their pet special interests. If they could have waited a few decades with tricks like that it probably would have worked a lot better.
The major issue that I see with a really unified EU is that the divergence of cultures within the EU is enormous, much more so than say the Americas, where a strong federal government was the result of a large group of people uniting behind a single good cause. And even then - in spite of that much more homogeneous culture - they had to have it out in a civil war to beat the remainder into submission (and that war was a war of ideology as much as it was a war over money and power).
> If so, its failing apart (not a syntax error, figure of speech).
Unfortunately, yes, it looks that way. The Euro is quite fragile, the intra-communion tension at record high levels since the previous world-war.
Separatists may get emboldened by all this, the refugees are so much kindling on a fire that is already smoldering. It will take some really smart people with the long view to repair this.
In that bastion of critical thought called 'the Onion' they had a pretty good summary of such a solution:
http://www.theonion.com/article/northern-irish-serbs-hutus-g...
But as all seemingly extremists becoming prime ministers, he'll eventually learn to see a bit more of the bigger picture and cool down if he gets in office.
</humor>
This is a very scared, very scary person who is pushing every emotional button available with his policies and rhetoric who has the backing of a much too large segment of the country already. If you had told me 25 years ago that this would happen in NL I would not have believed you but I'm witnessing it. This whole thing started with the murder of a guy called Pim Fortuyn, the previous populist (who at least made some sense some of the time), he would have done some damage but not enough to seriously threaten the country. The segment woken up by the voice of Fortuyn was then handily co-opted by Wilders, who is now in an excellent position to put his play-book into action. It's super scary to watch friends and even relatives succumb to this idiots words and to hear his words being echoed by people dear to you.
It's like watching a re-run of Germany, ca. 1935, and then too people were saying 'Oh, it won't be that bad, he's just going to wake up when he actually has power' and we all know how that one ended.
Again, fortunately, NL is a crappy little country, but don't forget that Hitler came from Austria, not from Germany to begin with, who knows what his plans are. There is a large body of similar minded people in Belgium, and a much larger one still in France led by one Marine Le Pen. You can bet they're planning some sort of collaboration (too early to call it an anschluss) once they have managed to capture some power.
It's like watching the periscope of a submarine moving through a flotilla of merchant boats.
That's incredibly depressing. I only know of Geert Wilders from the court case (it was part of a law class), but I always assumed he was some uber-fringe politician who would never get anywhere near high office.
The world is entering a new period of radicalization and I'm very worried about the consequences.
But then again these are just polls. And then there needs to be a majority coalition.
But it's a far cry from the Netherlands I knew in the 90's.
Back on the topic: there are some really disturbing messages on social networks and in politician mouths regarding the refugees (who are called migrants here).
And yes, the coalition is pretty much our hope right now, but Wilders is ex VVD and SP might even join (they have a lot of similar things in their programs even though they're on opposite points of the political spectrum in nl, how that happened is another story). A 'cordon sanitaire' has been discussed but it is also already being broken.
The Netherlands that you knew in the 90's is dead, 25 years of divisive politics have seen to that.
Yes, it is absolutely deplorable how our 'chosen leaders' are positioning themselves and how they use the Paris attacks as a fig leaf cover to do things they nominally would have nothing to do with, except now that it is politically expedient.
Threatening to close your border to incoming foreigners is nothing like like closing your border, enslaving locals trying to flee you, and murdering them systematically.
And there's a difference between a leader being elected once on a wave of fear and the leader declaring themselves god's representative on earth - let the slaughter begin.
Ah, you must be a bit out of touch with recent developments in NL. We're soon to have elections and it looks like we'll have Geert Wilders for prime minister, his main motto is 'close the borders', the secondary one is 'the problem is the foreigners' and the third is 'let's throw all those refugees out'. And whether it is exactly 40% or not is immaterial, the numbers are scary.
http://gatesofvienna.net/2015/09/geert-wilders-party-is-the-...
That's 30% declared right there, another 10% undeclared would not surprise me at all.