Humanitarian Jihad
by Nidra Poller (October 2015)
[This is an excerpt from the last chapter of The Black Flag of Jihad stalks la République, scheduled for release on December 10th]
After the Arab Spring the September 2015 refugee crisis. Once again our media and allied opinion-makers dance to the beat of the Islamic street. Moved to ecstasy by compact masses of Muslim men leavened with a sprinkling of women and children trampling the ground we stand on, they incite the citizens of Europe and beyond to abject surrender in humanitarian guise.
The photo of a child victim triggered a massive onslaught on the West. The doll-like body of Aylan Shenu (a.k.a. Al Kurdi), face down at the water’s edge looking like a peaceful toddler sleeping the dreams of innocence, has produced the al Dura effect: a white flash of emotion, hasty judgment, swift punishment of the guilty, total impunity for the aggrieved party.
Why in fact was this child washed up on the beach? His parents embarked with their two boys on troubled seas in an overloaded inflated boat that would supposedly carry them from the Turkish beach of Bodrum to the Greek island of Kos and from there to A New Life. The father survived, his wife and two sons drowned.
Even as the Finnish prime minister offered his summer home to two families (how would they be chosen out of the hundreds of thousands marching as to war?) and a French woman created a free-of-charge “Airbnb” to lodge all comers, Europe was beating its breast, covering its head with ashes, and accusing itself of heartless indifference to the plight of the victims. First identified as migrants to avoid the shameful accuracy of “illegal immigrants,” the masses arriving by land, sea, and air were anointed as refugees and the default emotion was uncritical compassion. No, it was more like infatuation, adoration…swooning submission.
At least that is how mass media framed the story in Phase One. Government officials, with notable exceptions, were tearing their hearts out of their breast pockets to demonstrate compassion. It will take time to determine the degree of sincerity on each level of their discourse and action—follow-the-media emotion, desperate EU attempts to impose quotas for resettlement of asylum seekers, promises that economic migrants ineligible for asylum would be deported, and the frantic restoration of border controls within the Schengen free-circulation region and on its outer frontiers. On intellectual territory, the slightest deviation from the party line by analysts, specialists, and philosophers provoked a virtual lynch mob.
Day after day the refugee crisis dominated the news stream. Zapping from one channel to another, one online media to the next, we were faced with the irresistible flow of refugees and the ongoing lethal narrative of their inalienable right to come, to see, and to conquer the good life. Excited journalists, some of whom had starred in the Arab Spring show, camped in the Munich train station, ran through Serbian fields, pushed up against Hungary’s security barrier, crammed into trains and buses, shouted with the mob, cuddled wide-eyed babies, filling the screen with outpourings that drowned rational thought in the capsized dinghy of an orchestrated craze.
And yet there has been no popular refugee-welcome enthusiasm in France. Hopes of rousing another Je Suis Charlie movement fell flat. An estimated 8,000 people gathered one evening at Place de la République, there was at least one “Je Suis Syrien” sign, a solidarity concert attracted a few hundred in the City Hall square, nothing to compare with Germany’s open arms. The pernicious effect of the operation is to be found elsewhere, in a sort of quiet resignation to the violation of the basic attributes of sovereignty. The current unprecedented stampede is simplistically equated with previous waves of immigration, deliberately or unwittingly ignoring the difference in scope, context, attitude, and circumstances. One commentator compared it to the “immigration” of pieds noirs from the Maghreb. Never mind that the pieds noirs were French, forced to flee a newly independent Algeria, and the Maghrebi Jews that fled with them were not only French but also indigenous to the region where they had settled long before the Muslim conquest.
Why is this stampede into Europe different from all previous immigrations?
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now available in English and Al Dura: long range ballistic myth is available in paperback and on Kindle.
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