European Politics

Travis The Dragon said:
So, do you feel that letting these Syrian refugees into this country will help to fix those reasons? And in what ways?
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Well, as Forostar indicated, they are different problems. One is a short term problem demanding instant resolution - the millions of displaced people in the Middle East. The other is how to convince people not to be terrorists.

I'd say NOT blowing people up is a good start for the latter, and maybe showing compassion helps them too.
 
I'm speaking for myself, about all I have said was

1) Makes sense to screen people coming in/knowing who is coming in ... obviously not 100% and bad guys will slip through (not just terrorists, but regular criminals), but a step worth taking
2) Looking really closely at people who go to the Middle East and come back and not let them back in if they were proven to be in terrorist training camps, etc
3) Act on intelligence quicker ... like all these arrests that come up after this activity should have happened earlier

What we get from Foro ... is "you are racists, etc, this is just like the Jews pre-WWII, migrants are great, ban hate speech, let them all in. Not all that helpful.
 
Your points are very broad ... spell it out, what do you want to do with them. Say Holland was transported to south eastern Europe, 100,000 migrants just showed up at the Dutch border, you know nothing about any of them. What do you do with them?
 
First of all, they don't show up in that number in one single day.

Whatever the number, try to find out about them. Register them. Collaborate with other countries, to distribute/transport them. What would you do? Block them all, from the first moment they arrive?

Check this out, I just saw an American on Dutch TV, Benjamin Barber, making interesting points on this matter. Here I wrote down some of it (there's more in the video here):

Terrorists kill a number of people. That's a horrendous tragedy. But much worse, it gets people inside their societies to turn against their own values.
Against liberty, against freedom of the press. They accept surveillance. They accept security. They say: get rid of them all, we don't care if they are innocent or guilty. That's just what the terrorists say. The terrorists say: We will kill anyone, innocent or guilty, everybody is guilty. And we are now saying: any Muslim is guilty, it doesn't matter who. So it's a very, very dangerous time when the two sides mirror one another and begin to look like one another.

Europe is an extraordinary experiment. After 400 years of war between Germany and France and Spain and Italy. After WW II, in effect, Europe said: No more war. Which means no more walls, no more borders, no more sovereignty. We need a single European community. And the last 60, 7o years have been an extraordinary experiment. But the experiment is at risk because if it gives in to the temptations now to go back to nationalism, back to borders, back to hostility, back to mono-cultural societies, then Europe loses and the world loses. So, Europe is a testcase and what happens in Europe may be a test for the world.
 
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Say they show up over a month or two, that seems reasonable to what Hungary was seeing, a massive influx of who knows who .. sick people, probably at least some bad (to very bad people), some taking advantage of the situation for benefits ... what percentages .. who knows, but you have to assume at least some.

After WW II, in effect, Europe said: No more war. Which means no more walls, no more borders, no more sovereignty. We need a single European community. And the last 60, 7o years have been an extraordinary experiment

More than half the continent did not share in that experiment until 1989, they were trapped behind plenty of walls intended to keep them in, not others out.
 
Forostar said:
First of all, they don't show up in that number in one single day.
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Just to pull you up on one tiny point here, Foro. It was widely reported back in September that Germany processed more than 10,000 refugees, who had come through Austria, over, like, one weekend or something; without checking, I'm pretty sure the headline figure was 20,000, as it was being compared, here in the UK, to how many Cameron was agreeing to take over the next five years. Now that is a lot. Europe, Germany aside, was not prepared for this; whether they should have been is another matter.

I would, as bearfan comments on, also like to throw out to you whether you think European citizens are on board with the "no more walls, no more borders, no more sovereignty. We need a single European community" vision? I have a feeling quite a lot aren't.
 
CriedWhenBrucieLeft said:
Just to pull you up on one tiny point here, Foro. It was widely reported back in September that Germany processed more than 10,000 refugees, who had come through Austria, over, like, one weekend or something; without checking, I'm pretty sure the headline figure was 20,000, as it was being compared, here in the UK, to how many Cameron was agreeing to take over the next five years. Now that is a lot. Europe, Germany aside, was not prepared for this; whether they should have been is another matter.
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It's a lot indeed (but not 100,000). Now, controls are (getting) stricter, or borders are closed entirely in some nations.
CriedWhenBrucieLeft said:
I would, as bearfan comments on, also like to throw out to you whether you think European citizens are on board with the "no more walls, no more borders, no more sovereignty. We need a single European community" vision? I have a feeling there isn't.
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There was. It was the vision at the start of the "EU". It has changed for a lot of people. We're going downhill again.
 
Okay. Point is, I don't think this is necessary to solve the humanitarian crisis Europe & the Middle East is currently facing. You can have borders, (even walls if you like), & sovereignty --& still have it in your heart to show some humanity, compassion & take in a few more refugees than the likes of the UK & France are doing. Ironically, all of the first lot of Syrian refugees that the UK took were flown to Glasgow!

(I said ten thousand btw. Germany is predicted to take 800,000 this year.)
 
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34131911

Vast numbers of migrants have made their way across the Mediterranean to Europe in 2015, sparking a crisis as countries struggle to cope with the influx, and creating division in the EU over how best to deal with resettling people.

How many people are coming?
More than 750,000 migrants are estimated to have arrived by sea so far this year, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), but exact numbers are unclear as some may have passed through borders undetected.

One way to measure where migrants have ended up is through asylum applications. Although not all of those arriving claim asylum, over 700,000 have done so, according to the EU statistics agency, Eurostat.

Germany continues to be the most popular destination for migrants arriving in Europe. It has received the highest number of new asylum applications, with more than 331,000 by the end of October.

Hungary has moved into second place, as more migrants have tried to make the journey overland through Greece and the Western Balkans. It had 143,070 applications by the end of August.

_86549143_europe_migrant_numbers_oct2015_624.png
 
Well, in case you were wondering what's happening here in Bohemia (and I wouldn't blame you if you didn't)... During the celebration of the Velvet revolution the Czech president has had a somewhat... controversial speech regarding the immigrants. During which he was on stage with some extreme-right people. One of these people is known to have said all Muslims should be ground into bone meal and the people who disagree with that should have their citizenship rights suspended. (I am not making this up)

The Czech prime minister answered with a slight criticism, like that the president is a populist, that he seems to be siding with extremist groups and that this was a misstep of sorts.

In reciprocation, the speaker of the president then excluded the prime minister from the Czech nation.

Well, that escalated quickly. Seriously, guys, here it's as crazy as it gets. :D

(by the way, regarding the president - this is far from being his first faux pas; in fact, so far it seems he's determined to offend as many people as possible - including jokingly yelling Allahu akbar into a news camera when two of our citizens have been abducted in Pakistan or wherever - and he seems dead set on breaking pretty much every constitutional rule there ever was. Unfortunately, it's our first directly elected president. Sort of tells you something about the people here. :innocent: )
 
Wars have been started for less. And neither Putin nor Erdogan are the most reasonable people out there.
 
Russia has been violating Turkish airspace for a while now. Turkey came very close to shooting down a Russian plane before. I think it was Kerry that came out and said "Had Turkey shot down the plane, it would have been justified." after the incident. So not surprised at all.
 
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