Skip to main content

Europe's missing honesty, moral indifference and shame



Almost no day passes without hearing of the death of people, fleeing Libya and other countries in the region, attempting to cross the Mediterranean to mainly Italy.    And the European response to this ongoing tragedy?  Shamefully little!   There are estimates of some 30,000 people perishing this year if the present tide continues. 

 "When you hear on the news that “about 400 migrants are feared to have drowned when their boat capsized”, is there not something that jars? Of course there is. It is the hypocrisy wrapped up in the word “feared”. The response of many people listening, I would suspect, is instinctive horror, but laced with indifference. There is certainly no rush to offer resettlement.

The prevailing view seems to be that this new generation of boat people has calculated the risk, and it actually seems not a bad risk. So far this year, 10,000 people have arrived in Italy; 900 are believed to have died. So someone who embarks on a boat, however leaky the hull, however stormy the sea, would seem to have a 90 per cent chance of arriving.
 
Amnesty International says that deaths have risen 15-fold compared with this time last year, and blame this on the ending of the EU-funded operation Mare Nostrum. But the odds still look good. So long as the promised lands of Europe lie across the water, they will come – and wouldn’t you if you were in their place?

There is, of course, an element of poetic justice in the present exodus to Europe. We – or to be more precise, the British and the French – managed to mess up Libya even more than it was messed up before, by virtue of our well-meant, but miscalculated, intervention. If more Libyans now want to leave their country, and if its borders, both land and sea, are now so poorly guarded that sub-Saharan Africans take that escape route to Europe en masse, who are we to complain? Do we not have an obligation? You could blame “us” too, for the Iraqis, and Afghans, and Syrians attempting to make the journey by whatever route.

And beyond that, there is the more general moral argument that a human life is a human life. Europeans are rich by any standards. We can well afford to help those less fortunate, so why don’t we just get on and do it?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...
6 comments
Read more