Re: "Thousands are sailing ...
No nation is least conflicted by and least concerned with the consequences of its endless political and military interference in the Middle East and, notably, the causes of the current Syrian exodus than the US.
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me".
Yeah, right, and the US has magnanimously agreed to take a derisory 6,000 refugees from the mess the US created, albeit created by the US as part of the, to date, end process of Western interference in the Middle East during and since WWI, the Balfour Declaration, incomprehensible and primarily US support for the rabid Zionists in Israel, not to mention support for the rabid likes of Pahlavi and Saddam, and other idiocies guaranteed only to inflame the primitive religious and other conflicts and values of that despotic medieval and frequently much more primitive region.
At least the US is taking some refugees, which is more than Saudi Arabia and the other Arab / Muslim states around Syria are doing for their Arab / Muslim mates, some of whom have the misfortune to be the wrong brand of Muslim to make them worth saving.
If I was a Muslim anywhere in the Middle East or Central Asia and given a choice between being killed by my own corrupt regime or being denied succour by another corrupt Muslim regime which despises and will oppress if not kill me because I'm the wrong brand of Islam, I'd want to go to Europe too. Same for various minorities such as Christians.
And, having some understanding of these matters from an interesting childhood, I'd grab safety from fear and violence the first time I found it. I wouldn't
(and didn't) demand that I be moved to better quarters than the ones I first landed in.
Meanwhile, we have people who routinely leave Central Asia or the Middle East, go through various countries with similar cultural and religious systems on their way to Western Europe where they board aeroplanes to fly in the opposite direction to their escape route so they can land in Indonesia where, as with the previous 20 to 30 countries they've been through, they don't claim asylum. Instead, they choose to pay people smugglers to try to bring them to Australia.
This, as with the Syrians' demands to go to Germany, doesn't strike me as desperate people grateful to be anywhere they're safe but people choosing a destination because it suits their aspirations. Notably much better social security and other benefits than they'd get in, say, anywhere much east of Germany and everywhere they'd land in the Middle East, even with their co-religionists of supposed great mercy.
Perfectly understandable desire to get the best life you can, but after you've passed the first safe country in which you fail to claim asylum you're not a refugee from a well founded fear of persecution but just someone trying to beat the system to get to your preferred destination, and in so doing displacing more deserving cases languishing in refugee camps all over the world for years and often decades.
It's only the people with more money than the unfortunates languishing in camps who can embark on these migrations. It offends me that, as with most of life, it's the bastards with money who can push ahead of those without it.
Anyway, the solution to the refugee problem isn't admitting more refugees to Western nations. It's stopping the circumstances which drive them out of their countries, which usually involve the West (a) creating those circumstances or (b) failing to stop those circumstances.
The solution to the Syrian exodus is not to stuff around on the edges of ISIL in Syria but to get rid of Assad. Instead, we're going to expand our ultimately indecisive air strikes to ISIL in Syria, where every mission we fly merely aids Assad's war on his own people. End result: more Syrian refugees; ISIL not defeated as no ground troops put in; ISIL gets more attractive to lunatics in the West; and another massive own goal!
..
A rational army would run away.
Montesquieu
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