I just want to get this straight: we cannot help Syrian refugees, many of whom are fleeing from ISIS, because of the ISIS attack on Paris that was carried out by French and Belgian nationals?
Well, who knew a horrifying mass murder thanks to a terror attack in a major world city would lead to such bizarre responses? If only we had some precedent to warn us.
Apparently, to follow the rantings of right-wing tabloids and politicians right across the Western world — from US Republican governors to renowned global security expert Pauline Hanson — because of the victims of ISIS terror, we cannot help the victims of ISIS terror.
Why those so terrorised by ISIS, such as Kurds like Aylan Kurdi and his family, that they would imperil their own lives to escape them would suddenly, once safe, decide to actually join ISIS is a psychological mystery that remains unexplained. Presumably, by the same logic, they should pre-emptively lock up families of the victims of ISIS in Paris before they start roaming the streets shouting “Allahu Akbar” and beheading strangers.
The attacks on Paris indicate a well-organised and resourced terror group. So basically, we are being asked to imagine that, to infiltrate Europe, ISIS thinks the simplest, most efficient way in is to pay large amounts of money to people smugglers to make the dangerous and often deadly journey in overcrowded boats to Greece.
There, they'll join tens of thousands of others crammed into camps in an austerity-devastated nation without the resources to cope and without knowing when, if ever, they might secure resettlement.
Perhaps they might decide to join other desperate people in defying riot police and tear gas in long marches into Hungary, where they will face an equally dire and uncertain future but might, if they are part of a lucky minority, eventually get resettled somewhere else in Europe after an indefinite period of time.
You might imagine an ISIS committee meeting where a jihadi raises his hand and says, “Hang on, wouldn't it be simpler just to buy a fake passport and get on a plane?”, heads quite literally rolling over the failure to realise this before.
It seems that thanks to ISIS all Muslims are now suspect in the West. Slovakia is going so far as to monitor every single Muslim and, in Australia, Senator Jacquie Lambie is calling for Grand Mufti Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohamed to be fitted with a monitoring bracelet.
Lambie made the call on the grounds the grand mufti had not done enough to condemn the Paris terror attacks. Sure, he issued repeated statements condemning the Paris attacks, but what about all the time he spends not condemning the Paris attacks?
A simple investigation would surely prove that, since the November 13 atrocity, the grand mufti has spent vastly more time not condemning ISIS than he has condemning the fanatics. We surely have a right to know what the most senior Muslim leader in this country is up to all those hours in the day he is not expressing his horror at ISIS atrocities and insisting it has nothing in common with Islam.
The Daily Telegraph, for its part, decided to put the grand mufti on its cover depicted as a monkey, because what good is the worst terrorist atrocity in Europe in more than a decade if you can't turn the racism up to 11?
Not to be left out, Donald Trump, seeking to become US Republican presidential candidate, suggested all Muslism in the US should be made to wear some form of indentification, which just goes to show how lacking in original ideas modern day racists truly are. Seriously, Donald, that is so 1930s Germany.
Ultimately, such anti-Muslim racism pales into insignificance when compared to ISIS's hatred of the vast majority of Muslims. ISIS's approach to Muslims, after all, is very simple: “Join us or die”.
And in Iraq and Syria, they've been putting this into practice — with measures like beheadings and crucifixions. Sorry, Western Islamophobes, but ISIS hate Muslims on a scale that shames your petty bigotry.
The racist responses make no logical sense until you realise they are not meant to make sense. The horror in Paris is just the latest excuse for hating “them”.
You are not meant to think “gee what a wise policy for tackling to complex challenges of posed by the threat of terrorist attacks”. When racists say absurd things like “we are concerned that terrorists might be hiding among those fleeing terrorists”, they actually just mean: “Fuck off, we're full!”
The mindnumbing rantings of Hanson or Lambie mean nothing more sophisticated than “We hate your kind and we don't want you here”.
That it is dressed up in concern about “protecting people” is particularly sickening when you consider that, like the ignorant prejudice against Jewish people in the 1930s that led to Western governments refusing asylum to Jews fleeing Nazism, such racist views actually condemn large numbers of people to death.
***
There is no question that the Paris attacks have whipped up a lot of extremism, but surely none is more dangerously radical than that by British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has suggested more war is not the wisest response.
The British media went into meltdown at the refusal of the leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, until recently chair of Stop the War Coalition, to back the war drive. A series of Labour MPs lined up to criticise their leader and back Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron's call for British air strikes on Syria.
The leftist Corbyn has clearly gone too far for these more moderate MPs. They may well have backed the war on Iraq that killed more than 600,000 people and created the bloody and chaotic conditions in which ISIS arose, but they draw the line at their leader's refusal to support raining down more death on a region almost entirely destroyed by war.
The Iraq war may well have proved a mistake — and let's be fair, we all occasionally make one — but not backing more slaughter in Syria is a crime these labour MPs will simply not be party to. You have to draw the line somewhere.
And yet bizarrely, despite Corbyn's suggestion that French air strikes on ISIS targets in Syria that killed hundreds of civilians was not the most constructive response to terror, the latest polling shows Corbyn is more popular than Cameron, with the highest net satisfaction ratings of all Britain's main party leaders in a November 19 Ipsos Mori poll.
Of course, it takes more than having a leader less hated than Cameron to win an election, and Labour still trail the Conservatives. But the result is grounds for concern for anyone who wants the British state to continue its centuries-long proud tradition of killing the natives.
So thank god, as the talking heads of Britain's political class never tire of saying, Jeremy Corbyn is unelectable or else Britain might end up with a prime minister so extreme, he refuses to bomb a single child. We can only hope it never comes to that, or else the terrorists win.
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