Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Attitudes Within the Refugee Crisis

All Episodes

Previous Next

Dec. 27, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

28:03

Attitudes Within the Refugee Crisis

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	So I know I've been really hammering this topic quite hard recently, but I've just been saving all this stuff up for ages, and so I really wanted to go through it.
	And I'm going to do a sort of more relaxed and informal video on this part, because I think it does deserve having a little more thought and contemplation put into it as we go through what I've got here.
	The migrant crisis has been happening for most of 2015, and in October, it was becoming, as this Reuters article says, a logistical nightmare.
	In October, the German government was still saying that they were expecting a record of 800,000 migrants into Europe that year, and more than 200,000 had arrived in September alone, which, as you can imagine, is quite a terrifying number.
	I mean, that is a huge number of people to deal with.
	And then the government's true estimate was leaked, that they expected up to 1.5 million migrants to arrive in Europe in 2015, and it's just really hard to envisage the sheer scale of these numbers.
	And that viral film that went around with Open Gates, it did quite a good job of capturing it, but what they were showing you in those clips were probably no more than 20 or 30,000 people.
	The German authorities expected 920,000 new asylum seekers to arrive in the country between October and December alone, according to their previously classified figures that were leaked.
	And at the beginning of December, the number of migrants entering the EU went past a million people.
	One of the more difficult things about researching this video was trying to establish the ethnic breakdown of the migrants.
	Now, it wasn't hard to find the total.
	Apparently, there's 4.2 million registered in various countries around the Middle East and in Europe.
	But finding out how many of them actually come from Syria is a very difficult job.
	Apparently, around a third of the new arrivals had come without a passport, and some could not explain where they were from, and others didn't want to.
	And this source estimates that almost a third of the migrants who say they're Syrian are not actually Syrian.
	According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, out of the 800 migrants that travelled to Europe by sea in 2015 when this article was written, a little over half of them have come from Syria.
	And about 62% of all the migrants that have traveled to Europe are men, with just under a quarter, 22% being children, and only 16% being women, and approximately 0% being transgender.
	But as I said, the figures on this really vary wildly.
	It depends what you use as a source.
	For example, according to the EU, in April, May and June of 2015, they logged 213,000 arrivals, but only 44,000 of them were fleeing from the Syrian civil war.
	So I don't have any figures that I trust, frankly, and if you do, please do link them to me, and I'll put an update in the video description, because it's so hard finding anything that might be true.
	I mean, I don't think that four out of five of the million refugees that have now arrived have been non-Syrian.
	But then I don't believe it's only or less than a third.
	That seems remarkably low as well.
	So no matter what the breakdown, I think we can actually be fairly certain about the raw number of migrants that are entering Europe.
	I definitely think it's over a million people at this point.
	And it really is making European countries react.
	They're not just sitting around doing nothing.
	At least five countries in the path of these migrants have built fences to keep them out.
	Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, Turkey and Macedonia have all built these fences to control the flow of people going, it seems, to Germany and Northern Europe.
	And as you can imagine, there are plenty of northern European politicians who are not happy about this situation.
	Of course, Angela Merkel's just fine with it.
	She's well on course to win her Nobel Prize over this, but it's killing her political career in Germany.
	Her ratings have tanked, really tanked, and I'm not surprised.
	The perception, at least from Der Spiegel's perspective, is that the rational, deliberate decision-maker who was Angela Merkel has become increasingly emotion-driven, and so they're satirizing her as Mother Teresa or Mother Merkel.
	Which I'm sure does feel very good for Angela herself, especially as this humanitarian drive is going to see her get a Nobel Prize.
	But it does go to show that she's not actually serving her constituents here.
	She's actually serving Angela Merkel.
	And it's not that I don't have sympathy for the Syrian refugees either, because I do, I really do.
	It must be a terrible thing to have your homes destroyed and your families torn apart as you travel to a new continent in order to get shelter.
	And I know that a lot of the refugees, in fact the bulk of the refugees, are still in the Middle East and the surrounding countries.
	But the thing is, I'm only really sympathetic to those refugees.
	And we can be reasonably sure that a large percentage of them aren't actually refugees.
	A lot of them from Africa or Pakistan and Afghanistan.
	And honestly, I only think we should take in the actual war refugees.
	If someone's coming from North Africa or Pakistan or Afghanistan, send them back.
	I don't think we should take them.
	And if it's true that it is somewhere between, say, 30 and 50% of the migrants that are not war refugees, then think about how much hassle that's going to save the people in Europe for a legitimate reason.
	I mean, David Cameron, Prime Minister of Britain, one of the most Eurosceptic countries, but also a large country, said flatly, outright that the net migration of 300,000 a year was not sustainable to Britain.
	Margot Wollstrom, the Swedish foreign minister, you know, the one who operates the feminist foreign policy, has outright stated that Sweden can't accept 190,000 asylum seekers to arrive each year.
	Margot goes on to say that she has to admit that there have been moments recently of very great disappointment.
	I have heard statements from member states that have been completely astonishing and very discouraging, presumably talking about other member states that have just flat refused to take in immigrants.
	So what the Swedish government ended up being forced to do was to rescind its open-door policy where anyone posing as a refugee, whether legitimate or not, would be able to enter the country and be settled there at least for some time.
	And when the deputy prime minister went on TV and decided to announce it, she broke down in tears over the fact that they couldn't keep accepting these refugees.
	On Tuesday, Sweden's Prime Minister Stefan Lofen, probably pronounced wrong, sorry, said that the policy would be reduced to bring it in line with EU minimum, meaning that it would only be granted temporary residence permits.
	He said that the country needed respite from accepting such a large intake of refugees.
	It pains me that Sweden is no longer capable of receiving asylum seekers at the high level we do today.
	We simply can't do it anymore.
	And Asa, or OSA, however it's pronounced, Romson, became visibly emotional as she announced the U-Turn on asylum policy at the conference.
	Maybe I'm guilty of like thinking politicians aren't people or something.
	You know, maybe I'm guilty of like looking at these people as if they are their jobs rather than people doing a job.
	Because I am just baffled why anyone would get so emotional about this situation, I just I don't see why anyone would allow themselves to get upset about this.
	This is the kind of problem that requires cool, clear thinking.
	Guessing, allowing yourself to get emotionally worked up about the issue.
	It strikes me as a rather silly thing to do, but the thing is, I can understand if these European politicians are unable to distance themselves from the subject material.
	There would be nothing wrong with just being discriminatory about who you let in.
	Letting an actual Syrian refugee refuse an economic migrant and send them back, there's nothing wrong with that.
	That's perfectly fair and rational.
	You are still doing charitable work.
	In fact, you may well be doing more charitable work in the long run because you're actually giving the people you know need the charity the actual help.
	Resources aren't going to be wasted on people who are taking advantage of you.
	I don't see how that could be perceived as being in any way wrong or immoral.
	As if you're shirking your duty or something.
	But the thing is, Asa Romson went on to say, I'm going to be completely honest.
	Recently we've been having difficult decisions within the party about the perception of reality.
	In the last couple of weeks, I've been convinced that this is the best way to help the local Green Party politicians actually do something.
	She went on before bursting into tears.
	I mean this isn't really what you want to hear from a member of your serving government, is it?
	Recently we've been having difficult discussions within the party about the perception of reality.
	That's not good, is it?
	That's the sort of thing I expect to hear from a bunch of fucking lunatics.
	And the thing is it's not very encouraging, especially when like other people who claim that they do have a good grip on reality are going to say something like, Sweden's going to become a third world country by 2013, according to the UN.
	This isn't really true.
	This is based on this human development research paper that was done, commissioned by the UN.
	The study was done in order to calculate the projected human development index of a bunch of countries and what they would look like in 2013.
	Almost every Western country increased their human development index according to this study, except for two.
	Belgium where the HDI went down by 26 points.
	And Sweden which had had a projected drop in HDI of 43 points from 2010 to 2030.
	That sounds really bad and maybe it is.
	I'm actually not sure what the impact of Sweden's HDI going down so dramatically is going to be, but I think it's really overstating the case to say that it'll be a third world nation.
	I think the major concern is that it would have HDI on par with Libya, but Libya had the highest human development index of any country in Africa.
	Libya is probably a really bad example to use now, so again, I really don't think this is an accurate way of judging anything.
	And they're just forecasts as well, but the forecast is for the HDI of Sweden to go down, and it seems that members of the Swedish government and parliament understand this, and are trying to take steps to at least kind of mitigate the damage taking in so many migrants is doing to their country.
	And the thing is, it's not just like, you know, crazy conspiracy theorists who are going on about how the migrants are causing a huge number of problems for the people in their wake.
	A Norwegian foundation called the Human Rights Service has also that various authorities along the path of the migrants have been doing their best to hush down that asylum seekers rape.
	I really don't want to labour the point any more than necessary, but I honestly don't think it's fair to say that it's asylum seekers raping.
	Like we covered earlier, we know that a large portion of the asylum seekers are not actually people seeking asylum.
	They are actually economic migrants from countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia.
	And by the same token, I don't want to downplay the effect that the passage of this number of people is having.
	And the response from the authorities is amazing.
	It's so anti-feminist I can't even believe it.
	It's literally victim blaming.
	Like, mini skirts could lead to misunderstandings.
	Well, what was she wearing?
	I know we're not supposed to be asking that, but when the perpetrator is brown enough, it turns out that we can become slightly more regressive than we would be if he happens to be a native of these countries.
	And it's not just women in the communities surrounding these refugee centers that are having a problem.
	It's obviously women in the refugee centers as well, that, according to the Huffington Post Germany, are treated as fair game by many of the quote-unquote refugees.
	This has been translated using Google Translate, so I apologise if it's a bit disjointed.
	This situation makes those men in his hands, anyway, assign women a subordinate role and treat women as travelling as fair game.
	The consequences are numerous rapes and sexual assaults, increasingly also reports of forced prostitution.
	And it must be said clearly that this is not anecdotal.
	And the Huffington Post corroborates this by saying that our own research has shown that not only is the letter genuine, but reflects the situation correctly.
	I think it's important to note that the Middle East and North Africa is not one homogenous area.
	And so to simply say, oh, everyone travelling from this area of the world into Europe is a refugee, we know that's not true.
	And honestly, whenever I'm reading about sexual assaults that have taken place by migrants, it's never someone from Syria.
	It's always someone from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia or Sudan or Eritrea, somewhere like that.
	It's never someone who is actually confirmed as being from Syria.
	Now, I know I don't have any hard data on this or anything like that.
	This is just my experience of going through these articles.
	And as far as I can tell, it doesn't really seem to be the Syrians.
	It seems to be the economic migrants from other areas who are coming along with them.
	Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that Syria is some sort of progressive, forward-thinking, westernized, modern country, but I don't think it's quite the backwater that some of these other countries are either.
	For example, we know that female genital mutilation does happen in Syria, but we also know it's quite unusual and usually restricted to certain ethnic or religious groups.
	Whereas if you go to somewhere like Somalia or Sudan, over 90% of the women there have had their genitals mutilated.
	Now, I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know when I say that the problem appears to be deeply ingrained cultural attitudes around women.
	Norway and other places that are dealing with large numbers of these migrants are literally now teaching them not to rape.
	Everything that feminists have said about white men in the West is actually true about men from Sudan and Somalia.
	Not all of them, I am sure, but it does seem to be a majority of men in these countries who have particularly retrograde attitudes towards women.
	So when he first arrived in Europe, Abdu Osman Khalifa, a Muslim asylum seeker from the Horn of Africa, was shocked to see women in skimpy clothes drinking alcohol and kissing in public.
	Back home, he said, only prostitutes do that, and in locally made movies, couples only hug but never kiss.
	Confused, Mr. Khalifa volunteered to take part in a pioneering and, in some quarters controversial, program that seeks to prevent sexual and other violence by helping male immigrants from other societies that are largely segregated or in which women show neither flesh nor public affection to adapt to more open European societies.
	So this guy has volunteered to be treated as if he is a rapist, or at least a potential rapist, because the sexual norms in his society are so radically different to those of Western European societies.
	But then, fearful of stigmatizing migrants as potential rapists and playing into the hands of anti-immigrant politicians, most European countries have avoided addressing the question of whether men arriving from more conservative societies might get the wrong idea once they move to places where it can seem as if anything goes.
	Isn't that an incredible sentence?
	They're afraid of stigmatizing them as potential rapists, but they are going to ask them to volunteer to be treated as potential rapists.
	But god forbid they play into the hands of anti-immigrant politicians that might say, hey, these guys are much more likely to rape than people from other countries because they have severe cultural problems in the countries that they're coming from.
	Which is what they are saying, but they don't want the anti-immigrant politicians to say because that would be a legitimate reason to be anti-immigrant.
	And so instead of addressing this, most European countries just put their heads in the dirt.
	Fuck it.
	Why do we have to deal with it?
	It's not us being raped.
	It's just someone else.
	So we don't have to worry about that.
	But the best part of this sentence is the apology.
	Whether the men arriving from more conservative societies might get the wrong idea and brutally gang rape someone who they thought was a prostitute.
	I really cannot believe how forgiving they are being with regards to the things they're describing.
	Apparently the goal of this course is that participants will at least know the difference between right and wrong.
	Which, I mean, it sounds incredibly patronizing, but by the way they are describing it and by the way things might actually work in these countries, this might actually be necessary.
	The biggest danger for everyone is silence, said Per Isdahl, a clinical psychologist in Stavanger who works for the Foundation, which developed the program that Mr. Khalifa attended in Sanders.
	Many refugees come from cultures that are not gender equal, where women are the property of men.
	We have to help them adapt to their new culture.
	God, I hate pronouncing these names.
	Henry Overberg, Oveberg, I don't know, who was Stavanger's police chief during the spike in rape cases, said he supported providing migrants with sex education because people from some parts of the world have never seen a girl in a mini skirt, only a burqa.
	When they get to Norway, he added, something happens in their heads.
	Well, I suppose that's true, but the thing that happens is that they think it's okay to rape people.
	He said there was a link, but not a very clear link, between the rape cases in the city's immigrant community.
	Stavanger being the city that, I think it was 2010, where 9 out of 10 of the assault rapes that took place there were done by immigrant men.
	But okay, let's just say that the link isn't clear, but we know there is a link.
	How's that?
	I mean, personally, I'm going to go on the assumption that it's the fact that you feel the need to teach them not to rape, because back where they come from, they literally don't think of women as people, they think of them as property.
	But hey, I'm not trying to stigmatise the migrants.
	Just because these things are true, doesn't mean people should think that they're true.
	And I'm just going on what this article has told me.
	But the claim that refugees and immigrants in general are prone to commit rape has been the main rallying cry of anti-migrant activists across Europe, with each case of sexual violence by a newcomer presented as evidence of an imported scourge.
	You are doing an article about teaching them not to rape because there has been a marked increase in the number of rapes due to the number of immigrants.
	And you're presenting this as if, well, I mean, each case of sexual violence by a newcomer is presented as evidence of an imported scourge.
	It is evidence!
	For fuck's sake!
	To the point where Norway has to fucking run these programs to try and get the number of fucking sexual assaults down.
	Norway, like most European countries, does not break down crime statistics by ethnicity or religion, which is why I had to use the examples of cases in Oslo and Stavanger for the previous video that I did.
	A 2011 report by Norway's State Statistical Bureau noted that immigrants are overrepresented in the crime statistics, but suggested that this was not due to cultural differences, but because many of the immigrants were young men.
	Isn't that an incredible thing?
	To say it's not because in their country most women have their clitorises hacked off when they're young girls and women are treated as property.
	The men have never seen women in mini skirts or, you know, with a bit of flesh on display and can't help themselves and something happens in their brains.
	But you see, Norwegian men would do exactly the same.
	Because it's down to the fact that they're men, not down to the fact that they're culturally conditioned to see women as being worth less than men.
	It should not be surprising if groups with large proportions of young males have higher crime rates than groups with large proportions of elderly women.
	Well that's true, but there are no groups with large proportions of elderly women.
	How about if we compare the migrants to say, I don't know, displaced Norwegian men?
	Do you think you would see the same number of rapes?
	Hannah Kristin Rod, a former head of the violent crime section of the Oslo Police Department, said she ran into a wall of hostility when in 2011, while still with the police force, she blamed sexual violence by foreign men on cultural factors and went public with data suggesting that immigrants committed a hugely disproportionate number of rapes.
	It does not surprise me that she would encounter a great deal of social resistance.
	Obviously, we can't bring ourselves to outright ban data, but we can make it very uncomfortable so that as she says, it was a big problem, but it was difficult to talk about it.
	She also asserts that there was a clear statistical connection between sexual violence and male migrants from countries where, quote, women have no value of their own.
	Well, what a fucking surprise.
	Men from countries where they think very little of women and often mutilate them or oppress them are actually far more likely to rape them and in far greater numbers.
	But the fact that this isn't just the default assumption shows how deep down the rabbit hole we actually are.
	Listen to this apparatchnik.
	Many question whether there is a clear link between the migrants and crime.
	Last month the German Interior Minister Thomas de Maziere said that asylum seekers were no more prone to commit crime, including sexual violence, than Germans.
	In general, the available recent trend findings show that refugees commit just as few or as many crimes as groups of the local population.
	He lied through his teeth, either willingly or unwillingly, using data that without a doubt has been massaged.
	But the thing is, how stupid do they think that we are?
	I mean, look at the differences in attitudes and tell me whether you think it's possible that German men would, obviously not having these sorts of attitudes, rape and sexually assault on the same scale.
	Mr. Khalifa, the African asylum seeker, said he still had a hard time accepting that a wife could accuse her husband of sexual assault, and that he had learned how to read previously baffling signals from women who wear short skirts, smile, or simply walk alone at night without an escort.
	Men have weaknesses when they see someone smiling it is difficult to control.
	He said, explaining that in his own country of Eritrea, if someone wants a lady, he can just take her, and he will not be punished, at least not by the police.
	You think, Thomas, that that attitude translates to exactly the same number of rapes as the attitude of the average German when it comes to women.
	Really?
	Am I supposed to believe you believe that?
	Because it strikes me that only a complete and fucking moron would think that these two attitudes would produce the same result.
	So this is my problem with all of this, is the willful dishonesty on the part of Western politicians to the idea that, yes, some cultures are in fact inferior to our own, and they actually do have retrograde opinions and attitudes regarding women.
	I mean, the guy literally said that if he wants to rape a woman in his country, the police will do nothing about it.
	Feminists, I don't know whether you're paying attention, but that is actually a rape culture.
	And again, I know I've been hammering this issue, but this is, I really think this is the crux of the problem.
	It's that these guys don't think what they're doing is wrong.
	And they hold these opinions because their cultures, frankly, are backwards.
	They're fucking awful cultures.
	They treat women in a terrible, terrible way.
	I can't imagine being part of a culture where 90% of the women have their genitals mutilated.
	I can't imagine what it's like to be part of a culture where it's actually okay to rape someone.
	The police aren't going to punish you.
	Nobody's going to bat an eyelid apart from her brother or whatever, and he may well end up honour-killing her because she disgraced herself.
	Look, I am not a cultural relativist.
	I do not think that all cultures are inherently equal, and they just need to be understood.
	Some cultures are worse than others.
	Some cultures are even worse than those cultures.
	And some cultures are downright barbaric.
	And the migrants who are moving into Northern Europe, not from Syria, but from these sort of impoverished North African countries, have particularly barbaric cultural norms.
	And the thing is, I have yet to hear a compelling argument for why anyone should be tolerant of the attitudes these people hold or the way they conduct themselves.
	If it was a Western person acting and thinking in this way, I would think of them as a despicable person.
	I would think they were fucking awful, abhorrent.
	And so it's really hard not to think the same thing of these men who come over and say, well, it's okay to rape.
	I really do think it's high time to just refuse to accept any sort of regressive attitudes, no matter where they're coming from.
	I don't care if it's their culture.

▲