Post 89--Pegida—Germans and Refugees

            

           The following is about a German organization known as PEGIDA. I have taken            it over from Wikipedia and therefore cannot vouch for 100% accuracy. I realize            I am taking a great risk in posting this document, for PEGIDA has a bad name              in the media. But that media is mostly liberal, leftist in orientation and generally            condemns the sentiments expressed in this post without giving it a fair hearing.              Some of the statements below are purely local German politics for which I     

           cannot vouch either. Some of it is definitely questionable and would need    

           greater nuance before I would support it. Nevertheless, the document as a                      whole draws our attention to some refugee issues that the liberal mainline           

           politicians and media tend to hide, obscure or flatly deny, if not ridicule. 

I believe you, my readers, have a right to hear the PEGIDA folk themselves out and make up your own mind. And then see what you can take away from it and apply to Canadian refugee policy. You will note that in the document PEGIDA recommends Canada’s refugee policy. So that their perspective can’t be that bad, right?

Unfortunately, much of Canada’s policy is based on a totally inexperienced and quick-to-talk Prime Minister, who has forced himself into an unceasing process of chipping away at his questionable campaign promise of hauling in 25,000 refugees before the end of 2015. How could Canadians fall for such immaturity? 

It can only be explained in terms of the “monster” that Harper portrayed himself to be, a monster Canadians wanted to get rid of at all costs. Well, they did. I’m glad we got rid of the “monster,” but I’m not so sure we did not simply replace him with another type of monster, one who has shown himself either to be ignorant during his campaign or deceitful or, perhaps worst of all, populist; not sure which. Whether ignorant or deceitful or populist, as one who sought the leadership of a nation, any one of these three would turn him into a monster Prime Minister. Perhaps the jury is still out on that one.

I want it understood that I welcome refugees. A hundred of them are at the moment my next-door neighbours, having been put up in a hotel. I see them every day. I stop to welcome them and chat with them as much as language allows. Before long, an unceasing flow of refugees will be the neighbours of my church, the First Christian Reformed Church of Vancouver on Victoria Drive and Tenth Avenue. A welcoming centre is under construction next door to this church and I have voted for that church to support a chaplain cum social worker to help the Centre “process” refugees, a move the Centre itself welcomes with open arms.

But I do resist careless acceptance of refugees without rigorous due process.  Previous recent posts on this blog have indicated that it is often lacking in rigour.  I don’t need to repeat all that.

I do remember years ago, when I would visit friends and relatives in my “old country,”  The Netherlands, that I predicted that with the end of the Cold War, Islam would become the West’s next challenge. I warned my listeners that the guest workers they were importing at the time, would become serious problems for Europe in the future. They dismissed me as a “red neck.”  Some of them recall those discussions and no longer apply that epithet to me.

So, here then a brief Wikipedia introduction to PEGIDA and then its document translated from its own German words.  Read it. Think about it. Reject the inappropriate and then insist on policies for our own Government that are based on actual facts and have an eye for potential dangers.

Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident^{[note 1]} (German: Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes), abbreviated PEGIDA or Pegida, is a German anti-Islamisation^[1][2][3] political movement founded in Dresden in October 2014. The organisation team in Dresden usually holds demonstrations every Monday, at a location and time specified beforehand on its Facebook page, against what it considers the Islamisation of the Western world, calling for more restrictive immigration rules, particularly for Muslimswho refuse to integrate (see Item 16 of its Position Paper). Offshoots of Pegida have been formed in various countries.

10 PEGIDA Demands on German Asylum Politics

On 11 September 2015, Pegida posted 10 demands on German asylum politics on its Facebook page, as reported by heute.^[62] Although an official Pegida translation exists on its Facebook page, the following is an improved version that harks back to the original German:

1.) We call for an immediate stop on asylum seekers, and we call for a German asylum emergency law - now!

Our asylum laws were conceived after the war for the manageable quantity of approximately 2,000 refugees per year and not for the million we expected to reach in 2015!

2.) We call for strict border controls! We demand IMMEDIATE suspension of the Schengen Agreement - on all of Germany's borders!

Other EU countries already monitor their national borders again - even though the completely failed Dublin procedure is a burden rests mostly on Germany's back. The temporary reintroduction of border controls during the G7 summit has proven that border controls hinder illegal border crossings, the flourishing business of the smuggling mafia and the entry of criminals.

3.) We demand that the group of "safe countries of origin" be expanded to ALL Council of Europe member countries!

This Council of Europe has 47 member countries with 830 million citizens and over 1,800 European officials.

All member states have committed themselves to the preservation of democracy and rule of law as well as the recognition of fundamental human rights. That should be enough to count these countries as safe countries!

4.) We call for a TEMPORARYLY LIMITED right of asylum for war refugees!

Of course, real war refugees and accepted asylum seekers are to be granted temporary protection and full coverage on a MODEST scale. But once the situation in the home country improves, the refugees have to leave our country again.

5.) We call for a binding limit on the annual reception of asylum seekers, set namely by ourselves, the host country Germany!

This vital question about the future of our country must be carried out by means of direct democracy - through a referendum!

6.) We demand honesty, at long last, in the integration debate and the end of the red-green^{[note 3]} social-romantic tale of wanting to integrate masses of male, African asylum seekers here!

No one wants that. The green socialists use the refugees to create a red-green job wonder for bachelor graduates of chatter sciences here. The pathological altruism and do-gooders with feigned empathy are moral invisibility cloaks, which cover the highly lucrative migrant market.

7.) We demand that all rejected asylum seekers and hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants be deported at once, as logic would have it!

Again: We call for MASS deportations - and do it NOW!

8.) We demand that the refugee problem be resolved locally, in their own cultures!

Our so-called representatives of the people should show some backbone and take Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to task.

These wealthy, huge Sharia paradises are much better suited to accommodate the crowds of Muslim asylum seekers than a Europe of unbelievers! And we need, at long last, asylum audits right in the countries of origin. Applications for asylum in Germany have to be decided by fast-track procedure locally even in North Africa!

9.) We demand that foreign criminal, who stand in alliance with Islamic terrorist organizations be deported immediately!

This naturally also includes the adopted "sons and daughters" of German Minister of Internal Affairs de Maiziere, all these jihad returnees and all known and violent Salafists - these people also deserve to be deported from Europe immediately!

10.) The expected resistance from Brussels about any changes in German immigration and asylum policies must be answered with exit from this bullying dump EU.

The future French President Marine Le Pen has summarized it concisely in the demand for "the destruction of this EU"

It’s only this radical way which works! This EU will never be able to reform - who would rationalize away his own highly paid job?

Asylum seekers driven by nothing other than economic reasons are NOT welcome! Christian refugees, especially those who are oppressed by murderous Islamists, are absolutely welcome in Germany and we provide the shelter, food and life support they need, because this is a natural German trait. To all others: STAY OUT!

We, the people of the European nations, need to unite, to conserve and to defend our values, our culture, our freedom. We need to unite against the self-declared kings and queens in Brussels. We, the German people, need international support against our own politicians in our German parliaments.

Our politicians want to change the current form of government of the Federal Republic of Germany substantially, they want to abolish the German state and replace the German people with a multicultural society, they want to establish a multiethnic state on German soil - this behaviour is high treason!

Well, there it is. Plenty of food for thought.  You now have it directly from the horse’s mouth—from PEGIDA, not me!  Does the paragraph above this one not remind you of Trudeau Sr? And now of our current Jr?  I am not sure I'd call it "high treason," but we should ask what it is we are seeing—the inexperience of youth or populism or what? Are we sure we want to go there?  Do we know what that might look like?  Or are we just barging into the unknown and gambling with the future of an entire nation--of our children and grandchildren?

I’m off to one of the largest annual conferences in downtown Vancouver: Missions Fest Vancouver.  I’m on their Board and thus have plenty to keep me busy over the weekend. See you next week. Perhaps I'll give you a report.

Post 81--Better Help to Refugees

Douglas Todd of the Vancouver Sun (VS) wrote a very sensible column under the title “Poviding better help to refugees” (Nov. 28, 2015, D5) that I am going to partially summarize for you. And unless I come across something else spectacular on the subject of refugees, I will try to let the topic rest for a while after this one. Notice the careful nature of this promise? “I will try….”

Todd reports how almost every Canadian supports Trudeau’s efforts to welcome refugees, thousands of them. There’s a lot of Canadian compassion floating around in Canada’s frigid airspace, along with sympathy. Many people look at it as a “feel-good policy,” a phrase Todd borrows from Oxford’s economist Paul Collier.

You see how we all borrow from each other? I borrow from Todd, who borrows from Collier and others whom you’ll meet in this post. Except perhaps for the most brilliant among us, we all do so borrow. It’s a borrowing world. We are “homo mutuatis,” a "somewhat Latin" for “borrowing man,” a phrase I just concocted from a more classic expression. And sorry for the exclusive male reference. That’s just the way Western cultures formed their languages in the past. There might be some alternatives: “Thinking person” would be something like “persona mutuatis,” while “thinking woman” might come out as “femina mutuatis.”  Don’t mind me. I just like to play around with such expressions, even when I’m not sure of their exact forms.

All this “feel good” stuff turns it into an emotional issue for many. Now there’s nothing wrong with emotions, but when it beclouds reasonable judgement, it can become dangerous, especially if it involves the destinies of many thousands of people and even of nations. When I expressed my misgivings about the 25,000 goal and the need for proper vetting to a retired professor for whom I have high respect, he dubbed my reaction as “paranoia.” Me paranoia?  Me, who has lived for 30 years in a country that now has some 80 million Muslims, who has throughout all these years kept a research eye on events around me and collected research materials on the subject all these years, me who ultimately published a series of eight volumes on Christian-Muslim relations in that country and numerous other articles? (Go to www.SocialTheology. com/Islamica.htm.) That went too far for me and, though I hid my reaction from him, I felt insulted at his unthinking (?) dismissal of my experience and surprised that someone of his stature could be so misled by emotions as to isolate him from larger reality. Remember my earlier warning that compassion, like love, should not be blind. As to the impossibility of proper—and, thus, safe--vetting, also remember that letter to the Prime Minister in Post 78. 

But maybe I am doing the same thing, when I so dismiss the man’s opinion about paranoia. He is an experienced psychologist and thus knows a thing or two about paranoia as I do about Christian-Muslim relations! Now where do I go?!

But sympathetic as most of us are, polls also indicate that roughly half of us question the Government’s asylum programme.  We mostly approve of their intentions but doubt the way it is being done. The CBC, being aware of the deep suspicion floating around in our collective mind, has gone out of its way to make the process of accepting individual refugees transparent, In the meantime, even the Government itself has already scaled back from its campaign promise of 25,000 by end 2015, which, truth be told, could only be described as something close to ridiculous. Germany and Sweden, two countries who are accepting far more refugees per capita than we are, Todd reminds us, are having second thoughts about their “carrying capacity.” Sweden, in fact, has since “closed its borders.” 

Todd also adduces the opinions of recognized experts on refugees such as Michael Teitelbaum of Harvard and Collier, whom you’ve already met. Since the number of refugees accepted by the West, though perhaps overwhelming for the host countries, in reality represents only a tiny fraction of displaced persons, the money spent on that fraction would go a lot farther if spent on helping “the ten million Syrians who are living safely, but in poverty, in refugee camps or on the margins of society in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.” The West, according to Teitelbaum, needs to far more support the UN refugee agency, which is “chronically underfunded.” Todd quotes Teitelbaum that this is “hardly a humanitarian” situation. “It is well established that most refugees would prefer to stay near their home countries in hopes of returning when conditions stabilize.”  “The same funds now spent on refugees “could protect far more people in need.”  Germany alone has budgeted $ 7 billion for its refugee programme. That’s more than one-third of the amount needed by the UN to adequately fund its programme for the entire global refugee situation. That one-third would proportionally help a lot more people than Germany’s expected 800,000.  The same would be true of the Canadian budget.

Collier describes Western refugee policies as “often short-sighted.”  “Encouraging the mass emigration of their most enterprising young people” is not helpful in the long run. Canada today is struggling with a lack of skilled labour and professionals. Perhaps behind the scenes of government our refugee approach is less compassion than a cynical and calculated effort to supply our own manpower needs.  Who knows? Governments are extremely clever in their public relations. 

I am reminded of the colonial era during which Western governments hoodwinked their citizens with the ideology of a God-given “white man’s burden” for other races and nations.  In reality it was our own economic self-interest that was the real motivation. Believe me on this one, for here, too, I published a dissertation on the subject, a summary of which can be found on my < www.SocialTheology.com/boeriana.htm >.  

But then again, perhaps the Canadian Government’s motive is a combination of compassion wedded to self-interest, but that would then be short-sighted compassion for thousands of individuals while it short changes their home countries. No doubt someone will come out with a book explaining the full picture for us. I am eagerly waiting….

In the meantime, let us welcome with Christian grace and compassion all the refugees Canada is accepting. I am happy I am member of the Vancouver Christian Reformed Church that “happens” to be next door to the world’s very first refugee welcoming centre that is soon to open its doors to the incoming crowds and that does not constitute a welcome into a refugee camp. Even if their arrival is/were (The correct form of the verb depends on your opinion of the situation!) the result of short-sighted policies, since they’re coming, let us embrace them wholeheartedly. They need all the love and compassion with which many Canadian hearts are overflowing. Let's not waste that.

Unfortunately, the name of the highly respected long-established organization that will operate the centre is “Immigrant Services Society”—ISS! The greatest of people, but that name! My advice? Change that name! Don’t fill your incoming guests with fear and suspicion even before they cross your threshold! Let them feel welcome, loved and secure at that moment.