Daniel Greenfield article: A World of Refugees

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A World of Refugees Posted: 12 Mar 2013 10:06 PM PDT The old paradigm that a country has the right to decide who enters it has been decisively overturned in Europe, it's under siege in such first world countries as America, Canada, Australia and Israel by the creed that says it's the human rights obligation of every nation to accept every refugee. Given a chance a sizable portion of the third world would move to the first, a minority because of oppression and a majority because the opportunities and freebies are much better there. Even low ranked first world nations still find themselves swamped with refugees looking to move in. International law does not assign any priority to a nation's citizens over any person who happens to stray across the border. At the ground level that means the end of borders and the end of citizenship which is why immigration isn't just a touchy issue in Arizona, it's a touchy issue in Sydney, Tel Aviv and Birmingham. You can hardly open a newspaper of the liberal persuasion without being treated to another group of refugees in some troubled part of the world walled up behind fences and trying to get over to London, Sydney or New York. This sort of thing can't be called immigration anymore, it's a straightforward migration and it has no apparent limits. However many you take in, there will be more waiting and always burdening you with an unsolvable crisis. One approach is to try and stabilize whatever crisis they are supposedly escaping from. Too many Libyans running away to Italy? Just bomb their dictator and they'll go home again. At least that's the theory, it doesn't work too well in practice. For one thing Libya is more dangerous and unstable than it was under Gaddafi. Stabilizing it would require an Iraq level investment of money and manpower, and Iraq isn't stable either. And London is still full of Iraqi refugees dating back to the 1980's. The disparities that make migration aren't fixable, but nor is mass migration a viable option. There's a reason that the refugees are running away and they are often part of the problem. Every nation is troubled in its own way and mass migration imports those troubles. It's why beheadings have come north of the border and the Jihad has set up shop in countless Western cities. The melting pot myth was that people leave their identities behind to join in a mass identity. That worked only marginally back in the day, it doesn't work at all today when the refugees are immersed in their Little Mogadishus, which have popped up in a frightening amount of American cities foretelling the day when those cities will become as violent and broken as the original Mogadishu. In place of the melting pot is the No Go Zone, which is the inverse of integration, it sets up tribal encampments in major cities which run on the laws of the tribe. That sort of thing has always been around in one form or another and it is survivable in limited numbers so long as those zones don't also become factories of violence. That's the difference between Amish Country and a Muslim banlieue, it's also the difference between separatism and supremacism. The United States has had its Fenian raids, its assorted wars being waged by immigrants from its soil, and the attitude toward those conflicts has been mixed, depending on whose ox was being gored. But there's a fundamental shift when those wars are being waged against it. That shift from immigrants using it as a conflict base to becoming the target of their conflicts is a somewhat recent one whose full implications have still not been absorbed. Across the southern border it faces mass immigration from a country whose history is riddled with old scores to settle and whose politicians use it as a whacking post for their national troubles. And to the east and the west it faces mass migration from the Muslim world, which is operating on its own form of manifest destiny, settling Europe and European colonies, the way that European colonists once settled America. The news is no better in Canada or Australia, it's certainly no better in Europe where the EU sees mass migration as a convenient way of completing its project of dissolving national identities. Encouraging separatism at the regional level is one way of doing it, but mass fragmentation of nations gets the job done even more thoroughly and comprehensively. The EU is working off another melting pot model, much like the national governments who think that they can create a pliable left-leaning electorate by opening up the borders. What they actually end up creating is chaos and chaos eventually becomes order. The only question is whose order it will be. It isn't likely to be their order, which leaves few options. If nations are meaningless, then national identities are equally meaningless. All that's left are clans, religious and ethnic groups in the borderless multicultural globe. A chaos that sorts itself out through the old reliable means of brute force, accompanied to dollop of deceit and coalition building. The coalitions that the left built up to consolidate its rule are being hijacked and used by the Brotherhood as the building blocks of their rule instead. In a chaotic environment, tribalism and a compelling ideology can combine to carve out an expanding sphere of order. That is how Islam got its start, that is how it is operating now. In a fragmented environment, it has a leg up because it is organized and it has the money and vision to move forward, which is more than the natives or most of the other immigrants have. To Islam, Europe, America and the rest of the non-Muslim world are all Mogadishus, they are the Dar Al-Harb, the realm of the sword, where the faithful are destined to bring order. Every social problem proves how much the infidel world needs them to bring order and the violence that they bring raises the stakes and drives everyone toward an inevitable conflict.  Borders are created to keep things out, like invading armies and suicide bombers. The border represents security and ownership, and when you take away the border those are gone and the soft vulnerable territories within are up for grabs to the ruthless and the canny. If the borders are down, then why not go north where there's wealth and power up for grabs and take some for yourself. National identity in the Muslim world is already weak, outmatched by religious identity on the one hand and tribal identity on the other. That set of conditions makes it quite difficult for them to build and maintain functional countries of their own, but leaves them quite well adapted to using tribal and religious ties to take over regions in a state of multicultural flux. Islam is not built for competence, it's built for conquest. Its effectiveness lies in its ability to create chaos, rather than maintain order. And every suicide bomber, every plot exposed, every riot over a cartoon demonstrates the power of that chaos and how far the local and global authorities who try to maintain order will go to appease the causers of chaos. A West that has become increasingly secular, where nationalism is suspect and ethnic identity for the natives is taboo, is frighteningly ill-adapted to such a conflict. It has thrown away the survival skills necessary to cope with the situation and the survival skills it has are built on adapting to change by submitting to a new state of affairs, whether it's a new set of ideas, a new set of forms or a new set of laws. Change and future shock have become the way of the West. Islam's past shock follows the same narrative and makes the same demands. Adapt, learn to recite the new truisms and get on with your life. The West has learned to forget and it no longer knows the answer to the question, "Who are we?". Who are we beyond people in an experiment to create a new and better society and then spread that wonderful society to the rest of the world? And what exactly is that society we are spreading? Muslims who know quite well what new and better society they are part of, have an advantage because they understand their role better than the natives. The ability to answer the big questions is a key factor in any struggle. Every battle begins with an army that has to be composed of men who have to be convinced to leave their homes and participate in a conflict that may cost them their lives. Getting them lined up and in good fighting shape is a lot easier if they understand why they are here. They are better adapted to the end of the state, because they have never truly internalized the reality of the state, than the Westerner for whom the state has become the fundamental unit of existence. Westerners have become the ultimate refugees, lost at home, refugees in their own countries, wanderers in their own cities. The same processes that have turned their countries into superpowers are now drowning them in their own effluvia. And the citizen of the first world often finds that he seems to belong less in his own country than the refugees flooding it. He has become a displaced person, a familiar enough feeling to many of his new neighbors who are also victims of ethnic and religious conflicts. But while the conflicts they have fled are official, his conflict is not. He is the victim of a nameless conflict that cannot be named, of a colonization that cannot be described as such and of the ethnic cleansing of his national identity and the theft of his future. Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.