Left and Right: Equal Opportunity Immigrant Killers (Trouw, The Netherlands)
"We have never seen an ideology or a religion on trial before
a court of law on charges of murder. It is invariably people who should be held
accountable. ... To point a cowardly finger at 'the left' or any other
political entity or notion is ridiculous. ... If one has a serious accusation to
make, it should be taken to a prosecutor, who would reject it, because
prosecutors cannot call to account either 'the left' or 'the right.'"
Tombs of unidentified immigrants in the cemetery of the island of Lampedusa, off the Italian coast, October 7. Italy is asking for more E.U. support and an overhaul of immigration rules after last week's shipwreck off Sicily that killed 300 African migrants.
We
have never seen an ideology or a religion on trial before a court of law on
charges of murder. It is invariably people who should be held accountable. A prosecutor
will never call an ideology or religion to appear in court. In fact, they cannot.
This
thought occurred to us when we read the headline of a column by JoostNiemöller: Today
the Left Killed 300 in Lampedusa. If you read
the article, you will understand that by "the left," Niemöller mean people in Europe who help immigrants and
asylum seekers obtain residence permits. The refugees and illegal immigrants
know this help is available, and do anything to get themselves into "Fortress
Europe." One might gather from this that were it not for the European left,
these fortune seekers would conceivably not arrive. The left-wing beckons and
the eager paupers come running.
Were
such people to die along their journey, as they did in Lampedusa
early this month, then it is not the fault of leftists, but the notion of "leftism."
The ship sank and the refugees couldn't swim, but they lost their lives not because
they drowned, but because "the left" killed them.
The
latter isn't possible. First, the immigrants certainly did drown; and second, "the
left" is a concept, not a potential murderer of flesh and blood.
Using
examples from history, allow us to explain.
The dramatic
journey of the MS St. Louis
On
May 13, 1939, 1,938 passengers, most of them Jewish, left Nazi Germany on the steamship MSSt.
Louis, headed to Cuba for
onward travel to the United States. She had applied for U.S. visas and wanted
to await processing in Cuba. However, the Cuban government refused entry to
most of them. After much diplomatic wrangling, the St. Louis had to leave Cuban waters and made its way toward the continental
United States. The passengers sent a telegram to Democratic
("left-wing") President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who never
responded. Due to the application of strict U.S. immigration laws and
procedures, the ship was eventually forced to sail back to Europe. Fortunately,
a large number of the passengers were taken in by European countries other than
Nazi Germany, but 254 did eventually fall into Nazi hands and died. Using Niemöller's logic: The "American left" killed the
254 Jewish refugees from Germany."
The sinking of
the Struma
On
December 12, 1941, a Greek ship, the Struma,
departed from the Romanian port of Constanta carrying 769 Jewish passengers fleeing
the Holocaust in Europe - they had barely managed to escape. They had been
given to understand that they could travel to Palestine by boat, and had paid
huge sums to come aboard. The ship first sailed to Istanbul. When the British, who
then ruled Palestine, got wind of the voyage, it was the beginning of a tragedy
that would end with the deaths of every passenger but one. For fear of Arab
nationalism, the British, led by the ("right-wing") Conservative
Party under Prime Minister Winston Churchill, refused the Jews access to
Palestine, and the Turks refused to allow the them transit by land. Eventually
the ship, which was in very poor condition, was forced to leave Turkey’s
territorial waters. Less than a day later, the ship sank, allegedly hit by
torpedoes from a Soviet submarine. Only one passenger survived the disaster. Again,
according to Niemöller's thinking: The "British
right" killed 768 people.
The
British pulled this trick again in 1947, fortunately without it leading to as many
victims, when they refused entry to a ship named Exodus which was
transporting to Palestine Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. The ship
eventually returned to war-torn Germany, where the Jewish refugees were again interned
in a German concentration camp.
The soft and
hard side of immigration policies
The
sad story of Lampedusa is therefore not unique. It
has had numerous predecessors, as the examples of the Struma and MS St. Louis testify.
The problem of illegal immigrants and refugees has always had a soft side and a
hard side. The soft side is human: to speak and act with compassion. The hard
side is, however, also human: apply rules to defend interests, however difficult
this may be. The art of this is to shape things so there never are any victims.
Now
that there are fatalities, however, to point a cowardly finger at "the
left" or any other political entity or notion is ridiculous, just as are
any "conclusions" about the "British right" and "American
left" having killed Jewish refugees in the previous examples. If one has a
serious accusation to make, it should be taken to a prosecutor, who would
reject it, because prosecutors cannot call to account either "the left"
or "the right."
Niemöller had better say exactly who he means.
Call a spade a spade. But he cannot, because he doesn't know who the killers
are. In fact, there are no killers.
So
what's the purpose of this article by Niemöller? Does
he wants to share his heartfelt feelings for the poor devils who died in the
Mediterranean Sea? No, he does not.
His
crusade leads him to everything "left," and walking on the backs of
drowned refugees, there is no ocean too deep to silence his aversion to all people
on the left, and with the most extreme terms and extreme accusation: murder.
