How many Syrian refugees should Australia take?

[HAL]

Where did you get it?

[Morrigu]

[Pies4shaw]

[think positive]

<This conversation moved from Islamic terrorism thread>

[Mugwump]

^ TP, she (we) cannot unscramble what has been mixed,nor should we try to.

So we start with a policy of integration, tolerance, kindness and support for those who are here, while sending back those who are not genuine asylum seekers.

We abandon the clearly failing experiment of multiculturalism, and ask that new arrivals imbibe, understand, appreciate and seek to join the historical and traditional roots of the country they have chosen to join.

We get a grip on our borders, and stop the sentimental mush which argues that young men chanting "Germany" and clashing with police should have the same status as families with children in need of particular protection. We deny the subtle post-truth that mass unmanaged asylum-seeking/immigration is a necessary reality of the modern world, and we demand that our governments start to serve the interests of the people they are elected and paid to represent, rather than some offshore humanitarian ideal.

At a cultural level, we remember that our job is not to act as an historic dictatorship which arrogantly assumes it knows better than our forebears, but rather to carefully steward the inheritance we received - not as revolutionaries, but as careful guardians and wary reformers on behalf of the future.

We stop interfering in the Middle East unless it is unambiguously necessary that we do so in our direct and vital national interest. We start recogising and discussing present day Arab culture and Salafist and Deobandi Islam generally for the backward, death-flinging, failing and misogynistic thing that it mostly is, in scripture and in practice, while being open to dialogue with those serious Islamic scholars and statesmen who are capable of reasoned accommodation and progress.

We stop humouring Saudi Arabia and pretending it is an ally, when it is to the latest evil rather like the USSR was to the Communist evil. We grow up and regard healthy, normal patriotism and pride in our own history, traditions, and habits as normal, rather than things to be sniggered at by snobbish and self-regarding undergraduates leading virtue parades.

Finally, we treat terrorism or the making of plans and preparations for terrorism as an act of treason, and one of the gravest crimes on our statute book, to be punished with great severity. As we should all forms of violent crime.

All of those things, I suggest, are the things that a properly
Conservative party should be attending to, if we had one. I think our society would be kinder, more humane, less legalistic but more lawful, less oppressive, safer, and more genuinely tolerant and compassionate if we did so. The other side of politics will tell you that it is impossible that the "old Right" can have an interest in real human welfare and the dignity of ordinary people, as they have a monopoly on that brand and the sneers it entitles them to. We should stop buying that, as well.

[think positive]

i really like that post, cheers

[David]

[Skids]

Migrants in Germany committed or tried to commit some 69,000 crimes in the first quarter of 2016, according to a police report that could raise unease, especially among anti-immigrant groups, about Chancellor Angela Merkel's liberal migrant policy.

There was a record influx of more than a million migrants into Germany last year and concerns are now widespread about how Europe's largest economy will manage to integrate them and ensure security.

The report from the BKA federal police showed that migrants from northern Africa, Georgia and Serbia were disproportionately represented among the suspects.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0YT28V

GERMANY, Sweden and other European countries are facing growing public unrest amid a wave of reports of sexual assaults since the Cologne attacks.

New York-based conservative think tank Gatestone Institute has compiled a shocking list of sexual assaults and rapes by migrants in Germany in just the first two months of the year.

Drawing only from German media reports, the list documents more than 160 instances of rape and sexual assault committed by migrants in train stations, swimming pools and other public places against victims as young as seven.

http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/world-economy/cologne-is-every-day-europes-rape-epidemic/news-story/e2e618e17ad4400b5ed65045e65e141d


Migrants committed 208,344 crimes in 2015, according to a confidential police report that was leaked to the German newspaper, Bild. This figure represents an 80% increase over 2014 and works out to around 570 crimes committed by migrants every day, or 23 crimes each hour, between January and December 2015.

The actual number of migrant crimes is far higher, however, because the report, produced by the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA), includes only crimes that have been solved (aufgekl�rten Straftaten). According to Statista, the German statistics agency, on average only around half of all crimes committed in Germany in any given year are solved (Aufkl�rungsquote). This implies that the actual number of crimes committed by migrants in 2015 may exceed 400,000.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/7470/germany-migrants-crime

Can't wait for the 2016 stats hey??!!

[David]

It's a shame that document in the Reuters article didn't provide percentages, because these figures are pretty useless without them. For point of comparison, 69,000 crimes in a quarter sounds like rather a lot, but when you consider that (as a random example) 750,000 thefts alone were committed in Australia in 2009*, you can get a sense that these figures don't necessarily indicate an alarming increase on their own.

* (See link below)
http://www.aic.gov.au/media_library/publications/facts/2010/facts_and_figures_2010.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwiesazTsKjRAhXMHJQKHU0KCmAQFggZMAA&usg=AFQjCNEPLZ8cA5z2kCT1it2ONJ0YEhlqUA

[Mugwump]

^ Though I disagree with most of what you wrote, David, thank you for taking the issue seriously.

The most fundamental point of disagreement I have with your post is that you seem to assume that those of us who disagree with Merkel�s approach ipso facto favour the �turn away� approach. The second fundamental point is that I don�t think �whether she went about it the right way� is a secondary question. It�s what politics (and indeed, life) is about. Once you have decided to involve yourself, the question is how, and to what extent, and on whose behalf, with what consent, and with what likely entailed risks. Those are the difficult bits of the exam, not whether one should try to help.

Now, there are solid conservative arguments for turning away, as we do all do every day from Congo, and Eritrea and Liberia and from poverty across the world. We cannot solve the world�s problems of government, and we all know that asking the world�s homeless into your home is not a real strategy for making the world fairer or more pleasant : though anyone who does share their actual family home with a Syrian family earns a lot more moral respect from me than those armies who prefer to socialise their sacrifices and preach on Facebook � William Blake�s �minute particulars� quote is worth looking up in that context.

However, in Syria, it is right not to turn away. These are good people who have been caught up in crisis of horror through no fault of their own. It is arguable that we played some role in the conditions that now prevail. The question is what to do, and how to do it.

My position, as I stated above, is that Merkel went about it almost entirely the wrong way, causing massive externalities and misdirection because of her methods. When there were other and better alternatives, I don't think that is real �leadership� as you do. I think it is quite the opposite.

As a final note, thank you for having the humility to put �progressive� in quotes. When we all begin to accept that progress is contingent and hydraulic and uncertain, and that there may be different political and philosophical approaches to it, we may have the intellectual conditions to advance towards it a little.

[David]

No worries, I appreciate your respectful reply, and take your comments on board.

One last thing I should have added, though, was that Merkel's decision to effectively fling open the gates deserves a bit of contextualisation. This was a response to a crisis that was already more or less out of control; people were already flooding into Europe and many likely would have made it in through the back door anyway if they hadn't been granted amnesty (we easily forget here in our moat-girt castle of a country how uncontrollable such people movements can be). It was also one that required immediate and decisive action; people were dying in the Mediterranean on a regular basis and Greece in particular was being overwhelmed with asylum seekers.

So, let's not characterise this (as some on here have in the past) as an act of maverick free will on the part of the German leader. Merkel didn't create the Syrian crisis and she most certainly didn't create the mass migration into Europe that occurred as a result of it. Whether she exacerbated that flow is another question � if she did, it's less clear to me that she could have done much to reduce it. Syria would seem to be a pretty clear instance of what refugee advocates talk about when they argue that push factors are far more effective than pull factors in determining people movements. Stricter controls might, as you say, have sifted out more of the opportunists and troublemakers from the genuinely needy, but I expect that history would not have been radically rewritten.

[Mugwump]

^ Yes, you have a point. the crisis was well underway before Angela Merkel issued her famous proclamation, and it is well to remember that she did not cause it. I do, however, think she exacerbated it and was naive in encouraging a chaotic, increased flow via the leaky-boat merchants who ply the Mediterranean, and attracting the kind of passport-less Tunisian who drove a truck through a Christmas market. I also think she was na�ve as to the likely long-term consequences of absorbing ~ 1 million people - including many (mostly?) ill-educated young men - from a very distant, unquestionably problem-ridden and alien culture, all within a year.

It really is a little like inviting the local homeless into your front room in a crisis. Don't assume that it'll feel like your home in 5 years time if you set that precedent. And that might be ok if it was your personal home, but it is less ok when the rest of the German family did not elect you as head of the household on that basis, and your home is an open-plan block of flats called free-movement Europe.

On respect, I copped "authoritarian", "smug", "reactionary", and (by innuendo but not denied when challenged) Nazi-values-sympathising in recent weeks and my respect meter fell rather low. Your open and courteous reply makes respectful disagreement quite straightforward.

[Pies4shaw]

[Skids]

1000 strong mob set Germany's OLDEST CHURCH ON FIRE on New Year's Eve.

Polish TV reported that the Merkel government had ordered all CCTV footage of the attacks erased and the event covered up.


http://www.therebel.media/1000_strong_mob_set_germany_s_oldest_church_on_fire_on_nye

[HAL]

How do you usually introduce yourself?