Immigration

Tales From The Safe Space, Part 50 – University of Maryland President And Students Vie For Coveted Victim Status

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

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Waah, waah, waah

What happens when SJW students and their university president become locked in a social justice victimhood showdown, each trying to claim offence and present themselves as having been somehow harmed by the other in a gruesome yet compelling display of whinnying, childish immaturity?

The University of Maryland shows us exactly what happens.

Campus Reform reports:

University of Maryland President Wallace Loh inadvertently outraged liberal students by using Spanish while pledging to protect illegal immigrant students, a move deemed “offensive” to UMD’s immigrant population.

Much of Loh’s annual State of the Campus Address was a “a clear call to embrace diversity,” according to The Diamondback, including a promise to protect illegal immigrant students on campus by barring immigration officials from campus if they don’t have a warrant and refusing to voluntarily share undocumented student information.

“These are the things that we will commit to, that we will do and will not do in order to create a safe and supportive learning environment,” he declared.

His repetition of the same statement in Spanish, however, raised eyebrows among some members of the crowd, even though he had employed a similar tactic in a campus-wide email last month in which he first outlined UMD’s intent to resist federal immigration enforcement efforts.

Student Senator Ashley Vasquez, for instance, complained that Spanish “does not represent the entire immigrant community here” during a post-speech Q&A, asking Loh if he would like to apologize for repeating his promise in Spanish.

Vasquez later told The Diamondback that she found Loh’s use of Spanish offensive because it implied that the only immigrants on campus are “Latinx.”

This is brilliant on so many levels.

Firstly, why make the comment in Spanish at all? Is anybody studying at the University of Maryland incapable of speaking English? (Hint: No) Is this part of a policy of general bilingual communications, signs, written and verbal instructions at the university? (Hint: No again). The only reason for President Wallace Loh to make such a gesture is that it affords him a quick and easy way to signal his own virtue, his acceptance of absolutely all kinds of immigration, legal and illegal, moral and immoral.

To see Wallace Loh then called out by a professional offence-taking student for oppressing immigrant students of other backgrounds by failing to pander obsequiously to their own native languages is in many ways inevitable. Just as straight gay men are often no longer considered sufficiently “oppressed” to warrant full coverage under the Social Justice umbrella, so it may soon come to pass that “Latinx” students, being so plentiful in the United States, find themselves summarily deemed relatively privileged and cut adrift as the SJWs go looking for rarer and more exotic immigrants to defend.

And if one accepts SJW logic, who can argue with the student’s complaint? Hispanic people are a rapidly growing demographic in America. In the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where I have family, the Hispanic population far exceeds the white and there are some stores and businesses where I am disadvantaged as a non Spanish speaker. But in terms of how much their language is catered for in America, Hispanics are immensely “privileged” compared to, say, German, French or Mandarin speakers. The student is therefore doing what any good SJW student should do – casting aside the interests and concerns of a relatively privileged group and focusing on more “marginalised” ones instead.

But President Loh’s response makes this story even better:

Loh, who is Peruvian and a native Spanish speaker, did not initially address the question, but later responded to the accusations after a second student asked him to apologize, as well.

“I simply said that I completely support—I said in Spanish what I previously said in English,” Loh remarked with surprise. “Are you asking me to apologize because I’m speaking in Spanish, which is the first language I learned?”

Loh probably realises that he actually committed a bit of a culturally imperialistic faux-pas by translating his Ode to Undocumented Immigrants only into Spanish, thus suggesting that immigrants and illegal immigrants can only come from an Hispanic background. But he doesn’t want to back down, so instead he chooses to take public offence at the student for criticising him for speaking in his native language.

In other words, we have here a grown man and somebody who rose to the position of president of a state university flopping around on the floor like a wounded victim and playing the role of a wide-eyed innocent child whose ice cream was just stolen because rather than confess to a mistake, his social justice ideology commands him to always play the victim to get out of a tight spot.

Naturally the student was unimpressed with his deflection:

UMD senior Lauryn Froneberger apparently didn’t find Loh’s response sufficient, mainly because he did not concede that his use of Spanish was offensive.

“As a student you want to know that your university stands by you and won’t use language that sort of offends you,” Froneberger said. “And even if you let them know they offended you, I think it’s important to acknowledge that. I don’t think he acknowledged that at all.”

I’ve said it before and I will no doubt say it many more times on this blog – the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics is not about doing good or liberating people from genuine oppression. It is a first world, middle class cult of power, a virtual country club with its own finicky rules and seething, petty power struggles.

And this pathetic little exchange at the University of Maryland’s “State of the Campus” (ha!) address is just one of what will be many more tussles between students and faculty, both of whom drink the identity politics Kool-Aid and both of whom intend to use identity politics principles to bolster their own tawdry arguments and undermine their foes.

The University of Maryland’s own president is apparently unable to think properly in public or respond to a challenge when called out by a student in any way other than curling up into a ball and asserting hurt feewings victim status himself.

Where’s rock bottom again?

 

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The Mainstream Media Will Never Rebuild Public Trust So Long As It Covers Immigration With Such Overt Bias

Samuel Hooper16 Comments

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If the mainstream media really wants to rebuild public trust in their own reporting and editorial content, they should halt their their insidious campaigning for open borders and hysterical scaremongering about proper border controls and finally cover the immigration debate with impartiality and objectivity

For those who still do not quite understand why so many people are no longer willing to be spoon-fed “facts” and opinions from the mainstream media and their patrons within the establishment, I can do no better than give you this case study from the Sacramento Bee, and that newspaper’s editorial about president-elect Donald Trump’s likely policies on illegal immigration.

From the Editorial Board’s article:

When President-elect Donald Trump vowed at times during his campaign to expel 11 million undocumented immigrants upon taking office, Americans wondered whether he was just opening a negotiation or seriously telling the foreign-born that they should be very afraid.

The answer appears to be some of both. In his post-election interview with “60 Minutes,” Trump lowered his number, saying his administration would focus, at least initially, on “people that are criminal and have criminal records – gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million.”

“We are getting them out of the country,” he said, “or we are going to incarcerate.”

No one wants gang members and drug dealers to be out committing crimes, with or without papers. But beyond that, Team Trump has offered little to reassure this nation of immigrants.

My emphasis in bold.

The Sacramento Bee is utterly unable (or more likely unwilling) to distinguish between illegal immigrants – people who either entered the United States without permission or else deliberately overstayed their short term residencies – and “the foreign-born” in general.

To aid in that deliberate blurring of the boundaries, the word “undocumented” has been brought in to replace “illegal” as an attempt to bridge the gulf between people who join the back of the queue and emigrate to the United States through the lawful channels and those who (for whatever reason) choose to circumvent the process and make a mockery of those laws and the people who follow them.

(Indeed, elsewhere in the media there are people like despicable propagandist Jorge Rivas who ludicrously try to suggest that “undocumented” is somehow the neutral term while the more accurate “illegal” carries negative connotations that we should somehow swat away and ignore in the name of social justice).

But why should the “foreign-born” as a generic group be afraid of Donald Trump, as the Sacramento Bee suggests? Why should somebody who married a US citizen and completed the proper paperwork to become a legal resident or citizen of the United States fear? Why should somebody whose firm transferred them to the United States for a certain period of time, in compliance with the various visa requirements? Why should future US citizens such as myself – married to an American, with the ultimate intention of settling back in the United States – be concerned that Donald Trump intends to thwart our plans?

The answer, of course, is that none of these groups have any reason to fear the presidency of Donald Trump. The only people who may be immediately impacted by the new administration’s immigration policies will be those currently residing in the United States illegally. But the Sacramento Bee – together with nearly all of the mainstream print and television news media – are determined to suggest otherwise, to imply that the Evil Donald Trump intends to purge America of anyone with dark skin or a funny surname.

The media does this first by softening the language to downplay the lawbreaking aspect of the situation, re-branding illegal immigrants as merely “undocumented immigrants” – people who have every right to remain in the United States, but whose passports, visas and other documents proving their eligibility mysteriously disappeared in a puff of smoke, rendering them sadly undocumented. And then they falsely suggest that Donald Trump’s (and much of America’s) concern about illegal immigration is about immigration in general.

Of course, Britain has experienced a very similar phenomenon, most visible during the EU referendum in Britain. Since the previous Labour government’s refusal to adopt transitory controls on immigration (or even consult the people about such a measure) when the A10 Eastern European countries joined the European Union, net migration to the United Kingdom has increased at a rate far above the previous normal baseline, outstripping the growth of housing, the upgrading of infrastructure and (sometimes) the ability of communities to socially assimilate the new arrivals. Meanwhile, the government’s approach to those immigrants from outside the EU was equally “hands-off”, asking little by way of assimilation or community contribution from those who arrived, many of whom set up parallel communities based on ethnicity or religion, openly refusing the give-and-take of the melting pot in favour of a stubborn refusal to participate in the wider society.

But for over a decade, to even question the inherent virtue of fully open borders was denounced by the hysterical Left as being xenophobic at best, and deeply racist and fascistic at worst. Even when articulate explanations were made that the issue is not a hatred of foreigners but rather the absence of democratic consent and the fact that net migration continues to outstrip our present ability to manage without adverse side-effects, still the leftists roared that the people with concerns were racists hiding behind a thin veneer of respectability.

For me, the real low point came when a Sky News presenter interviewing schoolchildren for a feature about the rise of UKIP just prior to the general election, asked a credulous boy what he would think of an MP in Westminster who “says it is a problem” for people to have Polish or Bulgarian friends (neither of UKIP’s two MPs at the time were remotely racist or had ever expressed opposition to friendship between British people and legal immigrants).

Here was a reporter for a national TV news channel so utterly unaware of his own internal biases (I’ll be kind and refrain from accusing him of deliberate malevolence) that he thought nothing of suggesting to an innocent schoolkid (and millions of viewers watching at home) that the one party seriously committed at the time to controlling immigration volumes was racist and against anybody befriending people of other nationalities.

And this remark went completely unnoticed, unpunished by Ofcom (the regulator) because it was so utterly typical of the mainstream media’s approach to immigration.

And that approach can be described as follows: All immigration, legal and illegal, skilled and unskilled, is to be encouraged to the fullest extent possible. There is no moral difference between coming to live in a (Western) country legally and doing so illegally. If anything, illegal immigrants are to be praised and put on a pedestal for their courage in flouting the law. Any attempts to limit immigration volumes in response to popular concerns are inherently racist, and are to be ignored or shouted down as forcefully as possible, while those people daring to express such views should be publicly demonised and accused of harbouring intolerant, xenophobic opinions. Private citizens demanding controls on immigration are racist. Politicians seeking to respond to public concerns about immigration are irresponsible populists seeking to stir dark and malevolent forces of bigotry.

The thing is, eventually people get sick of being told that they are mean or intolerant or racist simply for wanting to see the law properly enforced, or for the integrity of national borders to be defended. And while half the country (Britain or America) seem happy to lap up the Kool-Aid and parrot the establishment talking points that unlimited immigration is a good thing – usually those Americans who only ever see the positive sides of immigration, and whose economic position insulates them from the negative sides – the other half of the country is increasingly unwilling to let itself be cowed into silence by the moralising minority.

Americans are fully aware that they are a “nation of immigrants”, as the Sacramento Bee insufferably sees fit to remind their readers. And none of those first-generation immigrants who respected the law have the slightest thing to worry about. But the mainstream media and other open borders cheerleaders cannot admit this fact, as their only hope of achieving their open borders dream is by mobilising a political movement based on the false idea that all immigrants are under threat. This is nonsense.

Most Americans are probably willing to be reasonable about illegal immigration. They would be receptive to the argument that were they in the position of poor or desperate migrants looking for a better life for their families, they would probably be tempted to flout immigration law too. Many Americans understand that it is neither feasible nor moral to deport up to 11 million people overnight, and that to attempt to do so would be bad for the people involved, bad for an economy which relies on their labour and bad for the federal budget which would have to burden the cost of increased deportations.

In other words, a reasonable compromise around immigration – involving greater border security, the deportation of those illegal immigrants who have committed other crimes while in the United States and a path toward permanent residency (if not full citizenship) for those involved – was within reach. At least prior to the election of Donald Trump.

But no – the media and their establishment backers overreached. They did not want reasonable compromise (not, it should be noted, that the Republicans presented a tremendously friendly face for negotiating such a deal), preferring to shoot for everything they wanted (de facto open borders, legalisation of all those currently illegally living in the United States and less stringent rules for newcomers) by demonising all of those who dared to oppose that agenda.

And even now they can’t stop. Even now their maximalist position on open borders has helped to deliver Donald Trump to the White House, media outlets like the Sacramento Bee are wringing their hands that Trump intends to persecute all immigrants, and suggesting that there is no moral difference between “undocumented immigrants” and those who seek to become new Americans the legal way.

At this point the mainstream media deserve their fate. The fruits of their hysterical demonising of anybody with doubts about uncontrolled immigration are staring back at them in the form of president-elect Donald J Trump, and even now they are unable or unwilling to change the script, or to concede that perhaps not everybody with qualms about immigration harbours a seething hostility to brown people.

The media’s overt, unapologetic bias on the subject of immigration has helped to deliver Brexit to the United Kingdom and President Donald Trump to the United States – both results which they absolutely feared and detested. So given that their current strategy of overt bias is not working, why do they still refuse to compromise and play it straight with the people? Why will they not realise that openly cheering for one side while demonising the other simply doesn’t work in the age of alternative media and the independent blogosphere?

This is going to get worse before it gets better, unless the mainstream media stops mindlessly reciting the propaganda of the open borders zealots and starts reporting on immigration more objectively and less manipulatively. And right now, there is very little chance of such a miracle occurring.

 

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Brexit Catastrophisation Watch, Part 7 – Don’t Speak German In Public, Or You Will Be Lynched

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

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Hand-wringing, self-pitying Remainers see racism and xenophobia on every corner of post-Brexit Britain, and publicly fret that the country has suddenly become an “unsafe space” for European immigrants

We knew things were bad, but not this bad.

Apparently Britain is such a seething hotbed of overt, suddenly-legitimised racism since the EU referendum took place that it is no longer safe for Germans living in London to openly speak their native language, lest they meet a violent end.

Peddling an extraordinarily irresponsible piece of hysterical speculation originally published in Die Welt, the Evening Standard reports:

Germans have been advised not to speak their native language in London following the Brexit vote.

Lawyer Carmen Prem, who has lived in the capital for 13 years, offered the advice for an article in German newspaper Die Welt.

The piece claimed foreigners were feeling “stronger xenophobia” since the referendum.

According to the article, there is now “a new bitterness, an anger which hardly any of the countless non-British on the island expected”.

And Carmen Prem, a mother-of-two, told the paper: “If you are out with the children, maybe don’t speak German too loudly at the moment.”

Yes. Britain is now so unsafe and hostile to foreigners that it is dangerous for parents to speak German to their children while out in public. In London, that great bastion of euroscepticism, nativism and xenophobia.

This is ridiculous. The absurdly, unthinkingly high level of support for the European Union within the nation’s capital was the only thing that made this referendum outcome a remotely close result for the Remain campaign. Take London away and Britain might actually be living in some kind of Nigel Farage funland right now. And yet we are supposed to believe that the capital city of the early 21st century world, which staunchly voted to remain in the EU during the referendum, is somehow hostile to European foreigners who live and work here?

Well, somebody needs to tell the half of France who seem to be living in my own corner of London, West Hampstead. None of them seem particularly perturbed by the oppressive air of racist doom which apparently now hangs over them; nor have they been reduced to only speaking their language from within the safety of secret societies or covert meeting places in cellars and basements – French is easily the second most spoken language on the high street and in the cafes.

More:

In the same article, German professor Mischa Dohler, who works at King’s College London, said he was seriously considering moving abroad.

The academic said he had received countless job offers but had turned down a role in Cambridge because of uncertainty following the Brexit vote.

He said: “Many non-British academics simply see no future here.”

No future. Okay. Sure, because there is simply no way that immigrants can live in another country unless those two countries are bound together as part of an ever-tightening supranational government, right? It simply couldn’t happen. The EU is the only thing which makes friendly cooperation and immigration between countries possible. I myself would never have been able to work in Chicago for a year were Britain and the United States not part of the same continental political unio — oh wait. Yes I was.

And the fact that so many weepy British europhiles and EU residents of Britain see their lives and futures as being dependent solely on the EU, of all things, only shows how effective forty years of relentless pro-EU propaganda, toothless media coverage and incoherent political opposition have been in making their creepy supranational project seem central to European peace and prosperity when in fact it has been marginal at best and an active drag at worst.

The idea that there is some kind of imminent pogrom against foreigners living in Britain is ludicrous – and all the more so when the people making the charge live in London, the most cosmopolitan corner of the UK (and probably the whole of Europe). But that’s not to say that there have not been isolated and deplorable acts of referendum-related bigotry and even violence.

Tragically, my hometown of Harlow, Essex managed to distinguish itself by playing host to what some people rather hysterically termed the first Brexit-related murder in the country, a young Polish factory worker set upon by a group of teenage hooligans and beaten to death. However, from my recollection and personal experience of being set upon by feral youths in that town, the kind of mindless young thugs who wander around Harlow late at night looking for a brawl are so completely brain-dead that I would be surprised if any of them even realised that a referendum had taken place. Current affairs tends not to be their forte.

And so we find ourselves in an absurd situation. We have been continually told – quite rightly – that we must refrain from forming any negative opinions about immigrants based on the bad actions or non-assimilation of a few. Yet apparently immigrants from the EU are being encouraged to form negative opinions about the whole of Britain based on one or two rather dubious-sounding anecdotes offered by by German professionals?

If anything is harming Britain right now, it is the ongoing attempts to catastrophise Brexit being fomented by bitter Remainers – people who would seemingly rather Britain descend into some dark, dystopian future and be vindicated in their doomsaying than help their own country to present a positive, open and internationalist face to the world.

We should not be surprised. In an age where looking good (and signalling virtue) is more important than actually doing good, there is every incentive for Remainers to continue seizing on every morsel of bad news, overlooking every positive development and generally acting hysterically, so long as their precious internal narrative – that They Virtuous Few stood alone against the “dark forces” of racist Brexit – is not disrupted.

Personally, I find it despicable, but good luck to them.

 

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Britain’s Leftist Open Borders Zealots Have Turned Migrants And Refugees Into Political Pawns

Samuel Hooper6 Comments

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The migrant crisis is too great an opportunity to ignore for many virtue-signalling members of Generation Me, Me, Me

Brendan O’Neill hits the nail on the head with his latest criticism of sanctimonious celebrity campaigners for open borders, in a piece entitled “You’re so vain, you think the refugee crisis is about you”.

O’Neill writes:

Narcissism runs through the discussion. The question these refugees raise is ‘What kind of people do we want to be?’, says one columnist. The keyword here: ‘we’. On the supposedly pro-refugee side, the game of self-reflection has been intense. Witness Allen’s TV-camera tears when she was chatting to an Afghan boy in Calais, after which the entire discussion became about her. Her image was everywhere. There was a thinkpiece war, some saying ‘Allen was right’, others saying ‘Allen was wrong’. It became about the role of celebrities in public life and whether emotionalism has a part to play in political decision-making, with the migrants reduced to mere objects of our self-reflection, and our tears, not the subjects of their own story.

Then there was Stella Creasy, the self-promoting Labour MP, interviewed in the London Evening Standard, promising to stand up for these child migrants regardless of how much flak she will get (shorter version: ‘I am brave’). The piece was accompanied by a massive picture of Creasy: no image of refugees, just her, because this is about her, not them. Then the story became all about Lineker, after he tweeted his concern for the refugees and was blasted by the Sun for doing so. What is the role of BBC people if not to be morally switched-on, a thousand op-ed scribblers asked, because this is about the Beeb, and the media, and us, not them. Jeremy Corbyn got stuck into the discussion of ‘what kind of people we want to be’ by praising Allen and Lineker for showing ‘Britain at its best’. It was a surreal illustration of the evacuation of substance and seriousness from public debate and their replacement by The Spectacle, largely of emotion: a political leader hailing media representations of sorrow for migrants over anything solid or concrete in relation to the actual lives of the actual migrants.

The media discussion has provided a striking insight into what being pro-migration largely means today: that you – the keyword being ‘you’ – are compassionate. Migrants are latched on to, not because of a genuine commitment to the idea of free movement (witness Creasy saying of course some migrants will have to be kept out), but rather as a means of self-distinction. To be pro-migrant is to be superior to those badly informed Others, who have a name now: Brexiteers. This is why so much of the child-refugee discussion has become bound up with Brexit-bashing. ‘What do we see each morning, post-Brexit, when we look in the mirror?’, asked a Guardian columnist of the child-refugee situation (keyword: ‘mirror’). He says we see a nation ‘hollowed out in terms of compassion’, but of course he means that is what ordinary, ugly, Brexit-voting Brits see in the mirror, not the migrant-loving Brits at the Guardian.

My emphasis in bold.

To be fair, Brendan also accuses many of the most strident anti-migrant voices of the same sin; I do not want to misrepresent his piece. But then Brendan O’Neill and Spiked (bless them) are enthusiastic advocates for completely open borders and the free movement of people everywhere – “it doesn’t matter if they’re kids, teens or adults: the length of their journey and the strength of their desire to live and work on Britain are surely sufficient to grant them access” – an idea rather ahead of its time (not to mention politically toxic so long as such disparities of wealth, culture and values persist).

But Brendan is absolutely right to note that the people of the Calais Jungle – genuine refugees and economic migrants alike – have largely been become political pawns in the ongoing British immigration debate. What matters to many people is how they are seen to talk about the migrant crisis rather than there being found an effective solution – as we saw only this week when Labour MP Chi Onwurah got upset about a poster mocking leftist credulity about migrants posing as refugees, claiming that it was “offensive” when it in no way targeted genuine child refugees.

O’Neill also writes perceptively of the “moral thrill” experienced by many of the “let them all in” camp, and indeed you see it coursing through numerous posts on social media, the intent of many seems far more to do with aggrandising the poster than trying to reach a reasonable compromise with those who do not want to let every last person into Britain unquestioningly.

But to his criticism of the political right:

The narcissism of the other side is striking, too. It is hard to believe that these right-leaning observers really believe that 70 young people coming to Britain will have any kind of terrible impact. And yet they demand that the arrivals’ teeth be checked to see how old they are, and furiously tweet photos of the young men with adolescent moustaches and mobile phones as if to say: ‘See! They’re grown-up! They’re dangerous!’ This is a performance of toughness, of security, to match the performance of compassion of the other side. Just as the pro-refugee side sidelines serious debate about freedom of movement and the role of their beloved EU and its Fortress Europe in creating this crisis, so the anti-refugee side dodges difficult questions of what is really causing a sense of insecurity in 21st-century Europe in favour of turning a handful of young refugees into symbols of existential disarray. Indicators, symbols, mirrors – that’s all these people are, to both sides.

I don’t see it that way at all. While some people do demand that Britain stop accepting any further refugees, a majority would be happy, I believe, if the UK government was simply a little less credulous and a bit more discerning about the people we do accept – both as to their age and the validity of their status as refugees rather than economic migrants.

The pictures do not lie – many of those already brought to Britain from the dismantled Calais Jungle camp are clearly adults. Does that automatically mean that they are not deserving of help? No, and I don’t think that anybody serious has claimed otherwise. But if this country is accepting fully grown men who claim to be children, what is to say that other levels of scrutiny which are supposedly taking place – like checking that entrants are not violent jihadists – are any more reliable? If the UK government is squeamish about insisting that child refugee applicants submit to dental tests to verify their age, have they also been reticent to ask whether the people they are ferrying from Calais to Croydon intend to wage jihad from inside their adoptive country? The incompetence we have already seen rightly makes us wonder about the incompetence which is being kept hidden from us.

These are perfectly legitimate questions to ask, and they do not constitute virtue signalling in the same way that the Left have seized on the migrant crisis to portray themselves as saints and the rest of us as sinners. Particularly in the context of the recent bloody history of ISIS using the migration crisis as a cover to slip Islamist extremists into Western countries, a basic level of scrutiny should be one of the first duties of government – yet there is now legitimate cause to fear that this scrutiny is not being applied for fear of causing “offence”, either to the migrants themselves or (more likely) to their powerful left-wing cheerleaders.

And here’s the thing.

Far right-wing rhetoric may be much more unpleasant to the ear than trendy lefty dronings about a borderless world of people holding hands beneath a rainbow. But leftist rhetoric and actions when it comes to the migrant crisis have killed far more people than anything said or done by those who are sceptical of accepting every last economic migrant who fancies a new life in Britain.

It was the leftist cheerleaders of Angela Merkel’s “open doors” policy who encouraged thousands more people to make the treacherous journey across Europe, some in genuine fear of imminent harm but many simply seeking a better life.

It was the leftist campaigners who accused sceptics of heartlessness for wanting to start turning boats back as a disincentive to make perilous the sea voyage who tacitly encouraged many more people to do so, and drown in the process.

And it was the false hope given by leftist agitators that Britain would ultimately accept a trumped-up moral obligation to accept thousands of people already enjoying the protection of France, hardly the most dangerous country in the world, which encouraged even more people to flock to the Jungle and remain there.

And yet we are supposed to believe that open borders zealots and sceptics are equally at fault when it comes to virtue signalling about the migrant crisis? Absolutely not. Exploiting migrants and refugees to burnish their own compassion credentials is the Left’s bread and butter, and it is an emotional comfort blanket whose cost can be measured in human lives.

So let’s not pretend that there is any moral equivalency in terms of blame for the suffering of migrants holed up in Calais. There is none. This is a crisis manufactured by the Left and encouraged by the Left for the benefit of the Left. They own it.

And all of Lily Allen’s tears will not wash away their culpability.

 

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Adults Migrants Posing As Children Make A Mockery Of British Asylum, But Pointing This Out “Offends” The Left

Samuel Hooper6 Comments

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Leftists do not scream “that’s offensive!” out of overwhelming, saintly concern for the supposed “victims” of free speech. They do so as part of an authoritarian ploy to shut down unwanted discussion and mockery of their own sacred values

One does not need to see the dental records of some of the people currently being brought to the UK from the soon-to-be-demolished Jungle refugee camp in Calais to know that a number of those migrants (for who can say whether most are genuine refugees?) are not, as they claim to be, under the age of eighteen.

In fact, one barely needed a functioning brain to correctly predict that a number of enterprising military-age males might seek to game the system, claiming to be both children and refugees when one or both assertions are entirely false (current figures show that two thirds of “child” refugees challenged by Home Office officials turned out to be adults).

As Peter Hitchens notes:

I confess I was rather looking forward to the arrival of the alleged ‘children’ from the Calais migrant camp.

Leftists have an oily habit of stretching the definition of this emotional word. It helps them make the exaggerated claims of suffering, by which they so often achieve their political aims.

I fully expected to see square-jawed, muscled, hairy young men of military age, and I have greatly enjoyed the embarrassment of the soppy idiots who spread and believed the propaganda about them.

Of course it’s possible that they are all really 12, and have been terribly hardened by war and suffering. But if that is so, how come they are in a crime-ridden camp in France, which exists purely to besiege our borders and launch illegal attempts to cross them?

Nobody ever asks how the inhabitants of this camp got there, because the answer in almost all cases is that they were trafficked there by well-paid crooks. What responsible parent would put an actual child in the hands of such people, notorious worldwide for their ruthlessness?

And why are we supposed to be so tear-stained that these people are stuck in France? France, the last time I looked, was one of the most civilised countries in the world. It is not a war zone. Nobody starves there. There are schools. Many fashionable British liberals own houses there. The quality of the coffee has gone down a bit in recent years, but that is no reason to stow away in a lorry or climb a 15ft fence so you can move to Tottenham or Slough.

And with so many transparently post-adolescent people being dutifully shipped across the English Channel and ushered into Britain by a credulous Home Office, it does not fall beyond the bounds of reasonable political humour to joke about the way in which British immigration and asylum rules are being so nakedly and egregiously flouted (the photo captions in this Daily Mail piece are some of the best political comedy this month).

Unless, that is, you are a thin-skinned Labour MP whose metro-leftist ideology demands that anybody and everybody who demands admittance to Britain is immediately and unquestioningly allowed in. For in such cases, joking about octogenarian “children” being rescued from the perils of France is not mere political banter – it is inherently racist for a start, and worse, it is highly offensive and triggering to those leftist MPs whose ideology and motivations are being mocked.

The Mirror reports:

A Labour shadow minister has been left upset after someone stuck up a “highly offensive” child refugees joke in her shared kitchen in Westminster.

Chi Onwurah shared the A4 sheet on Twitter after it was found this morning in the room she shares with Labour, Tory and SNP MPs.

The message mocked refugees after pundits and Tory MPs questioned the age of arrivals in Britain who said they were under 18.

It showed an old man with the message: “Just £3 from you could clothe and feed this 12-year-old Syrian child for a week”.

Highly offensive, really?

Who, exactly, does Chi Onwurah think is offended by this poster? Genuine child refugees from Syria? None of them have visited the House of Commons kitchen, or had an opportunity to see the offending poster. Genuine child refugees will have far more pressing cares and concerns on their innocent minds than a poster which mocks people who are clearly above the threshold of adulthood but trying to pass themselves off as children.

No, the only people “offended” by this poster are the virtue-signalling, bleeding heart lefties who are currently puffing themselves up with over-conspicuous compassion for people who already enjoy the shelter and protection of a safe and very pleasant country (France) because their metro-leftist ideology calls them to undermine the nation state at every turn and defy national borders wherever they exist.

And as even the MP herself emphasises to us, the main takeaway from this event is that Chi Onwurah, not any refugee or person directly connected to the migrant crisis, was left “upset” by the incident:

In other words, Onwurah – who, as an MP, is an immensely privileged and powerful member of society – was left distressed because somebody challenged and mocked her worldview in the form of a poster. That’s what we are invited to feel upset about, really. Not the genuine child refugees themselves. Screw the child refugees. Screw the adult refugees posing as children, for that matter. No, what really matters here is that a virtue-signalling Compassion Olympian like Chi Onwurah encountered some unexpected pushback against her leftist worldview, and promptly fell to pieces as a consequence.

This is – oh, how best to put it? – completely and utterly pathetic. This blog has sympathy for anybody desperate enough to traverse the continent of Europe and then rot in an improvised camp in Calais just to try to reach our shores. That sympathy does not extend to wanting to throw open our borders to anyone who seeks to abuse the asylum process to have their pick of safe European destinations – that’s not what asylum is for or how the system is supposed to work, and the nation state ceases to mean anything if everyone who fancies a life in Britain can claim one – but there is great sympathy nonetheless. And I back that concern and sympathy with action where I can, with charitable donations to appropriate organisations seeking to provide relief to genuine refugees.

But this blog has absolutely no sympathy for Chi Onwurah. I hope that with time and extensive therapy, the MP for Newcastle Central will manage to recover from the immense personal trauma of encountering a poster which contradicted and mocked her own personal worldview. It is truly a calamity of monstrous proportions, verging on torture, for a leftist MP to accidentally behold a poster which scorns her own personal belief that every last migrant seeking to gain entry to Britain is a legitimate refugee from the Syrian conflict, or that everyone who claims to be a child is actually under the age of eighteen. We may as well be honest – the person who put up this poster in the House of Commons tea room effectively mentally waterboarded poor Ms. Onwurah. There is simply no other way to put it.

And yet call me crazy, but this blog would sooner feel sympathy for those genuine refugees who have undergone untold sufferings on their voyage to Europe than for an MP who (shock, horror) experienced indirect mockery in the House of Commons – an unheard of and unprecedented indignity, I’m sure.

But this is how the modern Left operates. They have weaponised victimhood and offence-taking to such an extent that the target of any supposedly “offensive” speech no longer even has to be the victim group currently being exploited for political gain. Now, it is an equal crime to “offend” the leftist advocates of that victim group. Insulting Chi Onwurah is like insulting a vulnerable child refugee herself, according to this ridiculous mindset. To offend against a leftist white knight is to offend against their beneficiary.

The Mirror article concludes:

Directing her comments at whoever posted the image she said: “It’s a communal area, not everybody shares your sense of humour.

“There are many things I get angry about but I’m not going to force that on my work colleagues.

“I don’t think it’s funny. Not when you see what people have been through coming from Syria.

“People often share jokes but this is a communal area and I and others shouldn’t have to suffer what you think is funny.”

Ms Onwurah said her researcher took the poster down, and she was unlikely to make a formal complaint if it broke the rules because she had already highlighted it by making it public.

Again, we are invited to feel sympathy for and rend our garments in solidarity with Chi Onwurah, who has seen refugees from a distance, rather than with the refugees themselves. It is her trauma we are supposed to care about, not that of the migrants and refugees in Calais. The self-involvement of Onwurah’s complaint would be hilarious, were it not quite so sickening.

From her fainting couch, Onwurah writes that she should not have to “suffer” the sense of humour of the person who erected the poster, despite also conceding that other “people often share jokes”, seemingly without arousing her ire. In other words, Onwurah effectively sets the bar for offence within the Palace of Westminster at the low level of her own easily-triggered sensitivities.

And yet Onwurah actually believes she is being magnanimous by not reporting the incident to the House of Commons authorities (who presumably have an HR policy ready to go, just waiting for the moment when a Labour MP was triggered by a satirical poster). Onwurah clearly believes that it is perfectly within her legal and moral rights to summon the authorities and have them crash down like a ton of bricks on the head of the perpetrator – and that she is showing mercy to the perpetrator by not doing so.

Ultimately, Chi Onwurah’s complaint asks the British people to be more concerned that a home-made poster violated the safe space for leftist groupthink that is the House of Commons communal areas than we are about the plight of genuine child refugees stranded in Calais.

Leftists like Onwurah are aghast that a harmless poster mocked and contradicted their worldview, and have no compunction about assuming the same language of frailty and victimhood as the people they so ostentatiously affect to help, even though we can say with cast iron certainty that No Refugee Was Harmed In The Making Of This Poster.

And that really tells you everything you need to know about the self-involvement, decadence and moral bankruptcy of the modern Left.

 

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Bottom Image: Chi Onwurrah / Twitter

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