Thursday, July 9, 2015

Bishop of Manchester says Britain has a moral duty to accept refugees from its wars

A great opinion by the bishop of Manchester, UK. Developed countries are feverishly trying to destabilize developing countries through arms & weapons smuggling / selling, & of course, actively encouraging wars among developing countries.

As I have blogged previously that one of the primary reasons of creating wars overseas for developed countries is to create such dire conditions in the developing countries that their bright minds (& hopefully, with money) are forced to emigrate to developed countries, where they become compliant, law-abiding, tax-paying second-class citizens.

Problem with these "illegal" migrants from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, & Northern African countries is that these are poor &, in most cases, are uneducated, too. Not exactly the kinds of immigrants developed countries of North America & Europe are looking for. So they just want to push them back to their own countries.

But, the justice would be "if you break it, you buy it." (meaning: if you are going to actively intervene in another country's political, economic, social, & cultural facets, then you may as well be prepared for picking up the pieces if your strategy backfires).
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One of the country’s most senior bishops has said that Britain has a moral imperative to accept refugees from conflicts in which it has participated.
 
After a week in which the death toll of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean into Europe grew to 1,700 so far this year, the bishop of Manchester, David Walker, said there was a duty to treat the survivors with compassion.
 
In a piece for the Observer published online, he writes: “They are pushed, not pulled, towards the EU, forced out of their homelands by war, terrorism & the persecution of minorities. A political rhetoric that characterises them as wilful criminals rather than helpless victims is as unworthy as it is untrue.”

The UK’s pivotal role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq prompted a sectarian war that the UN said had forced two million Iraqis to flee the country, an involvement that ran alongside the 13-year Afghanistan war & was followed by the 2011 attacks on Libya, both of which precipitated significant regional instability & migration.
 
According to the UN Refugee Agency in 2013, one in four refugees was Afghan, although most were in neighbouring countries, while the ongoing instability in Libya was credited with making the north African state a haven for people smugglers.
 
Walker writes: “The moral cost of our continual overseas interventions has to include accepting a fair share of the victims of the wars to which we have contributed as legitimate refugees in our own land.

I want my country to be governed by those who are prepared to look at the faces of the desperate, be it the desperation of the asylum seeker or of the food bank client, & to look at them with compassion.”

Despite the huge numbers of migrants heading north, only 5,000 resettlement places across Europe have been offered to refugees under an emergency summit crisis package agreed by EU leaders, with the rest sent back as irregular migrants under a new rapid-return programme coordinated by the EU’s border agency, Frontex.

Welcome though it was that European leaders sat down to talk about the situation this week, their conclusions seem more directed at making the symptoms less visible than at tackling the disease,” said Walker.
 
A 2014 report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime estimated that there might be 600,000 migrants on the north Africa coast who could try to get to Europe by sea.

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