Refugees look over rail of cruise ship. Funny that the article says it was mostly women and children. Looks like a lot of young men to me. Photo: AFP/Andrew Cabellero-Reynolds
These are not ‘asylum seekers,’ they are ‘asylum shoppers’ wanting to get to the best countries offering ‘services.’
LIMASSOL, Cyprus: Hundreds of mostly Syrian refugees rescued by a cruise liner in the Mediterranean disembarked in Cyprus on Friday, after hours of refusing to budge and demanding to go to Italy.
A total of 345 migrants, mainly women and children, had been plucked from a boat in trouble off the coast of Cyprus Thursday by the cruise ship.
Some 700 paying passengers disembarked from the 157-meter liner at the port of Limassol, police said, but only 65 of those rescued at sea initially left the ship Thursday.
The others had refused to budge, the shipping company said.
The situation was resolved shortly before dawn Friday after police entered the vessel to talk to the remaining refugees, who finally agreed to leave, according to Marinos Papadopoulos, an Interior Ministry official.
See our entire ‘invasion of Europe’ series by clicking here.
Wow! This is a very enlightening piece. And, it’s in the New York Times no less!
Stockholm under siege in May 2013 as Muslim migrants riot. http://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/452746/fourth-night-fires-unrest-stockholm.jpg?w=480&h=270
Swedish counter-terrorism expert:
We are righteous. But sometimes the righteousness doesn’t meet reality.”
Seems that as Sweden opens its doors to Syrians (and the public is expected to stay quiet), in Norway the government is not going to swing its doors open and the “anti-immigrant” political forces are encouragedto discuss their concerns and fears about excessive immigration. (I wonder did Anders Breivik have something to do with the new-found openness?)
THE narrow victory of the left-leaning Social Democratic Party in Sweden’s elections last Sunday marked a broad shift in its politics. But a new coalition government is unlikely to reconsider one of the country’s most challenging policies: its response to the Syrian civil war.
Sweden has taken an open-door approach to people fleeing the conflict, accepting more Syrians than any other European country.
Never mind that Sweden has double-digit youth unemployment. That there have been riots in immigrant neighborhoods in Stockholm. That there is a severe housing shortage for new arrivals. Or that the Swedish Migration Board, which handles asylum seekers, needs a drastic budget increase — almost $7 billion — to cover soaring costs over the next few years.
And never mind that the far-right, anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats won 13 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election, their best showing ever. They more than doubled their seats in Parliament — from 20 to 49 — and are now the third-biggest party in the country.
“We are the moral guardians of the world,” Magnus Ranstorp, a specialist in counterterrorism at the Swedish National Defense College, told me a few days before the election, referring to Swedes. “We haven’t fought a war in 200 years. We are righteous. But sometimes the righteousness doesn’t meet reality.”
As the Syrian conflict has turned into a regional humanitarian crisis, more European countries are accepting Syrian refugees preselected by the United Nations. But apart from Germany, a much larger country, only Sweden is welcoming tens of thousands of Syrians who come on their own and request asylum.
Some 40,000 Syrians have arrived in Sweden since the conflict began. And following a decision to offer permanent residency to all Syrians, Sweden is expecting more than 80,000 asylum seekers in 2014, many of them from Syria.
In its largess, Sweden diverges from countries like Britain, the Netherlands and Denmark, which have taken in far fewer Syrian asylum-seekers — generally granting them only temporary residency — and just several hundred United Nations-sponsored refugees each. Even more dramatic is the contrast with Norway……
Opposition party leader, Inger Støjberg, calls for tougher rules on Muslim immigration. http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/07/30/Danish-politician-calls-for-tougher-rules-on-Muslim-immigration
Danish current-affairs magazine MandagMorgen has published a report on welfare and benefits which reveals that while the cost of supporting immigrants and their descendents has exploded, the cost of keeping native Danes is falling.
The magazine, which is a publication of one of Scandinavia’s leading think-tanks differentiates between “immigrants and descendants from non-Western countries” and ethnic Danes in its report. The revelation that the cost of welfare for the immigrants has increased by two billion kronor (over £200 million) since 2010 has prompted a bout of soul-searching amongst the leaders of Denmark’s Social Liberal pro-immigration party, who are presently part of the ruling coalition.
Denmark has experienced a sudden rush of immigration from these non-Western groups in past decades, and over one-in-ten Danes is now an immigrant or the descendant of one. Two thirds of immigrants, some 400,000, are non-Western, with Somalis, Turks, and Iraqis forming large, visible groups.
The arrival of large groups of immigrants from cultures unlike Denmark has caused friction within the country. An opposition politician was reported saying in July: “It is primarily Muslim immigrants who do not value democracy and freedom. In certain environments, they directly oppose it. Too many non-Western immigrants with Muslim backgrounds do not want our freedom-orientated society model.
And, of course their deaths will be blamed on Israel. We wrote about this sinking incident here yesterday.
Sure looks like US taxpayers helped fund their voyage. The US is the top donor of UNRWA (the special UN agency just for Palestinians).
Just one of many maps showing migration routes to Europe. http://www.stratint.nl/2013/08/migration-routes-europe.html
Many paragraphs in to this article from the EU Observer we learn this:
The Palestinian men told the IOM [International Organization for Migration] they paid a “travel office” in Gaza $2,000 each using money from grants to rebuild their homes.
Haaretz reports, citing an anonymous trafficker, that some pay up to $4,000. They enter Egypt through tunnels under the Rafah crossing point, where buses drive them through the Sinai desert to safe houses.
The sea voyage to Europe can take a week because they are forced to keep changing boats.
The smugglers bribe Egyptian officials. They also have agents in south Europe who help migrants get out of detention facilities. Some tell the Palestinians to claim they are Syrians escaping the civil war.
The survivors told IOM their boat was deliberately rammed by traffickers in waters south of Malta on 11 September when the migrants refused to board a smaller vessel.
“After they hit our boat they waited to make sure that it had sunk completely before leaving. They were laughing”, one survivor said.
The traffickers had their money, and like most Middle Eastern Muslims they must see the Palestinians as pawns in their more important war with Israel.
Could it be that Obama Administration pals in the No Borders movement (including the Catholic Church) used the “children” as pawns and started the stampede northward? I think so, and hope one day we will all have the truth.
In the meantime, here comes a worldwide study that puts El Salvador and Guatemala in the top ten countries where people are most satisfied with their lives, while the US is number 12!
From the Daily Mail(hat tip: ‘pungentpeppers’). A picture is worth a thousand words:
Latin America is the place to feel happy: Seven of the top 10 countries in the well-being poll hailed from the Americas, with Canada rounding out the top 10. Six of the 10 worst were from Africa
Here is how the article begins (Respondents were asked to rate their well-being over five categories: purpose, social, financial, community and physical):
People in Panama feel happiest about their lives, according to a new global well-being poll in which the U.S. finished 12th and the United Kingdom 26th.
There were six Latin American countries in the top 10 in the poll, which asked people to measure their well-being across five key areas.
Panamanians were well above the world average for feeling positive about their lives – 61 per cent were found to be ‘thriving’ in at least three of the five facets – compared with just 17 per cent internationally.
