Believe it or not, there is other news in the world these days that doesn’t involve the Chinese virus!
Just one of the tens of thousands of ‘refugees’ who have made their way to Europe! So much for the highly touted biometric data!
“This is a major problem,” a counter-terrorism official in Belgium told Insider. “Abdel-Bary isn’t some Syrian guy nobody has ever heard of. He’s a well-known jihadist from a well-known jihadist family … Now it turns out he’s not dead but rather living in a rented apartment on the Spanish coast.”
The arrest in Spain of an infamous member of Islamic State from London who authorities thought had been killed in Syria has sparked fears among security officials that more foreign fighters survived the fall of ISIS-controlled territory than previously imagined.
Worse, sources tell Insider, he found a way to smuggle himself back into Europe by avoiding customs checks and biometric tracking at borders.
Abdel-Majed Abdel-Bary and two unnamed associates were arrested Monday by Spanish police in the Mediterranean port city of Almeria after coordination with the UK domestic intelligence service MI5, which had been attempting to track him since he left the UK to join ISIS in Syria in 2015.
Abdel-Bary is the son of Adel Abdel Bari, who has been accused of killing 224 people in various bomb attacks across Africa. Some believe he is linked to the terror cell that committed the Bataclan massacre in Paris in 2015.
“This is a major problem,” a counter-terrorism official in Belgium told Insider.
“Abdel-Bary isn’t some Syrian guy nobody has ever heard of. He’s a well-known jihadist from a well-known jihadist family who was active on social media from Syria and was closely linked to both the cyber-caliphate activities of Junaid Hussain and the cell of UK fighters who controlled the Western hostages in Raqqa.
Now it turns out he’s not dead but rather living in a rented apartment on the Spanish coast.”
Just another of those poor suffering refugees.
The official said the immediate suspicion was that Abdel-Bary was able to make his way back to Europe at some point in the last few years amid the ongoing flood of civilian refugees.
[….]
“Who else is living here inside Schengen […the area of 26 countries in mainland Europe through which citizens are allowed to move without passports] and able to move around freely without showing ID?” asked the Belgian official, who had tracked both the Molenbeek Cell and then assisted French and Belgian special forces in targeting Francophone fighters during the fighting in Mosul and Raqqa from 2016 to 2019.
[….]
Abdel-Bary, 28, was involved in drug dealing and had a small star turn as a jihadi inspired rapper. He was influenced by his Egyptian-born father’s yearslong detention in the UK while awaiting extradition to the US on charges he was a member of al Qaida who helped plan the 1998 East African embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
There is an interesting discussion about how the French and British military attempted to kill as many of their nationals who had joined ISIS presumably so they wouldn’t have to bother with them if they turned up back home in France or the UK.
See my complete ‘Invasion of Europe’archive that extends back for a decade. LOL! You might have a little extra reading time on your hands these days!
Endnote: You might have noticed that both of my blogs were down for awhile yesterday. Apparently my hosting company was doing some fixes, nothing nefarious!
Or a combination of the two! Whatever, it can’t be soon enough for member states like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic who steadfastly insist on their right to control their own borders.
Invasion of Europe news….
No!!! Said Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 2015.
Gatestone writer Judith Bergman has agood piece this morningabout the recent decision by The Court of Justice of the European Union that says those three countries violated the EU principle of “solidarity” in not inviting thousands of supposed “war refugees” to live in their countries.
EU: Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic Broke EU Law
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic broke EU law when they refused to take in migrants under the European Union’s September 2015 relocation agreement. During the 2015 migrant crisis, EU leaders agreed to relocate 160,000 migrants and refugees EU-wide, assigning each EU member state a fixed quota from the camps in Italy and Greece, where migrants and refugees were arriving in record numbers. However, the Czech Republic accepted only 12 of the 2,000 refugees assigned it, while Hungary and Poland took in none.
In 2017, the EU took Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) over that refusal to take migrants. On April 2, 2020, the CJEU ruled against the three countries. The ruling followed the October 2019 recommendation by the Court’s Advocate General, legal advisor to the Court, which said that EU law must be followed and that the EU’s principle of solidarity “necessarily sometimes implies accepting burden-sharing”.
In its judgment, the Court dismissed the three countries’ argument that they were entitled to refuse the relocation scheme based on concerns for the maintenance of law and order and the safeguarding of internal security.
Ed Morrissey writing atHot Air reports on how the COVID-19 hysteria could spell the end of the European Union as countries rediscover the need for BORDERS!
Trip down memory lane!
He also reminds us how the beginning of the end came when Hillary/Obama and various EU governments joined forces to bring down Gaddafi in Libya in 2011 which opened the flood gates for African migrants by the hundreds of thousands to descend on the continent.
European Leaders Lament: Coronavirus Might Just Kill The EU Too
If the European Union now finds itself in “mortal danger,” it’s only because it’s faced its first truly mortal threat. The Washington Post reports that European leaders have begun to warn that unilateral actions by its members — most recently Hungary but also core members France and Germany— will undo their decades-long experiment in continental unity.The raising of borders and the imposition of trade barriers in the coronavirus pandemic has all but sidelined Brussels in the crisis, and there’s little indication that EU members are interested in anything but their own domestic political standing.
[….]
In other words, Europe has rediscovered why borders matter and why government works best on the principle of subsidiarity. The borders lesson got taught the hard way, as I wrote two-plus weeks ago, after Europe and the US precipitated a massive refugee crisis by decapitating the Qaddafi regime in Libya. The flood of refugees from there and Syria created cultural dislocation throughout the Schengen Zone, provoking the Brexit push in the UK and setting the stage for their current disunity.
Remember this! We wrote about Hillary’s role extensively at the time and over the years since as the invasion of Europe progressed. See here.
It should come as no shock that Germans expect the German government to prioritize Germans in an existential crisis rather than a super-national quasi-governing body. Nor should it shock anyone that the same is true for the French, the Italians, and so on. That doesn’t mean that they can’t work cooperatively to approach common interests and problems, but that in a crisis, they’re responsible to their own citizens first and foremost.
Everyday I check to see if the dire warnings the UN and its ideological partners have come to pass that a catastrophe is in the making in crowded refugee camps in Greece.
Not “carnage” yet, but the first cases of Coronavirus have appeared.
Of course those who have been encouraging the migration to Europe now say that something must be done. But what, really, there is no magic bullet for the refugees or for any of us.
Greece Records First Coronavirus Cases Among Refugees, Imposes Quarantine On Camp
Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, medical personnel, human rights groups and others have warned of catastrophe if COVID-19 spreads to the roughly 60,000 refugees living in often-squalid camps in Greece.
Now the virus has arrived. This week, at least 20 refugees living in the Ritsona camp, near Athens, have tested positive for COVID-19. The camp is now on lockdown for the next two weeks.
In 2016 protesting refugees said they didn’t need food they just wanted to be allowed to migrate into Europe.
“No one can go in or out” except for essential personnel like healthcare workers, Migration Minister Notis Mitarakis told Greece’s SKAI radio on Thursday.
Authorities were first alerted earlier this week, when a 19-year-old resident of the camp tested positive for COVID-19 after giving birth at an Athens hospital.
Healthcare workers immediately began testing more than 60 Ritsona camp residents who had come into contact with the woman. The 20 who tested positive for COVID-19 currently do not have symptoms, Greece’s migration ministry says.
Testing of the 2,700 refugees living in Ritsona will continue during the 14-day quarantine. [Check it out! They will all be tested.—ed]
[….]
Mitarakis, the Greek migration minister, told members of the European Parliament’s home affairs committee that there is no room on the Greek mainland for the refugees.
“We will strongly welcome any offers of relocation from member states that have capacity,” he told the lawmakers Thursday, “because we cannot resolve this crisis instantly and alone.”
The European Union is deeply divided on the issue of refugee relocation. On Wednesday, the European Court of Justice said three anti-migrant EU countries — Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic — broke EU law by refusing to accept refugees under a EU-mandated relocation program.
Hope all of you are doing well and taking this time to appreciate home and family during this challenging period.
I’ve been monitoring stories from around the world as alarm bells are being rung about a catastrophe (“carnage” seems to be the operative word) that has not yet materialized that refugees housed in crowded camps will be consumed with the virus and that someone (government?) has to do something. Of course, what governments might do is not clear.
I told readers here that NGOs that should be expected to help are concerned with protecting their staff.
As epidemic menaces refugee camps, the Middle East’s most vulnerable face a deepening nightmare
Many paragraphs in we learn this:
Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council is ringing alarm bells, but what is any country supposed to do. In his case, Norway is closed as cases rapidly mount there. https://www.lifeinnorway.net/coronavirus-in-norway/
“When the virus hits overcrowded settlements in places like Iran, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Greece, the consequences will be devastating,” Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said this week. “There will also be carnage when the virus reaches parts of Syria, Yemen and Venezuela, where hospitals have been demolished and health systems have collapsed.”
Health experts hope that the relatively young average age of the displaced will help keep the death rate low. (In some centers, more than 60 percent are children.) And for now, no camp outbreaks have been reported. In some cases, the camps’ very isolation may be slowing the appearance of the virus within their fences and walls.
Access to Gaza, for example, is tightly controlled by Israel, which has largely sealed the enclave’s crossings to Israel and Egypt. Aid workers there are using the time to prepare for what they view as the virus’s inevitable arrival. [So can we say for a change that Israel is doing something good by sealing borders?—ed]
At NBCon Thursday, the answer is supposedly that governments should be testing in the camps. Heck, governments are having enough trouble testing their own citizens.
Coronavirus could cause ‘carnage’ among the world’s refugees, aid groups say
WASHINGTON — The coronavirus outbreak threatens to inflict “carnage” on refugees around the world who often live in cramped conditions, lack access to clean water and are in countries with failing or stretched medical systems, humanitarian aid groups say.
Muhammad Zaman, a professor of bioengineering at Boston University wants testing in camps. That would be the UN’s job right?
From Syria to Bangladesh to Uganda, the risk posed to people who have fled war and persecution is potentially dire, and only urgent international action can avert a catastrophe, aid organizations told NBC News.
As of Tuesday, only 10 cases had been reported among refugees and displaced persons, and all of those were patients in Germany, according to the U.N. refugee agency.
But in the absence of extensive testing at refugee camps in the Middle East, Africa or Asia, it’s unclear whether the fast-moving virus has already reached them, medical experts and humanitarian workers said.
“We don’t know, and that’s largely because we haven’t done any testing,” said Muhammad Zaman, a professor of bioengineering at Boston University. “We need to know how acute the problem is before we come up with an intervention.”
I see this morning that the flow into the US has stopped for the regular refugee program, but am waiting to see data indicating we have shut off the Iraqi and Afghanistan special visa spigot as well.
