Originally Posted by
Kritias
People here focused so much on the tree and lossed sight of the forest.
For decades now, political and economic centres were trying to convince us that people coming from a muslim country were dangerous for our prosperity, our culture, our very lives. And for years now those centres held up individual cases for our inspection, trying to convince us that there's a correlation between the actions of an individual to an entire group, an entire community, an entire nation, an entire religion. For decades it spread from the fringes until it became mainstream with the economic crisis in 2008. We've even seen it here on TWC; how many hundreds of threads were opened just for this cause?
Well, you can kiss this time good-bye.
What Erdogan did, in fact, was that he provided those centres with the example they were desparately looking for. When EU officials stand meters away from the refugees and call Greece the "shield" of Europe, when the government announces that the mass movement of people to Europe is an organized invasion, when the army and the riot police are deployed to fight those "invaders" back, the narrative of the so-called Replacement Theorists has just been leveled up from popular to politically legitimate.
A quick look-see using the hastags #GreeceUnderAttack and #IstandwithGreece will inform even the deafest/blindest person about the hatred stired against peoples from muslim countries. There's no need to explain the ramifications of this development. In the near to not-so-near future the lives of millions of muslims living inside Europe and the Americas will be affected by what happens in the next few months. And if the situation goes sour, as I think it will, you can bet the treatment of these people is about to get much, much worse.
For those of you doubting the involvement of the Turkish authorities in moving these people to the border under false promises that the borders have been opened, or that Turkish authorities goad and assist the refugees to storm the borders -- a quick look in the international media will convince you otherwise. I am checking DW, Reuters, TRT, Anadolu, Al Jazeera and other major stations around the globe and only a handful of journalists support that the Turkish authorities are not involved in the movement and goading of refugees to attempt to cross the borders (only the Turkish news sites refute it, which is to be expected). Several members have shown such videos circulating the news media; if you don't accept the evidence, that's your problem.-
For those of you doubting that Greek forces are putting people's lives in danger in land or at sea by using (excessive) force, I would direct you to review the Greek police against the people's uprising in Syntagma during 2010. If they used excessive force on their fellow citizens, do you really believe that they would not be even more violent when they are being goaded by the government and the EU to let none pass? Or is your memory so impaired that you forgot that just two weeks ago the riot police disembarked in Chios and Lesbos in the dead of night to convince the islanders to accept even more refugees by beating them up?
For those of you saying that these people are not Syrian in their majority but Afghani and Iraqi etc let me remind you that both these countries (as many others) are still very volatile regions with a lot of fighting going on. Saying that only Syrians are legitimate refugees when Afghanistan hasn't been at peace for nearly 20 years is dishonest at least.
I don't know whether or not this is Erdogan strong-arming the EU into doing what he wants. Most analysts seem to believe so. I cannot decipher what he wants to do. I can only tell you that he's playing right into the game of the extreme right propagandists who, now that they can point to the Greek border, will be able to justify any amount of restriction and any cruelty on muslim people who did nothing wrong themselves. I am also concerned by the growing support of Greece's treatment of refugees by the worst elements of our and EU society. It's not an accident that just last week extreme right groups from Austria and Germany arrived on a Greek island to support the fight against the "invaders", in a perverse Spanish civil war volunteer hype.
In sort: good-night, humanity.
Re: Turkey opens its borders for refugees to go to Europe.
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