[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 07 October 2015 09:12.
Seriously, Estonia, Luxembourg & Sweden are to be thronged within days, as invaders are directed northward from their Mediterranean beachheads:
(ANSA) - Brussels, October 2 - EU sources said Friday the relocation of asylum seekers from Italy to other EU nations including Estonia, Luxembourg and Sweden will begin “within days”. The idea is to get it done before the next EU summit on October 15, the sources said. EU interior ministers agreed in September to resettle 120,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy - where most refugees fleeing across the Mediterranean usually make first landfall - to other member States.
Of auguries, apparitions and specters.. .
With the help of the Swedish government, Barbara Spectre set-up a non-denominational institute of Jewish learning with the Greek name of Paideia -
She believes Jews have a key role to play in a country undergoing profound change:
“I think there is a resurgence of anti-Semitism because Europe has not yet learned how to be multicultural; and I think that we’re going to be part of the throes of that transformation, which much take place. Europe is not going to be the ‘monolithic’ ..uh, uh, societies they once were in the last century. Jews are going to be at the center of that - it’s a huge transformation for Europe to make. They are now going into a multi-cultural mode, and Jews will be resented because of our leading role.”
She adds….”but without that leading role and with out that transformation, Europe will not survive.” - ??
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 03 October 2015 16:27.
Even where not required by EU quotas, Ireland’s Catholic bishops are calling for Irish parishes to accept and settle refugees who “will be arriving for months and years to come.”
Prelates seek reform of direct provision for asylum seekers to avoid two-tier system
The Catholic bishops have called on parishes throughout the island to mobilise resources to help with the resettlement of migrants who come to Ireland.
They have also called for urgent reform in direct provision for asylum seekers to avoid the emergence of an unjust two-tier system.
In a statement on Thursday afternoon, the bishops encouraged “all members of our parish communities to explore how they might offer their services, talents, time and commitment to supporting the resettlement of refugees through practical parish actions such as friendship and welcome schemes, English language classes, trauma counselling and medical services, as well as legal advice services”.
Demanding solidarity
They noted how “local communities across the island of Ireland have reacted to the worsening refugee crisis by mobilising to demand greater solidarity from European political leaders. The swift and enthusiastic response to Pope Francis’s appeal to parishes shows a ready willingness to help and a recognition that our parishes need to be places of welcome to all.
“Bishops are working with clergy and other diocesan personnel, as well as faith-based organisations, to assess our capacity to contribute to the national and international response.”
They said that “given the magnitude of the current crisis, refugees will be arriving for months and years to come, and it will be some years before they can safely return to their country of origin. Co-operation and clear sharing of responsibility across relevant Government departments, to address different types of need, is a necessary foundation for strategic planning.”
Move is aimed at atoning for the ‘historic mistake’ of forcing Sephardic Jews to leave on pain of death
October 2, 2015
Spain granted citizenship on Friday for 4,302 Sephardic Jews under a new law aimed at atoning for the expulsion of their Jewish ancestors five centuries ago in the Inquisition.
The law allowing dual citizenship for descendants of Jews who were forced to flee Spain in 1492 or face burning at the stake was approved by the Spanish parliament in June and came into force on Thursday.
But Justice Minister Rafael Catala said Friday the government had approved an extra measure to save paperwork for thousands who had already filed applications for nationality before the latest law came into force.
The new decree “has allowed us at one stroke to grant nationality to 4,302 people of Sephardic origin” whose applications under previous legislation were already pending, Catala told a news conference after a cabinet meeting.
“This is one more step in developing the law for granting nationality to the Sephardim,” he said in reference to the descendents of Spanish Jews forceed into exile.
“It seemed fair, rather than making them go through the process of filing their applications again, to speed up the process.”
The measure aims to correct what the Spanish government has called the “historic mistake” of the country’s Catholic monarchs sending Jews into exile in 1492.
Jewish groups welcomed the law in June, though some Jewish leaders complained the requirements are too burdensome.
Applicants do not have to be practising Jews but they must have their ancestry vetted by Jewish authorities and prove a “special connection” to and knowledge of Spain.
Historians believe at least 200,000 Jews lived in Spain before the monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand ordered them to convert to the Catholic faith or leave the country on pain of death.
Up to 3.5 million people around the world are thought to have Sephardic Jewish ancestry.
A secret document from Austria’s finance ministry, which was leaked to the Austrian broadcasting company ORF, forecasts that if Austria takes in an estimated 85,000 asylum seekers in 2015 and a further 130,000 in 2016 it will cost a total of €6.5 billion over the next four years.
This is much higher than earlier official calculations, and is based on a projected 25,000 positive asylum applications per year.
The figure includes the costs of primary care for asylum seekers, integration, social security, and helping recognised asylum seekers access the labour market. The document estimates that if the cost of family reunification is included this would almost double the figure to €12.3 billion.
In comparison, the 2015 budget for the defence ministry amounts to around €1.8 billion, which corresponds to 0.55 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
In September, almost 200,000 refugees arrived in Austria, and 8,000 of those have applied for asylum. The interior ministry has said it expects a total of 80,000 asylum seekers this year.
The conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) has argued in favour of granting refugees “limited asylum” and restricting family reunification - where family members of a recognised refugee are given permission to join him or her in Austria.
Austria’s upper house changed the constitution Friday to force local authorities to accept a quota of migrants equal to 1.5 percent of their population despite opposition from the resurgent far-right.
The move, mirroring EU efforts to oblige member states to accept more migrants, is aimed at relieving Austria’s overcrowded main refugee centre at Traiskirchen, and comes into effect on October 1.
It was put forward by Chancellor Werner Faymann’s Social Democrats and the centre-right People’s Party, which form Austria’s governing coalition, and votes from the Greens gave it the necessary two-thirds majority.
The far-right Freedom Party, which wants to restrict the number of migrants entering and which is currently topping national opinion polls with around 30 percent of the vote, opposed the move.
In recent months Austria has become a major transit country for tens of thousands of migrants entering from Hungary—having travelled up the western Balkans—bound for northern Europe, in particular Germany.
But 8.5-million-strong Austria also expects around 80,000 asylum claims this year, putting it high compared to other European Union countries on a per capita basis, and Vienna has been a major proponent of EU quotas.
Senior conservatives are urging a flexible application of Germany’s new minimum wage in relation to refugees, arguing that those with minimal qualifications could struggle to find jobs at the 8.50 euro ($9.60) hourly rate.
Deputy finance minister Jens Spahn, a senior figure in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and Reiner Haseloff, conservative premier of the state of Saxony-Anhalt, both called for exceptions to the minimum wage in comments to German daily Die Welt.
For the Social Democrats (SPD), the introduction of a minimum wage was a condition for entering a coalition with Merkel’s conservatives and they are likely to resist any changes to the law, which took effect at the start of this year.
“For entry level or training positions the minimum wage should not apply,” Haseloff told the newspaper.
Spahn said hundreds of thousands of refugees were likely to land on the jobs market and exceptions were necessary to ensure they found jobs, particularly in the services sector.
“Industry must offer internships, training and entry level positions to the many young people who, as refugees, have the right to stay,” Spahn said.
Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Monday, 28 September 2015 17:03.
When jokes threaten to become reality
A long time ago at the beginning of this ‘refugee crisis’, people used to make a joke and say, “If this keeps up, liberals might start asking for a bridge to be built so that no one would need to smuggle humans across water any more”. Who could have known that this joke would become a jinx?
Austria’s refugee coordinator Christian Konrad has called for the construction of a 200km long bridge from Al Huwariyah in Tunisia to Agrigento in Sicily. This is after Konrad had previously called for housing solutions to be constructed in Austria as hundreds of asylum seekers currently staying at the Traiskirchen reception centre in Lower Austria are sleeping in tents due to overcrowding there.
Education Minister Gabriele Heinisch-Hosek is tasked with devising proposals on how to integrate refugee into Austrian schools. This integration will likely be of the sort that parents of non-Muslim children will have no ability to veto. Integration of school systems never seems to come ‘organically’.
Social Minister Rudolf Hundstorfer will be looking for ways to ease the strictures of employment laws, so as to make it easier for big businesses to employ refugees, and for the purpose of lowering the standards that govern social bargaining at the enterprise and state level, the standards which Austria actually would have had to agree to have upheld upon joining the ERM back in March 1979. So now they have come full circle, and have ended up considering imposing a very ‘American’ form of social bargaining and employment laws, even though the European approach was supposed to have some significant differences.
Under the so-called emergency, the crisis that ‘demands’ compromise, one of the supposed prized qualities of the European labour market, will be dismantled for the benefit of a certain cross section of large companies which see it as being in their interest to use these migrants as a battering ram against any attempts to have any kind of organised labour movement in the continent. It is against this backdrop of the tendencies within the Austrian ruling class, that this bridge proposal is set.
Construction companies
The construction company STRABAG AG would get the contract for the bridge. STRABAG AG is a company that was created through the merger of ILBAU and STRABAG in the 1930s, both being founded by Anton Lerchbaumer. It acquired Deutsche Asphalt Group in 2002, Waltr Bau Group in 2005, it took on a majority stake in Ed Züblin in 2005, Adanti SpA, KIRCHNER Holding GmbH, F. Kirchhoff AG and Deutsche Telekom Immobilien und Service GmbH in 2008.
In 2013 the Supreme Court of the Slovak Republic stated that it believed that one of the companies of the STRABAG Group participated in bid rigging cartel of construction companies in that country. Amongst the companies involved in that cartel, was a company called Doprastav a.s., which is part of Doprastav Group. The illegal conduct centred around the D1 Highway which was constructed from 2004 and continued to have work done on it and its surroundings up to at least 2010.
STRABAG is managed by CEO Thomas Birtel. The Chairman of the supervisory board at STRABAG is Alfred Gusenbauer. Alfred Gusenbauer is an Austrian politician who until 2008 had spent his entire professional life as an employee of the Social Democratic Party of Austria or as a parliamentary representative. He headed the Social Democratic Party of Austria from 2000 to 2008, and served as Chancellor of Austria from January 2007 to December 2008. Since then he has positioned himself as a consultant and lecturer, and as a member of supervisory boards of Austrian companies, STRABAG being one of these.
Gusenbauer is known for having exploited the occurrence of the BAWAG Scandal, in which BAWAG—the bank of the Austrian Trade Union Federation—engaged in failed bets using risky undocumented derivative instruments held off-balance-sheet. After the losses became unmanageable, Fritz Verzetnitsch resigned from the Austrian Trade Union Federation in disgrace, and Gusenbauer used this opportunity to exclude all of the Trade Union leaders from the ballot lists of the Social Democratic Party, an action which moved the party to the right structurally.
STRABAG’s Gusenbauer and Austria’s refugee coordinator Christian Konrad obviously are not strangers to each other, seeing as they come from the same party and travel in the same social circles. In the world of business and politics, it’s quite often about who you know and who you’ve worked with. Aside from the fact that STRABAG is one of the largest construction companies in Austria, there is also the political connection that would exist between persons within the state and within that company’s structure.
Russian-Jewish Mafia involvement
A notable stakeholder in STRABAG is Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska, a extremely wealthy Russian oligarch, who—when he is not exploiting the mineral and energy resources of impoverished Asians in Siberia—also has for some reason cultivated over the years a very amicable relationship with people who may or may not be associated with former Russian soldiers who had been veterans in Afghanistan who may be part of the presently existing heroin smuggling operations which have been occurring at an ever-heightening rate since the year 2005.
Additionally, Deripaska has a good relationship with the Russian-Israeli Mafia, which helped him with the purchase of Sayansk aluminium plant in Siberia when he was first starting up as a businessperson in the 1990s. He has a especially tight relationship with the Israeli business and crime figure known as Michael Cherney, who personally assessed Deripaska and pulled the necessary strings on his behalf. Deripaska has since operated in the debt of Cherney and the Russian-Israeli Mafia. Cherney also operates security think tank groups, which may or may not be actually just front groups which allow him and his criminal networks to plug into the stream of intelligence exchanges that go on in the War on Terror, so that he can smuggle contraband through conflict zones with less risk of detection. Cherney also publishes anti-fascist publications through the Michael Cherney Foundation which is registered as a ‘charitable foundation’.
Interfacing with activist groups
The proposal for this Africa-to-Europe 200km long bridge, whose construction contract sits at the centre of all of these groups and individuals, also is associated with a local Austrian ‘anti-racist’ activist group. That group is named Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, which in English is ‘Centre for Political Beauty’.
The Centre for Political Beauty refers to itself as a group that “makes art” for the purpose of encouraging the European peoples to adopt a more liberal-humanitarian outlook on the world. Much of what they do is done for the sake of “not rendering void of the legacy of the Holocaust”. One of their members, Massimo Sestini, is perhaps known to Majorityrights readers because he is one of the persons who has consistently been providing ‘humanistic’ photography of the migrants to various media outlets including the British Newspaper, the Guardian, since at least mid-2014. The power of images cannot be underestimated.
The Centre for Political Beauty takes its activism beyond simply creating static pieces of art, and in fact, merges art with political action while invoking shadows of past events which they believe hold immense sway over the European psyche.
Here are four relevant examples of them merging art with political action:
They have removed sections of the Berlin Wall monument, the sections that contain Christian cross logos with names on them. They have removed some of these because they have transferred those crosses to the outer border fences of the European Union, and affixed them there. In some images African migrants are posing with the crosses for photographs. This is a kind of art creation that is apparently supposed to symbolise the idea that the internal wall between the West Germany and East Germany that was removed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is ontologically the same as the border between Europe and Africa which they believe would be removed after the fall of racially cohesive European identity.
They plan to actually cut holes into some segments of the EU border fences on 09 November 2015, during the commemoration of the 25th Anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This would allow migrants to break through the fences at the precise timing of the celebrations, so that they can link the celebration of one thing, with the celebration of another thing that they plan to superimpose onto it.
Since the idea for the creation of a bridge between Africa and Europe is a project that would take them until the year 2030 to complete if it gets started on time and isn’t thwarted in some way, they want to call on Austria to supply state funding for 1,000 rescue platforms to be permanently installed into international waters between North Africa and Italy. The first one of these platforms will be unveiled in the water on 01 October 2015, in Licata Harbour. The press will be invited at 0630 on that day.
Dead African and Middle Eastern bodies will be exhumed and transported from the sea and into the capital city of Germany. The bodies will be displayed and placed into open shallow graves in plain view, so that persons running the media operation can then talk about the ongoing crisis in terms that have allusions to the narratives of the Jewish Holocaust.
They are absolutely serious. It would not be hyperbolic to say that the intention behind these actors who have come together to make these things happen, is that they would like to inflict extreme demographic damage onto the European Union.
The resources being allocated to these plans, and all such operations, stand in stark contrast to the fact that countries in the South of Europe have been placed under austerity policies so harsh that civil society in countries like Greece are breaking down, and money allocated to even basic state functions like national defence have been so low that the topic of whether enough counties are meeting the basic NATO obligations is often raised.
Yet, mysteriously, certain richer state governments of north-western and south-central Europe seem to be very capable of sourcing funds for extravagant migrant rescue operations and even funds for building a 200km long bridge. Where is it coming from? It’s coming from your bank account via taxation.
Kumiko Oumae works in the defence and security sector in the UK. Her opinions here are entirely her own.
Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Sunday, 27 September 2015 12:53.
Why not? Seriously, why not? It’s all the same to the conservatives at the National Review, right? That’s what they themselves are saying! So let’s do this.
After being heckled on Twitter for being an apparent ‘cuckservative’ or something to that effect, National Review contributor David French decided to take to the safe space that is whatever CMS the National Review uses, to write out a long and rambling article where he claims that the ‘far-right’ and the ‘far-left’ are the same thing because they both disagree with him on the racialised-classised nature of reality itself, and they both disagree with him on the exact same issue for the exact same reason.
It has not crossed David French’s mind yet that the reason that both the ‘far-right’ and the ‘far-left’ disagree with the National Review, is because the National Review is denying biological realities while clinging desperately to a portrait of Jesus of Nazareth.
It’s almost like no one at the National Review has even the slightest sense of self-awareness.
Conservatives should reject those on both extremes of the spectrum. We defend a culture, not a race. The foundation of that culture is a faith that makes no distinction among races but rather declares, unequivocally, “All are one, in Christ Jesus.” Shunning the slur disempowers the trolls and forces the radical Left to confront the race hatred that fuels its own rage.
The last time conservatives tried that one, they got punched in the head from both sides. That’s what happens when their argument is trash.
But since ‘far-right’ and ‘far-left’ are all the same to David French now, I might as well quote Leon Trotsky being correct about a thing which is obvious, since it doesn’t really matter which side of the spectrum I choose to source this argument from:
And who are all these democratic moralists? Ideologists of intermediary layers who have fallen, or are in fear of falling between the two fires. The chief traits of the prophets of this type are alienism to great historical movements, a hardened conservative mentality, smug narrowness, and a most primitive political cowardice.More than anything moralists wish that history should leave them in peace with their petty books, little magazines, subscribers, common sense, and moral copy books. But history does not leave them in peace. It cuffs them now from the left, now from the right. ‘Clearly’ – revolution and reaction, Czarism and Bolshevism, communism and fascism, Stalinism and Trotskyism – are all ‘twins’. Whoever doubts this may feel the symmetrical skull bumps upon both the right and left sides of these very moralists.
[...]
Moralists of the Anglo-Saxon type, in so far as they do not confine themselves to rationalist utilitarianism, the ethics of bourgeois bookkeeping, appear conscious or unconscious students of Viscount Shaftesbury, who at the beginning of the 18th century deduced moral judgments from a special “moral sense” supposedly once and for all given to man. Supra-class morality inevitably leads to the acknowledgment of a special substance, of a ’’moral sense’’, ’’conscience’’, some kind of absolute which is nothing more than the philosophic-cowardly pseudonym for god. Independent of “ends”, that is, of society, morality, whether we deduce it from eternal truths or from the “nature of man”, proves in the end to be a form of “natural theology”. Heaven remains the only fortified position for military operations against dialectic materialism.
[...]
Classical philosophic idealism in so far as it aimed in its time to secularize morality, that is, to free it from religious sanction, represented a tremendous step forward (Hegel). But having torn from heaven, moral philosophy had to find earthly roots. To discover these roots was one of the tasks of materialism. After Shaftesbury came Darwin, after Hegel—Marx. To appeal now to “eternal moral truths” signifies attempting to turn the wheels backward.
That’s completely applicable as a description of what the National Review is doing.
Of course, Leon Trotsky is not the only person who has said this. Much like how Leon Trotsky is not the only person who has announced that fire is hot.
Since conservatives, or ‘cuckservatives’ if you like, refuse to learn the basic building blocks of reality and apply them, I anticipate that we will all meet David French once again somewhere out there, and David French will once again find himself being punched on both sides of his face, from both the left and the right.
BRUSSELS — With Europe’s refugee crisis escalating, European leaders on Tuesday approved a plan to spread asylum seekers across the continent over the objection of Central European nations.
The plan to distribute 120,000 migrants across Europe is a first step toward easing the plight of the men, women and children who have been shunted from one European nation to another in recent weeks, a grim procession of human need in one of the world’s richest regions.
But the decision to override the dissenters means the European Union will be sending thousands of people to nations that do not want them, raising questions about both the future of the 28-nation bloc and the well-being of the asylum seekers consigned to those countries. Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia voted against the measure, a rare note of discord for a body that usually operates by consensus on key matters of national sovereignty. Finland abstained.
For all the controversy, the plan would find homes for just 20 days’ worth of new arrivals to Europe, a measure of the scale of the crisis and the baby steps the continent has taken to address it. E.U. leaders will meet in Brussels on Wednesday to discuss broader measures to stem the flow, including bolstering the region’s border controls and stepping up support for the overburdened refugee camps along Syria’s borders.
But after Tuesday’s bitter vote, it was unclear how much common ground remained among leaders.
“Some people will say today that Europe is divided because the decision was not taken by consensus,” said Jean Asselborn, the foreign minister of Luxembourg. “If we had not done this, Europe would have been even more divided and its credibility would have been even more undermined.”
Wealthy nations such as Germany have faced tens of thousands of asylum seekers arriving every week. Leaders there have welcomed Syrians fleeing their war-ravaged country, but have also said they cannot shoulder the entire burden on their own.
“We are doing this out of solidarity and responsibility, but also out of our own interest,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said after the meeting. He said the agreement would “prevent more people who are currently in Greece from coming to Germany.” The country expects up to 1 million asylum seekers this year alone.
A first step
Proponents of the plan acknowledged Tuesday that it was just a first step to address the much bigger crisis. According to the U.N. refugee agency, more than 477,000 people have arrived in Europe so far this year via often-dangerous sea crossings, and 6,000 now land on Europe’s shores every day —up sharply even from August, when the figure stood around 4,200 a day.
Germany’s national railway company announced Tuesday that it was suspending rail service to Austria because its trains have been overwhelmed with refugees. It was the latest example of national infrastructure apparently unable to meet the challenge.
Central European leaders condemned the vote, warning that Europe would suffer as a result of the plan to force them to accept asylum seekers.
Breaking down Europe’s migrant crisis
A look at the numbers behind the stream of refugees flowing into Europe as political leaders struggle to ease the burden.
“Very soon we will see that the emperor has no clothes,” Czech Interior Minister Milan Chovanec said on Twitter. “Common sense lost today.”
The numbers will be drawn from Syrians, Iraqis and Eritreans coming ashore in Greece and Italy. Germany, France and Spain will take the most. Of the 120,000 spots approved on Tuesday, only 66,000 were immediately assigned to specific countries, with the rest to be assigned later. An additional 40,000 slots were agreed to earlier in the summer.
The final agreement did not include an earlier proposal to penalize countries that did not take in asylum seekers, so it was not immediately clear how the E.U. would deal with nations that refuse to comply with the plan.
At least one country, Slovakia, said after the decision that it would not take in any of the migrants.
“As long as I am prime minister, mandatory quotas will not be implemented on Slovak territory,” Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico told his parliament’s E.U. affairs committee.
Almost 1,300 people will be sent to Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has crusaded against the mostly Muslim asylum seekers, saying they are on a campaign to de-Christianize Europe. He has built a 109-mile razor-tipped fence to keep them away from his country’s frontier with Serbia and in recent days has started to expand this barrier to the borders with Romania and Croatia.
Despite Hungary’s opposition to the asylum seekers, a government spokesman, Zoltan Kovacs, said Tuesday that his country would abide by the plan.
“This is a compulsory decision, and we are going to respect it,” said Kovacs. He said Hungary’s leaders looked forward to discussing the “real causes” of the crisis on Wednesday, adding that solutions include reestablishing border controls and improving the refugee camps closer to Syria.
Refugee preferences
Under the distribution effort, each nation would continue to make its own decisions about whether to grant asylum to individual applicants. Hungary, which grants just a tiny fraction of asylum requests, could continue to be far harsher than Germany, which is relatively generous, particularly to Syrians.
There are few guarantees that asylum seekers would actually stay in the country to which they’re assigned, especially given the lack of border controls between most E.U. nations. Migrants would risk losing benefits if they left one country for another, but, for example, few may want to stay in Poland, next door to Germany’s high wages.
Nor was it clear how E.U. policymakers would take into account the refugees’ preferences. Some countries offer far more generous benefits than others. Many refugees also want to be reunited with family members who already live in Europe.
“They say when you are in Vienna, you can go anywhere,” said Wassim, 28, from Aleppo, Syria, who made it through a bustling border crossing at Nickelsdorf on the Austria-Hungary frontier. He hoped to travel quickly onward to the Netherlands. He gave only his first name out of fear of possible reprisals against relatives in Syria.
Ahead of the E.U. decision, the U.N. refugee agency had pushed hard for action, saying that further delays would create an even more dangerous situation for the streams of people fleeing the Syrian conflict. More than 4 million Syrians have already moved to the neighboring countries of Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
“It’s very, very clear that there is a need for a united common response from European countries,” said Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency.
Despite Europe’s divisions, some refugee advocates said policymakers seem to be slowly coming to terms with the crisis.
“What is widely acknowledged now is that the conditions in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan are going to become untenable for a large number of people,” said Madeline Garlick, a guest researcher at the Center for Migration Law at Radboud University in the Netherlands. “We are further than we were some time ago.”
