It only took a few thousand footsore refugees to get the worms of racism come crawling out of the woodwork of ‘civilised’ Europe. A Danish man was caught spitting on refugees: just about 200 of them who had been forced to walk across the length of Denmark to reach the more humane Sweden, when the lot could easily have been fitted into two buses and driven across. Of course, there was no question of Denmark providing refuge to these children, women and men fleeing wars in which Denmark has been an enthusiastic participant. Denmark takes only 500 refugees a year, from its UNHCR quota, and a Justice Ministry report has documented that since 2006 the country has avoided taking Muslim refugees. Just to make sure that this point got across, Denmark is reported to have taken out full page advertisements in Central Asian newspapers telling refugees to stay away.
But Denmark is not alone in this. A major Finnish Minister has suggested that the country should only accept Christian refugees. A Hungarian press photographer was caught on camera kicking a refugee boy and his parent. A number of newspapers across Europe keep referring to the refugees as migrants: this is not incidental — migrants are already unpopular in these parts where they are supposed to take jobs away from the natives.
And if you think the U.S., being a prime instigator of the wars that have created these refugees, is an exception, think again. Early reports suggested that though there have been 150,000 applications from refugees in Syria, the U.S. allowed in less than 50 — most of the applicants are being rejected using its recent anti-terror laws, as posing a threat to internal security. One cannot help but note the numbers, the ratio, and the fact, as Adam Hills keeps pointing out, that the combined forces of Islamic State, Boko Haram and al-Qaeda make up 0.003 per cent of the total Muslim population of the world and less than 2 per cent of all terrorist attacks are carried out in the name of Islam. However, there is a ray of hope when the White House announced on September 10, 2015, that U.S. President Barack Obama has ordered his administration to “scale up” the number of Syrian refugees admitted to the U.S. in the coming year, directing his team “to prepare for at least 10,000 in the next fiscal year”.
But I do not want to dwell on these sad incidents. One could perhaps claim that they pale into insignificance in the light of the head-chopping antics of the Islamic State, though there will always be some who will argue, rightly or wrongly, that turning your back on a boatload of desperate people and allowing them to drown is hardly much less barbaric than anything that the Islamic State does.
What does fascinate me, however, is the fact that two issues are almost entirely missing in the current overheated media discourse on ‘migrants’ in the West, especially Europe. The first is the involvement of these Western governments in the wars that have created these refugees. The second, as pointed out, is the distinction between migration and refuge. Both omissions serve an ulterior purpose, and the purpose becomes clear if we look at a matching occlusion in the so-called Muslim world. Most Muslims, including religious ones, will agree that organisations like the Islamic State do not represent the vast majority of Muslims, many would even add that they distort Islam.
Be that as it may, these same Muslims are not able to see or talk about how Islamic Fundamentalism, in any shape, has become the biggest burden of Muslim peoples and has benefited only vested interests in the West and in Islamic countries.
In the West? How could Islamic fundamentalism have benefited vested interests in the West?
This is how: the problem of Capitalist Western nations, especially welfare states (like Denmark), has been that the logic of Capitalism insists on the free movement of capital and labour. This problem becomes almost intractable when employment declines in the nation-state and when foreign labour gets more mobile. This happened to the West from the 1980s onwards. The issue since then has been: how do we keep our capital as mobile as possible and prevent their labour from entering our countries?
Islamic fundamentalism has provided a way out. The more Islamic fundamentalism thrives, the easier it is for Western governments to bar foreign labour from entering their spaces — in the name of terror, and so on. The Islamic State is only an extreme version of this potential threat: it is this that explains why only 50 Syrians out of 150,000 ‘were to be allowed’ into the U.S. It is this that explains why refugees are called ‘migrants.’
Islamic fundamentalism does not just allow political tyrants in Muslim nations to hold sway locally, it also allows economic tyrants to rule our world. It is this that explains why the involvement of Western states in wars that have created the current lot of refugees is not mentioned — because, finally, all these wars are modes in which capital is invested, sometimes even modes by which the hard-earned taxes of ordinary citizens are turned into profit (in the cover of state secrecy) by the arms industry and related actors. Of course, no one — except idealistic innocent Malala — mentions the arms industry any longer. To mention it would be to realise that we have been plunged into an era of limited scale wars — which bring profit to some and misery to many. Islamic fundamentalism — extreme or moderate — is complicit in this. But so are most of our civilised European states — whether they let in 500 refugees a year or 5,000.
Wealth might or might not trickle down, but misery always spreads. That is the flipside of the above coin, as Europe is beginning to discover.
