jerseyhoya wrote:philliesphhan wrote:pacino wrote:understood.
i'm just saddened not only for the people that were murdered but that this may be used to advance a political agenda that involves demonizing the very people that are trying to leave this shit that's going on in their homelands. poland's already trying to use this as a reason to back out of the agreement to disperse refugees more evenly.
And it doesn't even make sense mathematically. So far, one guy at least lived in France until 2012 and another was born in Belgium. Even if the six remaining were ALL refugees, that's 6 out of how many million?
They don't have to be refugees for EU countries accepting refugees to have played a role in the attack being successful. We'll have to see how all the details to shake out, but if some/all of them were training in Syria, and they were able to enter/reenter the EU from Syria under the cover of being refugees that could've been key in helping them evade state security forces/effective surveillance. Any Belgian or Frenchman who is returning from holidays with ISIS needs to have tabs kept on them, and depending on their method of reentry in Europe the refugee situation may have made that impossible.
As for the not making sense mathematically, that's an opinion based on personal priorities. There's an undeniable need to do something to help such a mass scale tragedy, but I'm not sure it has to be large numbers of asylum for refugees. As it is, the EU is only taking a small fraction of the refugees being handled by Jordan, Lebanon, etc. I am not sure how it would work logistically, but if the West (and Saudi, Emirates, Kuwait) was willing to invest in decent refugee setups outside of Western countries perhaps the physical relocation of so many people into the EU wouldn't be necessary. It's not like the current set up taking them into the EU is firing on all cylinders. For your narrower math point, if it's just 6-8 people who are ISIS trained and perpetrate a one off major attack, then I guess it's easy enough to argue this would be within the acceptable risk of taking in so many needy people. But what kind of confidence should Germans, French, Belgians, etc. have that this isn't going to happen again? How closely can the people coming in be screened? My understanding is it's very difficult to closely examine claimed identity because documentation from Syria isn't exactly 21st century ID chip tech. The leader of a country has a first priority to keeping his or her citizens safe, and depending on what the details end up being from this attack, it might be irresponsible not to reexamine how they're going about accepting refugees.
In addition to the short term terrorism threat, these European countries have mostly had terrible times in integrating their Muslim immigrant communities. This fly by the seat of your pants refugee acceptance seems likely to exacerbate that issue, which hurts the countries accepting the refugees financially and with the threat of incubating future terrorist threats.
This was a huge wake up call for mainstream politicians across the EU, and they're going to have to figure out some way of handling this in a way that makes their citizens feel more secure or else we'll see the FN surging, the UK bailing out of the EU, etc.
Can't express how sick to my stomach a FN electoral success would make me
