refugees

There is a refugee crisis in Europe going on right now. It is, above all, a humanitarian crisis. The issue at stake should be how to take in the refugees. We should be working out the details of the political response from the European Union and the United States. Instead, we’re talking about if we should take in the refugees, and indeed, if the refugees are a threat to Western Civilization. My view is that at the heart of this inaction is a worldview about the place of the so-called West that fundamentally misconstrues the nature of the world we live in.

There are more than 1200 Greek islands, and fewer than 300 of them are populated. An Egyptian billionaire is in talks to possibly purchase two of these islands to give refugees from Syria a place to land, and possibly their own ‘country’ instead of returning to a war-torn region.

While Europe is erecting fences, deploying armies and expressing its “concern” about how to deal with the annual influx of some 300,000 asylum seekers, vast areas of the world – namely the Middle East and Africa – are essentially ceasing to exist.
For years, I have been witnessing the desperate movements of millions of refugees and migrants all over the world.

However they want to address the issue, most people are horrified at the refugee crisis now besetting Europe, with its scenes of chaos, conflict, and desperation. Yet in Israel, at least one high official sees in it not horror, but hope. As Rania Khalek has reported : “Dore Gold, director general of the Israeli foreign […]

August 26, 2015 marked the first anniversary of Israel’s offensive on the Gaza Strip, during which 2,219 Palestinians were killed. However, a large part of the story is left untold. Over half of those killed were refugees who were displaced from their homes in Yafa, Salama, Isdud, and many other villages and towns, as a result of and following the Nakba in 1948. The majority of those killed lived in refugee camps in the Gaza Strip within a 30 mile (50 km) radius of their homes of origin. A total of 1,236 refugees were killed during the 2014 offensive, including at least 309 children.

The Photo that went Round the World
Around 3:30 am September 2, Aylan Kurdi, his brother, mother and nine others drowned trying to reach a Greek island from Bodrum Turkey.

When Zionist Haganah militias carried out Operation Yiftach, on May 19 1948, the aim was to drive Palestinians in the northern Safad District which had declared its independence a mere five days earlier, outside the border of Israel.
The ethnic cleansing of Safad and its many villages was not unique to that area. In fact, it was the modus operandi of Zionist militias throughout Palestine. Soon after Israel’s independence, and the conquering of historic Palestine, the militias were joined together to form the Israeli armed forces.

A new report on the impact of deforestation in Africa suggests that integrating more trees and shrubs into farmland could not only benefit the environment, but also improve food security and even reduce the likelihood of people becoming refugees

Desperate people are still arriving on Europe’s borders and on its shores, as they have been for months and years. But now the public’s reaction is changing, says Hannah Jones

The widely circulated photo of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy whose body was found on a beach in Turkey and whose family was “making a final, desperate attempt to flee to relatives in Canada even though their asylum application had been rejected” by the Stephen Harper Government, has caused widespread outrage and forced Western leaders to acknowledge that there is a “refugee crisis”.