Francis Carr Begbie
Occidental Observer
August 9, 2015
What do you do when a story gets so big that you can ignore it no longer — you police the language around it by deploying those tried and trusty weapons; shame and demonization.
Prime Minister David Cameron learned this lesson the hard way on the unlikely location of the roof of the Stock Exchange in Ho Chi Minh City when he was finally cornered into saying something about the growing deluge of illegal immigrants, traversing the English channel on the back of lorries and trains, overwhelming Britain’s flimsy border defences and disappearing into the English countryside.
Look, this is very testing, I accept that, because you have got a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain because Britain has got jobs, it’s got a growing economy, it’s an incredible place to live.
Then the world tumbled in on him. The Refugee Council, the leader of the Labour Party and many others fell on him like jackals on a wounded antelope — all because he used the “dehumanising” word “swarmed.” The BBC, Mirror Telegraph and Guardian thought the PM’s language angle so hugely important that they diverted their attention from the real crisis of thousands of immigrants trying to illegally get into Britain every night.
The “anti-immigration rhetoric” meme has been building in strength just as the border crisis itself has been growing. Late last year the Archbishop of Canterbury said he was worried about anti-immigrant rhetoric. An academic at the London School of Economics has been complaining about the same thing. The Guardian has been whining about irresponsible rhetoric around the Royal Navy’s picking up boatloads of Africans in the Mediterranean. Last month the Guardian was again running the same nagging complaint.
So is it semantics that lead to people living in misery in a refugee camp in Calais, or cause illegal immigrants to die making futile dangerous attempts to cross into Britain? It is those who use “dehumanizing” language who are responsible for that? Of course, it has nothing to do with the flimsy borders and guilt-ridden political class unwilling to shut down the rewards of doing whatever they can to get to the UK.
Jewish writers have been at the forefront of the complaints about the tone of the commentary. In the Guardian Jonathan Freedland wrote that when it comes to immigration “we have to change the way we talk about it.” Nick Cohen said that the word ‘swarmed’ was an “inhuman comparison”. While in the Telegraph neocon Janet Daley was railing against “anti-immigrant rhetoric” on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the Telegraph another Jewish journalist, Emma Barnett, is deeply concerned about the way ordinary Britons are talking about the immigrant flood. She thinks it is “dehumanizing” and chides the selfish British for only thinking about themselves while ignoring the real victims.
Just 21 miles from Britain there is a jungle. Or to give it its full name: Jungle Camp. This is where hundreds of displaced people from all over the world live in some of the most wretched conditions. Stuck in a no-man’s land in Calais, they are living in temporary cardboard structures and surviving on porridge made out of milk and soggy bread. Not that you will probably have paid them much attention over the last week.
The “Jungle” is a refugee camp near Calais called Jungle 2 which is now home to thousands of displaced Middle Easterners and Africans in transit to Britain and it is the scene of frequent riots and gang fights such as when knife-wielding Eritreans clash with Sudanese, for example. A sympathetic portrait of the place is made in this BBC documentary which still cannot conceal the fact that most of these “refugees” are fit, well-nourished, young males.
There is no big mystery about what is happening here — it is an attempt to suppress free speech by labelling it as “hate speech.” By rigorously policing what can and cannot be said, the left have been able to demonize any opposition as “far right.” Anyone who utters even one word of objection is a moral pariah before they begin. Again we are reminded that the West is dying because of they have internalized guilt that is being continuously spewed by the mainstream media. No other culture does this.
The media are helped in this task by a stage army of state-funded supporters who scream ‘foul’ if anyone says a word out of place. Foremost among these is Zoe Gardner who is the TV face of a taxpayer funded outfit called Asylum Aid.
She is photogenic, well-spoken and generous with her opinion that Britain should be taking in far more asylum seekers. Indeed the BBC seems to have her on permanent speed dial as the voice and face of caring, migrant-loving Britain.
She is part of a very incentivised industry. Her charity is basically a front operation for lawyers who can charge the taxpayer vast sums for defending migrant deportations and for arranging housing, further education etc.
There are many organisations like this. Migrant Help Dover offers help with housing, education and employment. Calais Migrant Solidarity has its own permanent offices at the Calais encampment and openly assists bogus asylum claimants. It distributes flyers warning that British Home Office officials “are not your friends” and will “try and refuse your claim and refuse you.” It includes a list of various questions that British officials ask migrants to discover whether they are genuine asylum seekers or not. These include knowing the currency, the name of the president or even the lay-out of the capital of the country you claim to come from. “Prepare for the interview and know your story well” the documents advice.
Behind each of these organisations is a herd of lawyers each keen to get their snouts into the huge trough of government money available through Britain’s legal aid system — a form of lawyer’s welfare. Mass immigration is a cause for which the entire legal profession has an abiding enthusiasm. Activist judges seem determined to sabotage deportations with one perverse decision after another.
You can rely on the media not to mention the dog that does not bark. For there is a huge puzzle about this crisis which was summed up by a commenter in a newspaper forum who wrote:
Despite all the problems, I am amazed how little is done to prevent and detect the migrants. The fence is easily breached, so why not a barrier of rolls of barbed or razor wire inside the fence? This could be alongside the rail line and would deter even the most determined.
Whilst it is clearly easy to break open the doors of trucks, I would have thought that any truck operating on this route would be fitted we heat detector alarms or CCVT cameras, which are very cheap these days. Also, once the doors are locked and having checked there are no intruders, a poster should be pasted across the doors stating (in several languages) warning that if the poster is broken the truck would be checked and any occupants ejected.
Any immigrants who make it to Britain should always be returned to France, as this is where they should claim asylum, or in any other Schengen country. We are not in Schengen (free trade partnership) and it is not our responsibility if the “Free movement” ends up in Calais.
All good questions that no-one in the mainstream media or politics is asking. Instead the rhetoric concentrates on the “tone” of the actual coverage. Last Monday 2,000 attempts to run the Channel tunnel were defeated followed by a similar number the following night. A total of 37,000 have been prevented this year alone — who knows how many were successful. A Sudanese man became the ninth to die trying to make the crossing. The pictures have indeed been dramatic.
And what is David Cameron actually doing about this? Well, being Cameron, he talks a good game. He has said in speech after speech that Britain is not a soft touch. But he also says the EU prevents him for banning benefits to migrants.
Every expression of protest from local White parents has been labelled as “far right” and extremist.” A local demonstration by 50 parents against the imminent opening of an immigrant detention centre in Whitstable was typical. The only paper that reported it, Scotland’s Sunday Herald framed it as a “racist backlash” threat to the safety of vulnerable asylum seekers from the “far right.” The Kent local weekly press and BBC radio never even mentioned it at all.
The UN’s Special Representative for Migration is Peter Sutherland (see also Tobias Langdon’s recent TOO article) who is also head of something called the Global Forum on Migration and Development. The BBC and the Guardian gave this unelected figure a platform to say that “Anybody who thinks that by erecting borders or fences in some way a particular state can be protected from alleged ‘floods’ — which are anything but floods — of migrants is living in cloud cuckoo land.”
You could rely on the British media never to remind people of Mr Sutherland’s previous pronouncement on immigration when the former Goldman Sachs banker (who made £125 million from the Goldman IPO) said that the EU should do it’s best to “undermine the homogeneity” of its member states.