If you give into blackmail once, you will give in again and again until the blackmailer bleeds you dry.
The huge number of Muslim migrants from the Middle East and North Africa speaks to the failure of Muslim political elites to offer hope and prosperity to their populations.
The ascendancy of political Islam in the Muslim world since the 1970s, a phenomenon that Washington has played a big part in expanding and exploiting for its own strategic aims, is an under-reproted contributing factor in this mass migrant wave.
So the idea that the war in Syria is the only cause of Europe's refugee crisis is not based in reality.
In places like Pakistan and Afghanistan, where corruption is king and extremist Islamist forces threaten the way of life of normal people, the public has lost confidence in the government and political elites. The U.S. presence in these countries, which has been justified on false pretenses, has not changed anything in fifteen years. The governments that the U.S. is supporting are too incompetent and corrupt to truly tackle and defeat political Islam.
Many migrants from these countries view the West as a paradise where freedom is valued and opportunity is ripe, but in the 21st century the reality is anything but that for most people. Like their counterparts elsewhere, the political elites of Europe and North America have also failed the people by looting the public purse to bail out criminal banksters, shipping out jobs to third-world economies, and instituting draconian police state measures in the name of fighting terrorism to crush democratic voices and popular dissent.
An excerpt from, "Turkey and Saudi Arabia hit back for the Obama-Putin Syrian pact" DEBKAfile, March 5, 2016:
Turkey and Saudi Arabia have taken separate steps to break free from Washington’s dictates on the Syrian issue and show their resistance to Russia’s highhanded intervention in Syria. They are moving on separate tracks to signal their defiance and frustration with the exclusive pact between Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin which ostracizes Riyadh and Ankara on the Syrian question.
Turkey in particular, saddled with three million Syrian refugees (Jordan hosts another 1.4 million), resents Washington's deaf ear to its demand for no-fly zones in northern and southern Syria as shelters against Russian and Syrian air raids.
Last year, President Reccep Erdogan tried in desperation to partially open the door for a mass exit of Syrian refugees to Europe. He was aghast when he found that most of the million asylum-seekers reaching Europe were not Syrians, but Muslims from Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan, in search of a better life in the West. Most of the Syrians stayed put in the camps housing them in southern Turkey.
