Globalisation and Multiculturalism in Coronavirus Times

By Enza Ferreri

This article was published on Italy Travel Ideas


Many European countries have been seriously affected by Covid-19.

The idea that the movement of great masses of people from their places of origin to new countries could not give rise to critical, not to say disastrous, consequences has now, with the new pandemic, been put to the test more than ever. And we know it has miserably failed the test.

First of all, without globalisation the spread of a virus or another kind of epidemic could have remained localised. The globalisation that is sought after by economic and political powers has made the current pandemic of Coronavirus possible.

Immigration between continents has macroscopically and starkly displayed all its risks and dangers - and not just for the migrants - even to those who’ve been obstinately refusing to see them.

But that’s not all. The response to a pandemic requires the fabric of a society to be compact: everyone is asked to impose restrictions on himself for the collective good, as well as his own.

What’s been happening in these days in Italy, France, Spain and Germany is showing that a society with large numbers of unassimilated, unintegrated migrants is not such a collective body that can count on reciprocal ties and a sense of belonging to the same community and sharing a sense of responsibility towards it.

In all the afore-mentioned countries, which have strict containment and isolation regulations for the whole population, there have been cases of immigrant neighbourhoods or groups who have rebelled against these rules, behaved as if norms of home confinement and of keeping at least one-metre distance between people when out of doors didn’t exist, and who finally became aggressive towards authorities who asked them to comply with the quarantine order, thus endangering everybody.

French commentator Eric Zemmour reported that his country’s migrant neighbourhoods have responded to the Coronavirus crisis by rioting and looting supermarkets, and he talks about addressing “the migrant community’s dangerous and violent refusal to cooperate voluntarily with measures to control the spread of contagion”.

Something similar is happening in Italy, where migrants have been seen crowding the streets deserted by Italians, who force themselves to remain indoors.

In Spain, migrants at the Immigration Centre of Aluche, Madrid, rioted against the confinement of Coronavirus. They climbed on the roof crying "freedom, freedom" and announcing the start of a hunger strike.

In Germany on 16 March, 10-20 residents of the centre for asylum seekers in Suhl in the state of Thuringia rioted, climbed over the perimeter fence, threw missiles at emergency services and police. They also removed manhole covers in an effort to escape and reach the city through the sewer system, and threatened to burn down the asylum seekers centre.

The next day, about 30 residents gathered near the main gate waving ISIS flags and tried to break down the gate, while they used children as human shields by placing them in the first row.

The over 500 residents of the facility as well as all staff had been quarantined since Friday 13 after a man in the centre tested positive for Coronavirus. The measures have led to several days of disturbances, according to the RTL broadcaster.

In Italy too there have been cases of migrants with Coronavirus infection in asylum seekers centres, for example in Milan and Bologna. In these areas many complaints have been recorded about migrants who, much more regularly than Italians, did not respect the confinement and quarantine regulations.

The current, unforeseen crisis also paints a clear picture: our European societies are not as strong, indestructible as we and the people who came here from the Third World thought. We may now discover that we don't have the resources to cope with this pandemic created by globalisation and worsened by uncontrolled and illegal immigration with all the social chaos that it involves.

SOURCES
France and Germany Coronavirus Norms Migrants Defiance
France Immigrant Districts Not Complying with Coronavirus Norms and Measures
Coronavirus Spanish migrants riot
Germany Immigrant Centre Riot
Police Video Conference of Germany Immigrant Centre Riot
Italy Bologna Migrants Centres Coping with Coronavirus
Italy Milan Infection in Migrant Centre
PHOTO CREDIT
RAIR Foundation

Patriotism Means Uncovering the Truth

Unfortunately I'll have to skip tomorrow's London Forum meeting.

But I wish to write about the topic of one of the announced speeches, by Richard Edmonds: "Bad Nenndorf – a Nuremberg Trial for Allied War Criminals". The subject is described as "the tragedy of Bad Nenndorf where in the aftermath of WWII British torturers, many of them later emigrating to Israel, killed dozens of National Socialist sympathisers including girls belonging to the BDSM."

Richard Edmonds is a British nationalist who is capable of criticising his country when necessary, who rightly doesn't believe that patriotism means defending the indefensible.

I'd never heard of this Allied interrogation centre, a secret prison established after the British occupation of north-west Germany in 1945, so I did some research and here's what I've found.

This is Wikipedia's brief introduction to it:

The Bad Nenndorf interrogation centre was a British Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre in the town of Bad Nenndorf, Germany, which operated from June 1945 to July 1947. Allegations of mistreatment of detainees by British troops resulted in a police investigation, a public controversy in both Britain and Germany and the camp's eventual closure. Four of the camp's officers were brought before courts-martial in 1948 and one of the four was convicted on charges of neglect.

Hundreds of mostly German prisoners after the end of WWII were held in a camp converted from a mud bath complex - with the former bathing chambers becoming prison cells - in Bad Nenndorf, a spa town near Hanover.

Although British authorities tried to keep this centre hidden from public scrutiny, in December 2005 investigative reporter Ian Cobain wrote an article published in The Guardian, based on information he had obtained from a Freedom of Information Request to the Foreign Office. He described Bad Nenndorf in powerful terms:

Britain's secret torture centre. The interrogation camp that turned prisoners into living skeletons.

German spa became a forbidden village where Gestapo-like techniques were used...

CSDIC [Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre], a division of the War Office, operated interrogation centres around the world, including one known as the London Cage, located in one of London's most exclusive neighbourhoods. Official documents discovered last month at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, show that the London Cage was a secret torture centre where German prisoners who had been concealed from the Red Cross were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with execution or with unnecessary surgery.

As horrific as conditions were at the London Cage, Bad Nenndorf was far worse. Last week, Foreign Office files which have remained closed for almost 60 years were opened after a request by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act. These papers, and others declassified earlier, lay bare the appalling suffering of many of the 372 men and 44 women who passed through the centre during the 22 months it operated before its closure in July 1947.

They detail the investigation carried out by a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Tom Hayward, following the complaints of Major Morgan-Jones and Dr Jordan. Despite the precise and formal prose of the detective's report to the military government, anger and revulsion leap from every page as he turns his spotlight on a place where prisoners were systematically beaten and exposed to extreme cold, where some were starved to death and, allegedly, tortured with instruments that his fellow countrymen had recovered from a Gestapo prison in Hamburg. Even today, the Foreign Office is refusing to release photographs taken of some of the "living skeletons" on their release.

Initially, most of the detainees were Nazi party members or former members of the SS, rounded up in an attempt to thwart any Nazi insurgency. A significant number, however, were industrialists, tobacco importers, oil company bosses or forestry owners who had flourished under Hitler.

By late 1946, the papers show, an increasing number were suspected Soviet agents. Some were NKVD officers - Russians, Czechs and Hungarians - but many were simply German leftists. Others were Germans living in the Russian zone who had crossed the line, offered to spy on the Russians, and were tortured to establish whether they were genuine defectors.

Of many of these men Scotland Yard detective Hayward said that there were not charged with any crime but on the contrary were willing to help, were detained for no reason at all, and died of malnutrition and lack of medical care. Inspector Hayward reported: "There are a number against whom no offence has been alleged, and the only authority for their detention would appear to be that they are citizens of a country still nominally at war with us." Cobain goes on to explain an important part of the problem:

Of the 20 interrogators ordered to break the inmates of Bad Nenndorf, 12 were British, a combination of officers from the three services and civilian linguists. The remaining eight included a Pole and a Dutchman, but were mostly German Jewish refugees who had enlisted on the outbreak of war, and who, Inspector Hayward suggested, "might not be expected to be wholly impartial".

Cobain has penned other articles on the subject for The Guardian and written a book on the history of torture perpetrated by British officials during and after the Second World War, entitled Cruel Britannia (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) . The book was published in autumn 2012, when one of his essays appeared in the Daily Mail with this headline, upsetting but truthful:

How Britain tortured Nazi PoWs: The horrifying interrogation methods that belie our proud boast that we fought a clean war.

James Heartfield, in the book Unpatriotic History of the Second World War (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , writes:

Internal investigations revealed that torture was rife at Bad Nenndorf, and that many had died of injuries or of starvation.

Why, then, were there so few convictions?

After, in 1946 and 1947, several Bad Nenndorf inmates were taken to nearby hospitals and some died there, the doctors reported these cases. A court of inquiry was appointed, followed by a full enquiry by a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Tom Hayward. By June 1947 Hayward had amassed an enormous amount of evidence in support of the allegations of ill-treatment and use of methods which were extreme even for a harsh military prison holding suspected Nazi war criminals.

His report led to the camp's closure the following month, and to the courts-martial of the camp Commandant Lt Col Robin Stephens, the medical officer and two interrogators in 1948.

Hayward had found that interrogators and guards were not likely to be impartial towards the prisoners because of the criteria used in their selection, among which knowledge of German language and hatred for Germans were predominant. The most likely new recruits, as a consequence, were Austrian and German Jewish refugees. One such recruit was Lt Richard Oliver Langham, one of the interrogators to be court-martialled.

News of the courts-martial reached the papers, in particular The Times and The Daily Express.

The book Liberal Democracies at War: Conflict and Representation (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , edited by Andrew Knapp and Hilary Footitt, gives some idea of why these men were acquitted or convicted on minor charges, like neglect rather than manslaughter.

The Times's coverage of the courts-martial well reflected the spirit of the time and its little appetite for getting to the truth and giving a just punishment which was unpalatable for so many reasons, not least as an admission of guilt involving the war effort itself. That spirit was probably behind the excessive leniency of the court.

This latter topic is too long for the present article, and may be worth covering in a separate one.

Islamic Hatred and Persecution of Christians Is Imported into European Refugee Centres

Christians persecuted by Muslims in Islamic countries who think they are escaping their fate by fleeing discover that the same treatment awaits them in Europe, which after all has simply imported Islam's barbarism by opening its doors to large numbers of Muslims.

The German daily newspaper Die Welt reports on the terrible exclusion and violence suffered by Christian refugees at the hands of Muslims in Germany's asylum centres.

Germany is the second country in the world, after the US, for number of asylum applications received, with 13% of them last year, and the first in Europe, with 23.2% last year.

The report starts with some figures:

In Iraq, there are currently 30,000 Christians fleeing. But these are only those who are currently in the main news. Worldwide suffering estimate by humanitarian organisation Open Doors is around 100 million Christians under persecution. The organisation World Watch List 2014 has particularly strict Islamic countries - such as Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan - among the ten states with the worst persecution of Christians.

An example of the discrimination suffered in German reception centres for refugees is what happened to Leyla S, an Iranian whose Christian faith compelled her to flee to Germany about three years ago with her husband and daughter.

The woman related to Die Welt her experience in the reception centre in Hessen, where about 20 of the approximately 100 other refugees cursed the family from the beginning again and again as “infidels” and “dirty dogs” and banned Leyla from the two kitchens.

"For two years", she says, "we always had to cook in our room. Once I tried to go in the communal kitchen, but the Muslim refugees from Afghanistan housed in the centre immediately chased us away, claiming that our presence rendered the food impure.

"Why then are these people coming to Germany, home to millions of Christians, who for them are unclean, although not their money?"

Die Welt also exposes the wall of silence of the authorities. In the refugee camps of Baden-Württemberg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Hesse, those responsible say that there are no cases of discrimination, while in reality they happen under the roofs of the refugee camps. The incidents take place in silence, hidden from the police.

Max Klingberg of the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR), an organisation that for 14 years has been working with refugees, explains that attacks against Christians are far from isolatd cases and that all Christians and Christian converts arriving in Germany are victims of harassment, threats, pressure.

And psychological violence sometimes leads to physical violence. In the case of an Iranian Christian convert, a woman, Muslim men urinated on her clothes and other personal effects to humiliate her.

The situation is so bad that in Bavaria, in order to stop the violence, separate accommodation for different religious groups of refugees has been requested.

Since the moment of his arrival at the reception centre Ramin, an Afghan refugee who converted to Christianity, has been threatened by three Muslim countrymen with whom he shared the room. He recounts: "They said that I belonged to the Dar al-Harb [house of war, as Islam calls all the part of the world which is non-Muslim] and not the Dar al-Islam [house of Islam]." For the three Afghan Muslims, Ramin deserved death as an infidel and apostate.

The man tells of various attacks, including one that led very close to his death: "We were in the room when my three roommates beat me in the kidneys with the remote. When I managed to wriggle out, one of them went into the kitchen and took a knife. I then attempted to flee in another room, but another had blocked the door with his foot. At that moment I was shaking, I turned to Jesus asking Him to save me. Then one of the men pointed the knife to my chest, saying that it would be impossible for me to stay alive for much longer. Fortunately, the other two reminded the man that he had to suspend for the time being his revenge, since he had yet to complete his application for political asylum."

In line with the constant denial of Muslim supremacism and Islamic persecution of Christians, authorities more often than not don't deal with these cases of hatred. An Iranian 19-year-old Christian tried to escape his Mohammedan tormentors by asking for a transfer to another city. The local council refused the application on the grounds that the dispute had nothing to do with religion but was purely personal.

Peter Ulrich, director of a free school for asylum seekers managed by the Evangelical Free Church, says that Christians are much closer to European culture and far better capable of integration than Muslims. No surprise here.

"In my work as a teacher of German language" he adds, "I have observed that many refugees from Syria, Iraq and Iran seek asylum precisely because of religious persecution. They are disappointed and irritated by how often their problem is not taken seriously by the authorities of our country, from which they instead expect understanding and support."

The solution is pretty simple not just for Germany but for all of Europe: give asylum to Christians, deny it to Muslims.

Germany: Whole New Neighbourhoods without Churches

In Germany, architecture is being "de-Christianized". Entire new neighbourhoods and urban areas are being built without a church in them: churches are just not planned in the projects, as if nobody even thought of them.

The German Catholic news site Kreuz reports on this phenomenon with examples from an article by architecture critic Dankwart Guratzsch in the daily Die Welt.

In Stuttgart, a large new district was built for 12,000 residents without a church.

In Hamburg, another new neighbourhood for 12,000 residents was created without a church. Not only that: to realize this project, 19 churches were closed down, probably because they were in the way. Made disappear in the blink of an eye. Under the pretext that nobody had requested them.

Some people, however, did protest, and to make them happy they were provided with a small chapel with just thirty chairs, hidden on the ground floor of a battered-facade office building.

This does not look like an accident, but a plan to make the signs of Christian faith disappear in a cold, calculated, cruel way.

Writing in Die Welt, Guratzsch quotes the son of the great philosopher Hegel, Immanuel Hegel, who advised: "Build churches!". Because, adds Guratzsch: "To build churches means to build communities. When the faithful are deprived of the visible testimony of public recognition of their values, the latter are also weakened for the believers themselves".

Guratzsch recalls how the same was happening during the time of the German Democratic Republic, communist Germany: churches were being demolished to humiliate, offend, isolate religion and inculcate atheism.

A Europe without churches and without strong Christian roots and values will be much more vulnerable to a threat similar to communism: Islamization.

Increasing Attacks on Christianity in Europe

I'm afraid that Raymond Ibrahim might in the not-so-distant future have more work to do when compiling his monthly statistics of persecution of Christians.

European countries may have to be added to his list.

Persecution of Christians in Europe takes mainly two forms. The first is the age-old type that we already know from what happens in Asia and Africa as Muslim (mostly illegal) immigrants spread across the globe.

The second is the brand-new, "liberal" kind, deriving from European elites' efforts to marginalize Christianity in its own historical home.

I'll focus in this post on a few examples of the increasing number of physical attacks on churches, Christian festivals, other symbols of Christianity and even Christian people throughout Europe. It must be noted that destroying crosses is a well-documented Islam's tradition.

In a cemetery in Pausa, Saxony, Germany, a 2-meter-tall statue of Jesus Christ was beheaded and the head smashed to pieces. Pastor Frank Pierel reported that such attacks take place rather frequently in his area.

In Strunjan, Slovenia, the "artist" Dean Verzel and others set fire to a votive cross erected by local seamen in the year 1600, replicating the gesture he had performed 10 years before in 2002 and for which he had been acquitted. Repeating an often-heard justification for all sorts of anti-Christian garbage, "it's nothing against Christianity", he said, "it's a 'work of art'".

In the cemetery of Canohès, France, four Christian graves were vandalized and covered with anti-Christian slogans.

In Bologna, Italy, a Moroccan student approached the faithful attending the procession of Corpus Domini and shouted "You're all a flock of sheep, you'll go to hell!" He was charged with offending people and a religious faith.

In Clouzeaux, France, the Church of the Bon Pasteur was set fire to in broad daylight. The fire was lit in three different places and caused immense damage. The altar was totally destroyed, electrical wires pulled out of the wall, crucifixes, pews, chairs, panels, chandeliers toppled and broken, holy water fonts, extremely precious vestments, and many other religious objects completely ruined. Apparently it was three local children, aged 14, 13 and 12, who caused damage of 50,000-70,000 euros.

Still in France, three men entered the Church of Cruseilles on Holy Saturday and set fire to leaflets, prayer and hymn books. The cloth covering an altar was also burned and the main altar damaged.

More cemetery vandalism in France, in Sussargues, where graves were covered with anti-Christian writings and crucifixes were turned upside down, and church vandalism in Paris.

In Duisburg, Germany, churches were attacked over the New Year with stones, firecrackers, rockets, causing tens of thousands of euros' worth of damage. The congregants said that this was not the first time.

The main server of the Catholic Church in France was hijacked by a Muslim Algerian hacker who took control of a total of 475 French websites, many Catholic, the content of which he replaced with the message "No God But Allah and Mohammed is Messenger Of Allah".

This tops it all. In Nimes, France, people who had attended a Catholic festival were leaving in cars and buses when young Arab-Muslims from the neighboring estate started to throw stones at their vehicles coming from the sanctuary. The event organisers were forced to arrange a diversion to a different route to protect the occupants of the vehicles from the savage attacks, which continued.

In Nice, France, the traditional, annual Catholic procession for the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, celebrated throughout the Catholic world on August 15 but by the parish of Our Lady of the Assumption in Nice on August 14 evening, is now under police protection. During the last procession the entire route, 400 meters long, was lined by police. Who the faithful need protection from can be guessed when we know that Nice has a large Muslim population, who has been holding its prayers every Friday for years, illegally occupying public streets with impunity.

To remain in Nice, one of its churches received the dubious honor of being adorned with a huge Algerian flag on the front, covering the words "Saint Peter".

Watch this video translated by Islam versus Europe (IVE) about the many attacks committed against churches and cemeteries all over France in the first half of 2011 but prepare to be upset.

In Milbertshofen, Munich, Germany, a Catholic church has been the object of a continuous aggressive campaign for more than a year, with services disrupted, walls smeared, holy water receptacles filled with urine. Things have been set on fire, and tiles torn down from the roof; consequently it rained inside, with risk of damage to the almost 500-year-old tableau. The culprits are the neighborhood's youths and even children, almost entirely from a migrant background. A local social worker says that the youths are becoming more radical and the attacks are increasingly religiously motivated. (This video was also translated by IVE)

Another video shows St Calogero Church in Agrigento, Sicily, Italy, after Ales Halid, a drunken immigrant from Ghana already known to the police for other crimes, entered the church shouting in Arabic and smashed a small black statue of the saint against a wall. The man was so agitated that it took four police officers to restrain him before arrest. Two officers got injured and Halid also damaged the police car.

"Now we have to understand what drove this man to act in such an ugly manner" the video says, but it inadvertently hints at an answer when it adds that the attack took place "during the festivities dedicated to the Monaco Turco [Turkish Monk, a reference to St Calogero] worshipped by the people of Agrigento, saint who has been acclaimed by Bishop Montenegro as a model of integration among peoples." Maybe Halid did not want "integration", and particularly objected to a Turkish Christian monk called "the black saint".

Notice that none of the Italian media reporting this called the man "Muslim". This is the usual media line, which the president of France's National Council of Muslim Faith for some reason thought in need of being reinforced when last week he asked journalists that, in case of aggressions, the religion of neither victim nor aggressor should be mentioned.

In the cemetery of Belleville-sur-Meuse, France, the bronze statue of Christ carrying the cross was broken and fifteen graves were desecrated.

In Burgos, Spain, the two statues of St Peter and St Lawrence of the 13th-century Gothic church of San Esteban were beheaded. Police were puzzled by this attack against a place of worship, which is also an architecture jewel and an important cultural and historical heritage. The main hypothesis was that it was an act of vandalism because, if it had been a robbery, the thieves would not have damaged the statues. The church's parish priest said this was "the first time" an attack on San Esteban had ever occurred in its 8 centuries of existence.

A few years ago, 57-year-old Canon Michael Ainsworth was beaten up in his own east London churchyard by three Muslim youths who caused him serious injuries. The attacks on vicars or churches were so frequent in that parish with a large Bangladeshi Muslim population that they prompted Melanie Phillips to write: "Indeed, there appear to have been many attacks by Muslims who are clearly intent on turning east London into a no-go area for Christians".

The Telegraph wrote: "A survey of London clergy by National Churchwatch, which provides personal safety advice, found that nearly half said they had been attacked in the previous 12 months. The organisation suggested that vicars should consider taking off their dog collars when they are on their own."

The two facts that France has the lion's share of these less than edifying episodes and that, with 7.5 per cent of its population being Muslim, has the highest percentage of Muslims among Western European countries seem to go hand in hand rather well.

I could go on but you've got the idea of the current trend. This is only the tip of the iceberg.