And this:
Your cite used numbers from the 1960 census. FYI
Of course, those numbers of 1.1M Orthodox Christians have nothing to back them up. No census. “May be as high as” is not reality. “May be as low as” a few hundred thousand, right?
Dude, you used 55 year old numbers. The total population has quadrupled since then. Give it up.
Dude, you have no backup for your new numbers, they are wholly made up. Give it up.
Still not backed up by any documentation, really, but:
The vast majority of Syrian Christians belong to Eastern denominations. The largest and oldest is the Greek Orthodox Church, which has about 503,000 members. The Armenian Apostolic Church has between 112,000 and 160,000, and the Syrian Orthodox Church about 89,000.
So - maybe 700K, at most. As I said, an order of magnitude less than “millions”.
What I noticed is that by adding the other Christian churches we get indeed over a million that are as the BBC reports that for Christians “There is no safe place left in Syria.” as Patriarch Gregorios reported back in April.
At least that is an honest answer. On some level I do not want to either. The large numbers of refugees arriving in Germany these days make me feel a little uneasy.
But there was a time when refugees were not coming to Germany but trying desperately to leave it - for example to Switzerland. Back then, the Swiss were facing similar concerns and eventually decided, not to let everyone in.
[QUOTE= Wikipedia]
Of the refugees, 60,000 were civilians escaping persecution by the Nazis. Of these, 26,000 to 27,000 were Jews. Between 10,000 and 24,000 Jewish civilian refugees were refused entry. Although Switzerland harboured more Jewish refugees than any other country, these refugees were refused entry on the grounds of already dwindling supplies. Of those refused entry, a Swiss government representative said, “Our little lifeboat is full.”
[/QUOTE]
I am pretty sure, many a Swiss also said “the problems of the whole world are not mine to solve” when they turned those Jews back at their borders. I just do not want us to be that country today.
The comparison is only valid if you think it is valid to compare the situation Jews faced in Germany back then with the situation the refugees face in Turkey and Hungary today. Is it?
No, but “not as bad as the Holocaust” is not the line I think that should be drawn. Things can still be truly awful and horrible for these people and still not be comparable to the Holocaust. And turning such folks away can still be terribly unjust and wrong, in my view, even if it’s not as unjust as turning away Jews fleeing the Nazis.
But – so long as we’re Godwinizing – the Jews who fled Europe for America pretty much wound up doing what you’d expect: they became law-abiding citizens bent on raising kids who’d grow up to be productive members of society: brain surgeons and rocket scientists and so on. America didn’t expect shoot-up-kids-at-a-bus-stop types, and didn’t get shoot-up-kids-at-a-bus-stop types, and so it worked out fine.
Then maybe don’t compare.
That’s not relevant to this thread. The fact that some native-born Frenchmen have carried out homophobic crimes doesn’t affect the question of whether large waves of immigrants from the Middle East will threaten gays or any other group in France.
Bertrand Delanoe was stabbed by an immigrant. None of the 19 men who committed the 9/11 terrorist attacks were born in the USA. The Tsarnaev brothers, who committed the Boston Marathon bombings, were immigrants. While there may be some Islamic terrorists who are second/third generation descendants of immigrants, there are some who don’t fit that profile.
Further, letting in large numbers from the Middle East and North Africa now means more second/third generation descendants in the future. Native-born French people have to think about the future of France as well as the present.
As the leader of the 7/7 London bombing said - not long after Tony Blair’s re-election and at a time when it was known the WMD story was bogus:
Aside for attacks on media and cartoonists, I’m not sure I know of a single attack in the west that hasn’t been a response to western imperialism.
You could almost think there was a way to end these attacks.
So, originally, centuries ago, people who often looked like each other got together and formed into kingdoms, fighting together, sharing a language, and eventually carving out a land of their own.
That’s the basic story of every nation. Why should each nation suddenly have to let in a flood of people who *aren’t *distant descendents of the founders, who don’t share the language or values, who don’t look the same, and their own nations are a dysfunctional hellhole?
It is not politically correct to even suggest that the genetics of the people might have something to do with it, but it is probably true. The genetics of the people fleeing these countries that are despotic hellholes…might actually in some way predispose them towards behavior traits that create despotic hellholes.
I ain’t saying we can practically genetically screen people or if we should sterilize or murder people with the wrong genes, I’m just pointing out that these other folks maybe shouldn’t be permitted to just flood in and outnumber the natives of a given country overnight.
Otherwise, why have a limit at all? Why not just invite everybody over?
Keeping them out of the country?
Perhaps Charles Manson has some choice words to us about how to avoid getting pregnant women guttered?
I think the turning away can be compared, if one believes that they are escaping from a human rights horror (if not as bad as the Holocaust).
For example, I believe that it is wrong for relatively wealthy countries to turn away refugees escaping from horrors, even if they aren’t Holocaust-level horrors. Do you agree or disagree, or do you just feel that they are not escaping from horrors?
No. In one case the turning away was toward death. On the other the turning away is toward bad living conditions and lack of employment. Don’t compare things that cannot be compared.
Only if you think that Hungary, Turkey and Greece are “horrors”.
The countries they are fleeing from can be fairly described as horrors right now.
Evasion. The brouhaha is not about them fleeing from Syria or Lybia. It is about them fleeing on from Turkey, Greece and Hungary.