A scathing editorial in German newspaper the Frankfurter Allgemeine has criticised Saudi Arabia and other Arab states for their inaction over the migrant crisis, and twisted priorities in Islamising Europe.
In many cases, refugees and economic migrants have travelled thousands of miles from the Near and Middle East to find new lives in Europe, bypassing much closer, wealthy, and sparsely populated Arab countries to do so. There have been many attempts to explain away this absurd situation in recent weeks as what was a year ago a barely noticed quirk, but what has now become a rapidly mounting scandal.
A piece by an analyst for the highly respected Royal United Services Institute for the BBC this week explained without any apparent irony that rich Gulf states were not admitting refugees because a sudden influx of tens of thousands, if not millions of people from a warzone could cause political instability and irreversible demographic shifts.
Why these reasons were perfectly reasonable for Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and other similarly rich Gulf states, but couldn’t possibly apply to Europe, which is also facing political instability and irreversible demographic change, was not mentioned.
Yet there is hope, and some aid getting past the Gulf airlock and filtering out into the wider world.
Private individuals, every news report is now obliged to tell you, have gone over the heads of their own governments and are spending some of their enormous oil wealth on charity – about £600 million. Further, the Saudi Arabian government have just made a very generous offer to Germany.
No doubt spurred on by the multi-billion euro budget the German Federal government has now realised is totally insufficient for the nearly one million predominantly Muslim migrants and asylum seekers they are taking in this year, Saudi Arabia has offered Germany an undisclosed sum of money to make life more bearable for the new arrivals. They propose to build 200 new mosques in the country to make the Syrians at home, reports the Frankfurter Allgemeine.
German chancellor Angela Merkel has vowed to integrate the 800,000 refugees the country is expecting to take this year. What seems more likely, is that “This year’s record refugee influx will bring sweeping social, demographic and economic change to Germany”. By the end of the year, around one in a hundred Germans will have arrived this year.