Syrian refugees arriving on the island of Lesbos (cc photo: Ggia)
This week on CounterSpin: AP reports hundreds of civilians fleeing Mosul’s Old City, climbing over rubble as explosions rock the streets, as government forces battle the Islamic State. Cameroonian officials deny UN reports they’ve driven out at least 5,000 Nigerian refugees in recent weeks, rounding them up in trucks, often separating parents and children, taking them back to the danger they thought they’d escaped. Suicides are up alarmingly among Myanmar refugees in a camp in Thailand. Meanwhile, Austrian defense officials say they will use armored vehicles and troops to keep refugees from crossing the border from Italy.
Displaced people aren’t one story; they’re 65.9 million, according to the UN Refugee Agency. But it’s not just a story about individuals. What’s the connection between displacement and the so-called war on terror? Climate disruption? Poverty? On displacement, If you aren’t telling the big, interconnected story, you aren’t telling the story.
Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in Connecticut. He’s author of, most recently, The Death of a Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution along with many other books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. His columns appear on AlterNet every Wednesday, the most recent carries the arresting headline, “By 2100, Refugees Would Be the Most Populous Country on Earth.”
We talk about displacement and displaced people with Vijay Prashad on this week’s CounterSpin.
Transcript: There is a Myopia in Western Media Covering the Refugee Crisis
Plus a quick look back at recent press, including false accusations against Iran, and “liberal” media outlets moving to the right.
If we lived in an ethical world , those who bomb and destroy another nation would be required to accept the refugees that the warring nation created. HOwever, we live in an insane and counter productive space, where a single thought of , I think maybe, kind of, sorta that THOSE PEOPLE are evil and so———- a nation creates the “preemptive strike,” which is an insane way for insane nations to create fortune creating w ar economies for a small segmen of the population——-and the dream of a “more perfect union ” and establishing justice,” dies so quickly away. : (
Refugees, migrants and the migrant labor we depend on to sleep in the rough and pick all our fruits and vegetables, they are all of the uneducated laboring-class lower-half of society.
So, as the 51% most wealthy in each and every democracy on earth deliberately keeps the laboring-class impoverished for the purpose of cheep slave labor, why should we expect that anything short of global warming would stop things going from bad to worse?
“What’s the connection between displacement and the so-called war on terror? Climate disruption? Poverty? On displacement, If you aren’t telling the big, interconnected story, you aren’t telling the story.”
I agree. If you aren’t telling the stories of the Muslims killed, threatened, coerced, raped, humiliated, and exiled from their homes by a few co-religionists who demand the former adopt their interpretation of Allah’s (swt) divine law, you aren’t telling the story.
If you aren’t profiling brave individuals in the Muslim world championing individual rights against a mandatory “divine” law, you aren’t telling the story.
If you aren’t telling the stories of ex-Muslims, an entire demographic group, you aren’t telling the story.
For the sake of liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims everywhere, please tell our stories.
What a wonderful show with Vijay Prashad. I’ve been saying news outlets never ask “why” when someone becomes a refugee, and what did your country’s government do to facilitate this exodus. Vijay explained it all perfectly. Thank you!