Some lessons that we never learn…

In today’s sickening world of trendy terminologies, every second person uses the term “Global Village”, not having the least idea of what it means. This term refers to a unified, open and borderless world. 

This is an imperialist idea of global domination. If you don’t like the word imperialist you can call it a Utopian idea, because the first will never die and the latter will never become a thing of reality.

Let me introduce you to a friend of mine. This person is a white male of European origin. A couple of weeks ago this friend of mine, took a flight from Lima, Peru via Miami to return to his destination within the European Union. The country to which this person belongs, Finland, has visa free travel agreement with the #UnitedStates.

All of you, who might have traveled to the United States, may know that their immigration and customs procedures are quite different from other countries. For example, in many countries of the world if you are in transit through their airports to third countries, and you don’t need to leave the airport, you never go through immigration and customs. But that does not hold for the U.S. In this land of liberty, even if you are in transit, you go through immigration and customs control.

So my friend in question arrived at Miami’s International Airport, and queued up at the immigration counter. When at last he made it to the immigration counter and presented his Finnish passport, he was asked to step aside after some initial questions, reflecting doubts about his origin.

Then, he was taken into a separate interrogation room, and a specially appointed immigration officer conducted a lengthy enquiry, before letting him through.

Now this all sounds ambiguous, because you don’t know a couple of facts. First of all, this white Finish Male has a beard. Secondly, this ethnic Caucasian travelled to #South #Asia, about a year ago. In my friend’s words the interrogating officer first did his best to establish that the subject was a by-birth Finnish citizen and had no immigrant ancestry. 

Then came the real part. For the next more than two hours this person had to explain, why had he been to Pakistan? Why did he have 5 Pakistani visas in his passport? While in Pakistan, which cities did he visit? And a bunch of other moronic questions. 

He finally succeeded in compelling the U.S. immigration that he was not an extremist, just because he had a beard and just because he had been to Pakistan.

This is not an isolated incident. Most of the Pakistanis, who have travelled to the land of the free, can tell you such stories. 

The #discrimination, which starts at the entry points of this flag carrier of democracy, is not endowed upon Pakistanis only. If you follow the news, you must know about frequent incidents of police officers, shooting or badly injuring people during arrests. In many of the cases, the injuries lead to death. In all of these cases, the police officers are of white origin and the victims are all non-white.

In one of the cases, police officers shot dead a 19 year old Afro-American in Madison, Wisconsin on 6 March 2015. Just a few days before, police officers shot dead a black homeless person in L.A. in broad daylight. If I would keep on listing these incidents, I would need a few extra sheets. But the important fact is that none of the police officers, who killed people on the streets, have ever been convicted for the crimes, even when there is video evidence of criminal acts. Please refer to the Rodney King case.

The second interesting fact is that all of the victims have been black. Probably there are no bad white people in the United States?

Should I also tell you about the mandatory registration of all Muslims living in the United States following the September 11 2001 incident? This, my friends, is called racial profiling. 

The rise and common practice of racial, ethnic and religious discrimination is not limited to the United States. On the other side of the Atlantic, you can enjoy the discriminative drama in the European Union as well. 

Since 2013 the mosques in various U.K. cities have been attacked at a rate of one every three days. I will not list statistics here, to inform you that such attacks were not limited to buildings only. Attacks on businesses owned by people of Pakistani and Indian origin is a common practice in U.K. Now, they have just found a new way of covering-up there primitive racial hatred, by giving it a religious touch. 

In France the government first passed laws restricting only certain groups of people from practicing their cultural and ethnic rights, by forbidding head scarves and veils. Then the French got after the Gypsies, who hail from Romania. France has no laws about hate speech and it has very lose implementation of European conventions on human rights.

But, why are we wasting time on the peripheral states. Let’s go directly into the heart and brains of the European Union, both financial and political. Yes I am talking about Germany. Today’s Germany is not fascist. Not at all. 

Ender Çetin is 37 and he has a direct experience of falling victim to hatred and racism. This head of Berlin's Sehitlik Mosque Association has undergone multiple attacks. In March last year he received a letter saying that if he had not left Germany by the end of the year, he would be killed. When he contacted the police and asked for protection, his request met denial.

A neo-Nazi group, NSU, murdered a number of Muslims in a few months and made no secret of it. In Munich a person called Michael Stürzenberger, who used be a spokesperson for the CSU (CSU is the Bavarian sister party of Angela Merkel’s CDU) till 2012, feels free to hold public meetings in city squares and compares the Quran with Hitler’s Mein Kampf. 

An anti-Islam web portal called “Politically Incorrect (PI)” has more than 120000 clicks a day. Then there is this registered political party called Pro Deutschland (Pro Germany), which identifies itself as an anti-Islam party.

But, reading this if you think that it is only Muslims, who face ethnic and cultural discrimination in Germany, you are totally wrong. Just like the abovementioned imam of a mosque, a rabbi suffered from multiple hate attacks within the course of a year. In the last such attack his jaw-bone was broken and he had to go to the hospital for extended treatment.

In the year 2013 hate crimes committed against the Jews in Germany totalled to 1275. In 2014 this number grew by 10% to 1402. 

Walking down the streets of many large German cities you can see swastikas on the walls, accompanied by racially motivated hate slogans.

By now if you think that it is only #Muslims and #Jews, who are targeted by discriminative Germans, you are again mistaken. A couple of months ago, the owner of a family run Greek restaurant in the western German city of Dusseldorf received a hate letter. This letter instructed the restaurant owner, of Greek origin, to “Go back to your dirty Greece”. 

This family restaurant (The Platon) has been in business for more than 3 decades. The writer of the anonymous letter implies that since the Greek government is unable to stabilize the Greek economy, the Greek people are living on German account, thus becoming “Dirty” people. Definitely the writer is a German of “Aryan” origin.

Since we know that Greeks are of European origin and they follow neither Judaism nor Islam and that they are mostly Orthodox Christians, makes it clear that the Aryans are targeting everyone and have hatred towards everyone, except for themselves.

In the 20th century, a man called Adolf #Hitler also started his political climb by addressing street corner meetings, in which he implied that all German problems were because of the Jews, just like Michael Stürzenberger does now. The only difference is that the prior blamed the Jews, the latter blames the Muslims. Hitler and his associates also thought that Germany was for the Germans, just like this anonymous writer of hate letter to the Greek family. 

The German authorities could not put an end to Hitler’s rhetoric in the beginning, because of legal loopholes, and then, he grew into a monster of epic proportions. The current German authorities also express their helplessness in curbing hate speech, pointing to the fact, that they also lack clear laws against hate speech. Are we going to wait until a new monster of hatred will rise out of control?

After US drone attack

Telling me the story of his “pleasant” experience at Miami Airport, my abovementioned friend said something very thought provoking. He said: “It is not the Pakistanis, who have invaded America and it is not the Pakistanis, who are killing American soldiers and civilians. On the contrary it is the Americans, who are killing thousands of Pakistani and Afghan military personnel and civilians. Who should close their doors to whom: the Americans, who are killing or the Pakistanis, who are being killed? Who should be hostile towards whom?”

And that, my friends, is the right question!