Anti-US and anti-Israel Iranians during a November hate rally
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Tim Blair, The Daily Telegraph
Iranian-American Sohrab Ahmari meets Afghan and Iranian men in Istanbul as they plan their country-shopping adventures:
The migrants I spoke to passionately debated where to settle once they made it to mainland Europe, almost like a family weighing up various vacation destinations.
Same process, different duration.
Finland was ‘too cold, and they don’t pay much welfare’, said one. Switzerland was too expensive. And by picking Europe, the men had ruled out other destinations.
Oz, for example, was out of the question: they had heard that Australian authorities divert illegals to Papua New Guinea, and you could end up ‘having to share a hot cell with a darky’.
RACISTS! Still, this at least shows that Australian border protection policies are working.
A consensus formed around Britain, mainly because most of them spoke at least a little English. But they also knew the Channel crossing was no easy feat. In reality, most of them would end up in Germany or Sweden.
Unlike the Afghans, Iranians can’t claim to be fleeing war and the Taliban. So they either pretend to be Afghan (not difficult) …
It’s especially not difficult when you discard any identifying documents, which was a common strategy during Australia’s catastrophic open-border years.
… or they cite persecution on account of being Christian converts. (Liverpool Cathedral has reported converting Iranians at the rate of one a week.)
There are many sincere Iranian converts who risk their lives to follow the Nazarene; but there are also some like the young man I met on Lesbos who asked me if it would be better for his asylum case if he were a Christian, a homosexual ‘or maybe both’.
I told him to pick one or the other.
In other news:
Trump threatens to ‘devastate’ Turkish economy over Syrian Kurds
US President Donald Trump has threatened to “devastate Turkey economically” if it attacks Kurdish forces in Syria following a planned pullout of US troops.
