The Intercept Does it Again - Human Trafficking Is Less Important than a Political Agenda
As much as I used to love the Intercept, their political purpose continues to eclipse their once-primary mission of reporting on matters of international security. They have just published an article critiquing the Italian Government's efforts to curb human trafficking being done through NGOs.
https://theintercept.com/2018/04/20/mediterranean-refugee-rescue-boat-italy-libya/
The article promises a factual rebuttal of the claims, but boils down to "This research firm claims the data is disorganized intentionally to paint a misleading tale. Also they're racist. Also these people are migrants, not refugees." Whoops. They really let that one slip without any attempt to hide it. Yes, Libya sucks, but it sucks because the US instituted regime change without any effort to support a leader after the older leader was deposed. Thanks Secretary of State Clinton (and President Obama)! These people are seeking refuge through migrating, but they're migrating to countries which really had nothing to do with the cause of their woes and burdening these nations with entitlements and the need to spend even more integrating low-skill workers into their work force.
Not really fair to Italy and, let's be honest, that's really all that's needed for Italy to disallow the practice. Add in that, yes, you can go and buy a human on the streets of Tripoli for a few hundred dollars, like we are living back in the days of Sultans ruling the Barbary coast and exacting tribute from Europe on threat of illegal activities, you can quickly get to, "Yeah, it's weird that these NGOs are uncritically just accepting boatloads of people from these people who are known to be human traffickers and then moving these people to Europe where they somehow magically have the right documentation to disappear into large urban centers, since that is how human trafficking is done, you know, globally." Look at Canada and their Human Trafficking rings from China. The situations are eerily analogous. They've just cut out the pretense of legal migration.
The worst evils come disguised as kindness.
I think it's often understated how massive the impact of the "migrant" crisis has been on international politics over the last 3 years. It's actually still ongoing, but here in Europe it has been accepted as the new normal so we rarely hear about it anymore. It's safe to say the arab spring movement has ultimately caused massive problems for the EU and has only succeeded in destabilizing the region even further. So I'd like to offer a big thanks to the USA for their failed experiments in machiavellian intervention where traditional military intervention was required.
I find it upsetting because I want these refugees and migrants to be able to prosper in their own lands. There's nothing particularly dignified about being forced to leave your homeland because it has turned into such a hellhole. Western nations should at least try to help by providing them a stable nation to rebuild. Instead we're letting them uproot themselves so we can accept them as a semi-permanent underclass where they can be exploited endlessly by criminals of both a conventional and corporate nature.
These politically minded people who stand by the refugees welcome mantra no matter what are incapable of understanding that blindly supporting their cause is making everyone miserable, usually including the people they think they're helping.
The same thing happened in America with the drug war. Which was also a Clinton innovation. "But Reagan started it!" and Clinton used it to underhandedly encourage mass migration and to try and import a new voting block for the DNC.