Historical Comparisons to the European Refugee Crisis

BBC Radio Ulster - Everyday Ethics, The Ethics of the Ashley Madison hacking, the Refugee Crisis, and Van Morrison's Spirituality

Cormac Lucey (on the refugee crisis): It evokes a very emotional response when you raise the issue of the Jews fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany, but when the Polish Home Army sent an officer - Jan Karski, into Auschwitz and got him out of Auschwitz and they got him across to the United States and he met the then-Jewish United States Chief Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1943, even Frankfurter doubted his account of what he had seen.

So I think it's wrong to conflate strict immigration policies in the 1930s with somehow tacitly assisting the Holocaust.

Secondly, Joel [from the IOM] has favourably referenced United States immigration policy and you referenced the quote on the Statue of Liberty at the start of this program.

But the United States could only become a country open for massive immigration because they had wiped out the indigenous population and they operated on a philosophy of manifest destiny, which was actually namechecked by Hitler in his book Mein Kampf.

Hitler's attitude to the Jews and East Europeans was similar to what he thought the Americans had practised against the Indians...

They're seeking, at every stage, to improve their life chances... we have two crises in one. We've got refugees fleeing wars combined with people looking to move from poor countries to well-off countries...

People get from, reach a safe harbour from Syria, say. They get to Turkey. But then they look for a better harbour. So they move to Greece, then to Serbia, then to Hungary, then to Austria, then to Germany. And we've two crises in one here...

These are largely Arab people. Where is the rescue effort from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait? Why is it that the EU must fix all of the problems of the world?