The numbers don’t lie. The politicians do and the media swears to it. Go back to 2010. Look at the charts. Only a few thousand migrants were crossing the Mediterranean to seek safe passage in Italy and Malta. Four years and several wars later, over 170,000 landed last year and 4,828 drowned in transit.
Who’s to blame for the migrant crisis? Could it be the Syrian and Libyan wars launched by the US, UK, France, NATO members and Arab League allies? Maybe the wars that destroyed these once prosperous countries, killing over 200,000 and forcing several million refugees to escape the carnage?
Or could it be the Iraq War launched in 2003 by the US and its coalition of the willing that has killed a million people and put millions of others on the run that still continues? It certainly was not France’s invasion of Mali, not the military coup in Egypt, nor the wars in Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and other war-ravaged nations that have millions of people risking their lives to escape the killing fields.
Forget the causes, don’t place blame on the lunatics-in-chief that attack, bomb, occupy, torture and slaughter in the name of bringing peace, democracy, freedom or whatever other term they can invent to justify their penchant for power and mass slaughter. Take the cheap way out. Blame the people smugglers. “These traffickers of human beings, this new slavery of the 21st century,” must be stopped declared Italy’s Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni.