Thursday, August 6, 2015

Betts on Buzi's 'Refugee Nation'

Welcome to OMFG territory:

 "Two weeks ago real estate millionaire Jason Buzi launched his idea for a 'Refugee Nation' in the global media. The basic premise was not new: to buy an underpopulated area of land somewhere in the world and turn it into a territory for the world's refugees to begin a new life. It combines the historic precedent of the origins of Buzi's native Israel with..." (Is creating a new nation for the world's refugees a good idea? Alexander Betts, guardian.com, 4/8/15)

Stop right there. As soon as the 'I' word pops up you know you don't really need to read further.

After all, this rich bozo comes from a nation which was born of a process of turning an indigenous population into refugees (in 1948), and which to this day refuses their return simply because it wants to be exclusively Jewish. The result: they are forced to remain warehoused in perpetuity in their various countries of refuge.

And now here we have a representative of that same refugee-producing and refugee-perpetuating nation proposing that today's refugees, from wherever they come, forget about returning to their homelands and be warehoused somewhere, anywhere, so long as it's out of sight and out of mind.

The mind fairly boggles at the chutzpah of it all. But, hey, there's worse:

The author of the piece, Alexander Betts, a professor of refugee and forced migration studies and director of Oxford's Refugee Studies Centre, makes absolutely no reference in his piece to the now 7m plus warehoused Palestinian refugees.

Gobsmacking!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Bizarro!