The scenes witnessed this month of the exodus of refugees, migrants, people, babies and children and even fighters, from the middle- east and neighbouring countries, walking towards liberation, is a moment in history.
The world has stood silent and still, afraid to interfere in this hotbed of tribes, civilisations, conflicts, terrorism and proxy wars, uncommitted and conditioned by narrow thinking in a society where the mirco-sphere is the determining force, and the world-wide human suffering is just a face-book post or a parliamentary vote for the left leaning whiners against combat and military intervention.
People are walking and risking their lives now, not for a job with the German automakers, nor with their hospitals and services, but because they are so thoroughly astonished at having been forgotten and abandoned in this way, struck with a deep, unexplainable disappointment which has torn them apart and caused them to cling to their last hope – Europe. It is an instinct for survival and they probably obey a primeval force driving them towards life and away from death.
This week, in Britain they marked the anniversary of the Battle of Britain.The Battle of Britain (German: Luftschlacht um England, literally "Air battle for England") is the name given to the Second World War air campaign waged by the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) against the United Kingdom during the summer and autumn of 1940. The Battle of Britain was the first major campaign to be fought entirely by air forces, and was also the largest and most sustained aerial bombing campaign to that date.
“... What General Weygand has called The Battle of France is over. The battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of a perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour". — Winston Churchill”
Who are these citizens, ordinary workers, people, families, homes and cultures, faithful and nationalistic people of Syria, the Yazidis, the Iraqis, the Kurds and all others to be so discarded and left to fight alone and unarmed? Even when the evil and demonic ISIS entered their communities, beheaded and crucified innocent victims, making an empire out of other people’s land, villages, farms and shrines and the same organisation, threatened Christianity beginning from His Holiness Pope Francis down to ordinary Egyptian Copts, still nobody blinked. Nobody would set foot anywhere near the battle.
Sufficient to dump some bombs from the sky or arm a handful of Kurdish fighters to assuage the conscience of the great and mighty Britain, Europe, Russia and the USA.
Certainly terrorists have embedded themselves amongst these quarters and suicide bombings are a daily occurrence in Baghdad and places of resistance. But terrorists are to be found even in ordinary American towns or quiet Norway’s capital.
So why should the civilised West be so afraid of confronting this battle and liberating the prisoners, sex slaves, pillaged villages, besieged towns dying of hunger and sickness now?
There was no other hope, no other alternative, for a people whose only sanity rested on the faith that a free world still exists, that somewhere there is compassion and that all those Television programmes they have been following about Friends, about an American way of life which embraces freedom and democracy, are real and it is only some bad connection which has prohibited the liberators from coming to get them and set them free.
No matter whether they have reached Germany or Sweden or Greece or France, these people walking miles, refusing food and water, protesting against insincere hand-outs and rejecting self-pity, are not there for jobs or for welfare. They are there because nobody heard them when they were frightened and hungry. They are there because nobody came for them. They are there because they exist and have a name. That is why little AylanKurdi created such a response. He had a name, a father, a mother, a brother and an aunt. We could trace his treacherous journey and where it led to.
In his wonderful film, Life is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni, tells the story of the persecution of the Jews and incarceration in a concentration camp through the eyes and imagination of a little boy. No other film on the subject said it better. It is the same here and history repeats itself. If Europe was liberated from the Nazis, why not Syria? Why not centuries old civilisations and cultures to whom we owe our ancestry, our language and our roots? From where do you think are the olive trees or ripe oranges and lemons that you eat, if not from the cradle of ancient Mesopotamia?
Who do we have now at the borders of Germany? A whole generation of young men, who will not find the wife they had hoped for amongst the white, secular or Christian Europeans. The families may try to forget and look at their children’s plates of food and fancy school bags but what the parents try to forget, the children will seek to remember. Gratitude will turn to resentment. No children’s allowance or social housing can make sense of it all. It is freedom they want to find. It is their home and peace that they yearn for.
Maybe for this reason, on some subconscious level, Mrs Angela Merkel realised that the west had let down the victims of a callous war and sick geo-political order. Or like a Pharaoh fed up of plagues of locusts and red-coloured rivers, she let the people go by opening the borders of Germany.
What now? Has the situation in the middle- east changed? No, it has not. If anything it has become worse because the need for liberation has been converted into the need for refugee centres and housing. But that is something that powerhouse Germany can do, no matter if neighbouring countries cannot or will not.
It is not about whether the UK will send combat forces to liberate the suffering. It is now about how many Syrian families it can give refuge to.
And what of the young and hopeful men and women, unmarried, who were going to university before all this happened? What of the children who know nothing but war and hunger and persecution?
Who can forget Count von Trapp on the Alpine mountains, with his child on his shoulders, and Maria von Trapp, by his side holding the hands of the little ones? After bringing love and music into the lives of the family through kindness and patience, she marries the officer and together with the children they find a way to survive the loss of their homeland through courage and faith.
The persecuted cannot wait anymore. It is time for Europe and America to free the suffering. Time is well overdue for the Battle of the Crescent. If we fail, as we are so very close to doing, humanity loses everywhere, not just in fortress Europe.
Malta, marking 450 years since the Great Siege and all the anniversaries of the Convoy of Santa Maria, should understand better than anyone about the plight of the people and instead of shifting the responsibility onto Italy and the EU, they should be a strong voice for intervention without compromise. Enough with neutrality clauses, or with feeble excuses. We the Maltese should know better and do better. Get the planes here, get the warships here. Liberation begins here.