While Europe takes the burden of
the migrant crisis
Paul
Joseph Watson Prison Planet.com September 10, 2015
While
European countries are being lectured about their failure to take in enough
refugees, Saudi Arabia – which has taken in precisely zero migrants – has
100,000 air conditioned tents that can house over 3 million people sitting
empty.
The
sprawling network of high quality tents are located in the city of Mina,
spreading across a 20 square km valley, and are only used for 5 days of the
year by Hajj pilgrims. As the website Amusing Planet reports, “For the rest of the
year, Mina remains pretty much deserted.”
The tents,
which measure 8 meters by 8 meters, were permanently constructed by the Saudi
government in the 1990’s and were upgraded in 1997 to be fire proof. They are
divided into camps which include kitchen and bathroom facilities.
The tents
could provide shelter for almost all of the 4 million Syrian refugees that have
been displaced by the country’s civil war, which was partly exacerbated by
Saudi Arabia’s role in funding and arming jihadist groups.
However, as
the Washington Post reports, wealthy Gulf Arab
nations like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and others have taken in precisely
zero Syrian refugees. Although Saudi Arabia claims it has taken in 500,000
Syrians since 2011, rights groups point out that these people are not allowed
to register as migrants. Many of them are also legal immigrants who moved there
for work. In comparison, Lebanon has accepted 1.3 million refugees – more than
a quarter of its population.
While it
refuses to take in any more refugees, Saudi Arabia has offered to build 200 mosques for the 500,000
migrants a year expected to pour into Germany.
Saudis
argue that the tents in Mina are needed to host the annual Islamic pilgrimage
to Mecca, but given that the Arabic concept of Ummah is supposed to offer
protection to all Muslims under one brotherhood, surely an alternative location
could be found so that Mina can be repurposed to house desperate families
fleeing war and ISIS persecution?
While Europe is being
burdened by potentially millions of people who don’t share the same culture or
religion as the host population, Gulf Arab states refuse to pull their weight,
resolving only to throw money at the problem.
The likelihood of the
Saudis inviting Syrian refugees to stay in Mina is virtually zero, but the
thousands of empty tents serve as a physical representation of the hypocrisy
shared by wealthy Gulf Arab states when it comes to helping with the crisis.
