Wide Open Flood Gates

Decent people never, ever want to see children suffer or die. That's why it's easy to feel sympathy and heartbreak when you see that horrific image of a dead migrant child washed up on a Mediterranean beach. The photo went viral and every news agency, every newspaper, every TV network across the world carried it. Seeing it tears your guts apart and you ache to do something, anything to help.

That poor child has come to represent the crisis of thousands of migrants, or so-called refugees, that are flooding into Europe by the week. How many thousands? It depends on which news agency you read. Some say it is in the tens of thousands, some say it's in the hundreds of thousands. But all say it's only just beginning. From everything I've read, ultimately the numbers will be in the millions. How many of those are radical Islamists, nobody knows, but there's bound to be some. And no one in the world knows what to do about it.

But that image of the dead child. It haunts us, doesn't it? It sure does, but at the risk of sounding somewhat cynical, it also manipulates us. As Janet Daley in The Telegraph put it, "The lesson of the past week is that a picture of a dead child can move a continent and overturn the stance of a government Ð but only, it seems, if that picture suits the politics of influential voices in the public dialogue."

Daley continues, "For some reason, the appalling photographs of the bodies of children who had been deliberately gassed by the Assad regime, laid out on a concrete floor in Syria two years ago, were not sufficiently moving to compel the world to take action. Are dead children only a moral outrage when they are on the beaches of Europe? Or is it just easier to use the image of that single drowned child to support the notion of Western guilt, whereas an indictment of Assad and the intervention that would logically follow from it would have invited all the recrimination which self-loathing Western opinion delights in?"

And here I go blaming Obama again, but had he acted militarily on Assad when his infamous "red line" had been crossed we probably wouldn't be at this point now. If he had acted then, in concert with other nations, we could have kept Assad from killing his own people and ISIS could have been stopped at the same time. Inaction has its consequences.

The media would have you believe that the thousands of migrants pouring into Europe are simply Syrian families who are running to save their lives from their war torn country. This is only party true. To begin with, the migrants aren't just coming from Syria and Iraq; they are coming from many other countries throughout North Africa and the Middle East.

And yes, some of the immigrants coming into the European Union are escaping the violence in Syria and Iraq, but many are coming for the same economic reasons millions of migrants have moved to the western continent in the past; the generous welfare state. Notice how their destinations of choice are Germany, Austria, France, the UK and Spain. You don't see an influx of migrants into any Arab or African countries.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that her country is ready to take in 800,000 of these immigrants. Well that's all they needed to hear. The race is on. This thing will ultimately destroy Europe as we know it. Millions of Muslims, most of whom have no education, no skills, and no desire to assimilate into their host country spells nothing but trouble for the West.

Many European countries are already suffering from serious economic problems as it is. Adding millions more of potential new residents will only drive up unemployment and further tax their already crumbling welfare state. Cultural divisiveness will worsen, as the possibility of the new Islamic residents clashing with native Europeans is more than likely.

The immigrant communities within European countries are often worlds (and centuries) apart from their host societies and several have become breeding grounds for radical Islam. Think what a massive influx of millions of these migrants would do. To use a popular catch phrase, "This thing could get really ugly."

And here is one other final observation. As I watch the mass immigration of people streaming into Europe from the Middle East, I'm struck by the fact that the vast majority of them seem to be fit looking young men. Sure, there are some young women and little children mixed in, and the media cameras love to focus in on them, but by and large I'm seeing mostly older teenage boys and twenty-something men. I offer no explanation. It's just an observation.

So how long before America starts opening up their golden gates for these poor, displaced people? My guess is it's already in the pipeline.

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JWR contributor Greg Crosby, former creative head for Walt Disney publications, has written thousands of comics, hundreds of children's books, dozens of essays, and a letter to his congressman. He's also a Southern California-based freelance writer.