Last week the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, was confronted at a constituency meeting by a Holocaust survivor called Joan Salter. The 83-year-old courteously took Braverman to task for what she described as her inflammatory comments concerning the 45,000 people who arrived illegally in Britain last year, people Ms Salter called ‘refugees’. She said that words such as ‘invasion’, reminded her of the language ‘used to dehumanise and justify the murder of my family and millions of others.’ Salter, who was awarded an MBE for her work in educating people about the horrors of the Holocaust, arrived in Britain from Belgium, via the United States, in 1947.
The incident with Braverman was recorded by a pressure group called Freedom from Torture, who as they explained in an op-ed in Monday’s Independent, accompanied Salter to Fareham and ‘filmed the encounter and placed a video of it on social media.’
They did so, said the op-ed, to draw attention to what they described as the Home Secretary’s ‘dehumanising language’ which has ‘shocked the conscience of Britain’.
After the footage of Salter haranguing Braverman went viral, the Home Office contacted the organisation and asked for it to be removed because it has been ‘heavily edited and doesn’t reflect the full exchange’. The op-ed conceded that the video had been edited, removing Braverman’s comments about how her father arrived in Britain having been ‘kicked out of Kenya’ and then thrived in a country where he was treated with tolerance, generosity and decency.
Freedom from Torture have not complied with the request but the full exchange is available to view here.
The op-ed went on to accuse the Home Office of attempting to ‘dodge scrutiny and conceal its mistakes’ over its immigration policy.
The day before Freedom from Torture escorted Ms Salter to Fareham with a video camera, some astonishing statistics were published. They were released by Frontex, the EU’s border agency, and they concerned the 333,000 illegal border crossings recorded in 2022.
Not since 2016 have so many people attempted to enter Europe, and last year’s figure was a 64 per cent increase on 2021. Frontex stated that the number of border crossings excluded the ‘almost 13 million Ukrainian refugees [who] were counted on entry at the EU’s external land borders.’ Those Ukrainians are genuine refugees fleeing a brutal war and Europe – its people and its governments – has been generous in offering them sanctuary.
So why not the same compassion for the hundreds of thousands of other people entering Europe? Of the 333,000 illegal entries recorded by Frontex, some came from Afghanistan and Syria, but of the 100,000 who crossed the central Mediterranean to reach Europe, most were from Egypt, Tunisia and Bangladesh. Other countries that featured among migrant arrivals were Nigeria, India, and Turkey. Of the 15,460 people who entered Europe on what Frontex described as the Western African route, the main countries of origin were Morocco, Senegal, Guinea and Ivory Coast.
The most remarkable statistic in the Frontex report was that ‘women accounted for fewer than one in ten of the detections, while the share of reported minors fell slightly to around 9 per cent of all detections’.
In other words, the refugees flooding into Europe from, so we are encouraged to believe, war-torn countries, are overwhelmingly young men. The figures are the exact inverse of Ukrainian refugees entering Europe, 90 per cent of whom are women and children, although men aged 18-60 are banned from leaving the country.
The Home Office needs to finesse its tactics. Instead of trying to censor organisations like Freedom from Torture, it should better brief Braverman so that when she is faced by another Joan Salter, she can courteously point out these facts.
Ms Salter is an admirable women who as a young child endured great trauma. But it is disingenuous to draw comparisons between her plight then and what is going on in Europe today.
The vast majority of people crossing the Mediterranean and the Channel are most likely not fleeing wars or religious persecution; they are in search of greater economic opportunities, legal or otherwise. They are arriving in such numbers that it is impossible to vet them and discover their attitudes to, for example, Jews, women and homosexuals, all of whom are entitled to live free from persecution.
This century incidences of anti-Semitism have risen in Europe, and a growing number of the continent’s Jews are fleeing the continent for Israel. They are not running from the far-right this time, but from a new form of fascism, Islamic extremism, which cost one French holocaust survivor, Mireille Knoll, her life in 2018.
It is not just Jews who are growing increasingly fearful. Last week in Paris an Algerian man stabbed six people at random at the Gare du Nord, and on Saturday in Strasbourg a Kosovan man slashed at several people, including a mother and her two young children. It is reported he was ranting about Palestine during the attack.
Freedom from Torture’s website states that ‘Our vision is a world free from torture’. Who wouldn’t support that aim? But they will do their cause no good, nor win over the British public, if they persist in trying to pretend that there is no difference in status between traumatised women and children, and young men seeking out economic opportunities.
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