[...] Think about daily life in Congo, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon ... where are the outpourings of international solidarity in the face of constant atrocities perpetrated there? We should remember now that we live in a kind of glasshouse, in which terrorist violence for the most part exists in the public imagination as a threat, which explodes intermittently, in contrast to countries where--usually with the participation or complicity of the West--daily life consists of more or less uninterrupted terror and brutality.

With regard to the refugees, our proper aim should be to try and reconstruct global society on such a basis that desperate refugees will no be forced to wander around. Utopian as it my appear, this large-scale solution is the only realist one, and the display of altruistic virtues ultimately prevents the carrying out of this aim. The more we treat refugees as objects of humanitarian help, and allow the situation which compelled them to leave their countries to prevail, the more they come to Europe, until tensions reach boiling point, not only in the refugees' countries of origin but here as well. [...]