Go back to where you came from show lacks credibility on Syrian refugees

Although planned invited economic immigrants are far more numerous in Australia, the fuss about accepting or rejecting asylum seekers is so ridiculous when nothing is said about how the wars we support generate nearly all the refugees NATO shudders at the idea of.

I hadn’t been watching SBS latest 3 day Go Back To Where You Came From series, being put off by the obnoxious nationalism of people in the trailers. But I thought to just look at the final part on July 31, 2015. In fact I recorded it and watched a little the next day. I only saw the first 8 minutes, but that was enough to get the gist.

I don’t know who is responsible for SBS bias – unlike the ABC it pretends to be have no editorial control, so maybe this is just the default position.

So where were they going in the Middle East to see the place refugees came from? A refugee camp on the Turkish border, which looked to be in the zone that Turkey has infested with IS terrorists! And who was the refugee sample?

There was a flash back to their meeting in Melbourne with this refugee, who was a Palestinian! She wasn’t a Palestinian fleeing Israel’s ethnic cleansing though. As she related, "I went to buy groceries and there was a helicopter bombing our house."

So she fled to another place, where she was then hit by ISIS, and came to Australia.

But the party didn’t go to Yarmouk and Damascus – they went to the north west to meet the Kurds, who are battling against ‘the worst terrorist organisation in the world’.

This was yet another puff piece for the freedom and music loving Kurds, made before it looked like the Kurds may soon be joining the Syrian army to fight against Turkey and its proxies. And one of our good Aussies said that ‘I’d love to see 14,000 Kurds coming to take refuge in Australia’!

The voice-over, not by the guy who did the last series but by one who sounded like propaganda central, talked about the dangers from the ‘brutal Assad regime’ and from ISIS terrorists, and how this was the worst humanitarian crisis since WW2.

Syrians don't want to come here as refugees; they want Australia to stop supporting the war against their government

All this got me to thinking about the rift between refugee support and the Syrian crisis, and how it is that the people who are really suffering in Syria have no desire to come to Australia as refugees – all they want is for us to stop attacking their homes so they can live there in peace.

So it seems to me that if we actually want to help refugees – at least the ones from our battlefields, we should be putting the pressure on leaders to start working with the Syrian government and to put pressure on Saudi Arabia and Turkey and Israel and the US to go back to where they came from...!

But of course before ‘we’ do that ‘we’ are going to have to understand who are the bad guys in this conflict. (I’ve noticed incidentally that if ABC reporters find a ‘refugee’ in Europe or elsewhere, most of the time they will be ‘Syrian’. On the day I watched my recording of GBTWYCF, I noticed that when Cameron in Britain had said the ‘swarm’ of migrants should go back to West Africa, the ABC interviewed a random migrant in Calais who was.... Syrian!

Of course there is yet another devious agenda here – that Cameron wouldn’t be saying the migrants were mostly from Syria even if they were, because then it would be impossible to turn them away!

There’s a third problem – that migrants across Europe now all say they are from Syria, even when you can see they are Roma, or North African, or just homeless. It’s the best way to get sympathy and money. It was the same last year when we were in Greece, Lebanon, and France.