The public perception is sometimes more important than the cold hard facts.
And that's the problem. People perceive that refugees- by which they really mean "people with brown skin"- are a terrorist threat. Why do they perceive this? Because the fash have spent most of the last twenty years telling them that only people with brown skin are terrorists. All the papers say it, Farage is never off the bloody television saying it, so it's no wonder that the popular perception is this.
The public are frequently wrong. They think 15% of teenage girls get pregnant, when the truth is 0.6%. They think the country is "overrun with Muslims" when only 4% of people in this country are Muslims. Instead of indulging "honest fears" that are, quite frankly, nonsense, we should be making it clear just how wrong they are. But instead we just indulge fascists (and I don't use that word lightly) like Farage, Hopkins and
Tommy Robinson Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.
The ringleaders of the Paris and Brussels attacks were Belgian and French nationals, born in Belgium and France. They didn't walk down any "well worn refugee routes". They weren't refugees. The rest of them were Algerian and Moroccan, legally in France and Belgium because of the colonial history of those countries. They weren't refugees either.
As I said, anyone who tries to blame refugees for this is lying. The question is, why are they lying?
