You won’t read this in the New York Times……

“They cannot be allowed on the shore,” Marine Le Pen, the 42-year-old leader of France’s anti-immigration National Front, said in a March 15 interview in Rome after a three-hour visit the previous day to Lampedusa. “Send boats out to feed them. But they must not set foot on land.”   The island, a speck in the Mediterranean Sea closer to Tunisia than Sicily, is experiencing first-hand an immigration surge poised to spread to the rest of Europe and drive a deeper wedge in a north-south divide already tested by the sovereign debt crisis.

Malta: While arrivals to Lampedusa are shipped to the Italian mainland, immigrants arriving in Malta are held in detention centers for as long as 18 months. More than half of Malta’s 2.5 million-euro military budget goes to food and shelter for the refugees.  Since the turmoil in Libya began on Feb. 15, Malta has received about 26,000 people evacuated by ship from the North African country by their governments and repatriated to their countries of origins.   More than 3,000 kilometers away, on the 22nd floor of a Warsaw skyscraper is Frontex, the EU agency charged with border security. It has no ships or helicopters of its own, nor any autonomous decision-making power. Contributions are entirely voluntary, meaning those most affected by immigration flows bear the brunt of the costs.

On Feb. 20, Frontex launched operation Hermes, named after the winged Greek god, to assist the authorities in Lampedusa. Italy is providing the most equipment: two patrol boats and a plane.   “Frontex does not replace the border-control activities of members states as these are performed by, and remain the primary responsibility of the latter,” said Frontex spokesman Michal Parzyszek.

Holiday Island: In the summer, Lampedusa is brimming with tourists while simultaneously coping with a wave of immigration that occurs in the hottest months, when it’s safer to travel. Many of the island’s inhabitants move to Sicily in the winter, leaving Lampedusa virtually deserted.  January’s first wave of immigrants to Lampedusa was put up in local hotels before the island’s own detention center was forced to re-open after two years. The facility, which is meant to house a maximum of 100 people, often detained four times as many immigrants and was shut due to health and hygiene concerns.

Do you think you will see New York Times articles about this?  Ha!  Not a chance.  You see it exposes the hypocrisy of the liberal left,  the open border crowd that Obama woos and considers an essential part of his political contingent.   You see, the progressive movement talks a good game about generous immigration, claiming that the ‘poor huddled masses’ just need to be given an opportunity.  But where the rubber hits the road its whoaaah” – not in my backyard ya don’t. Faced with actually putting their proverbial ‘money where their mouth is’ they look around right quick to see if anyone is noticing then slip the gatekeeper a couple of bucks to double the padlocks.   True.

Many years ago during the Mariel boat lift when Fidel Castro opened his prisons and sent thousands of Cubans to South Florida shores, I read a book with a similar story-line.  It is called “The Camp of the Saints” – by Jean Raspail (The title, by the way, came from the Book of Revelations). In simplest language, the book presents that Europe and the western world would face if suddenly millions of third-world refugees, for whatever reason, showed up off European shores in thousands of boats demanding to be admitted and cared for. Here’s how Wikipedia explains the plot of The Camp of the Saints:

The Camp of the Saints is a novel about population migration and the consequences thereof. In Bombay, India, the Dutch government announces a policy in which Indian babies will be adopted and raised in the Netherlands. The policy is soon reversed after the Dutch consulate is inundated with poverty-stricken parents eager to give up their infant children. An Indian “wise man” then rallies the masses to make a mass exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera, where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run down freighters approaching the French coast. The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the plentiful food and water that are in short supply their native India. Although the novel focuses on France, it is not just the people of France that befall this fate. Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of England must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia. The one holdout until the end of the novel is Switzerland, but by then international pressure isolating Switzerland as a rogue state for not opening its borders forces it to capitulate.

But, I digress. The reason for this thread was to share the reasoning for the normally detached and elitist Europeans’ to be taking an aggressive stand toward Quackdaffy and his regime. There is the big picture answer.   And for our new friend Paul another challenge to reconcile. How do you think the liberal left would feel knowing the reason Obama was/is courted and coaxed into war with Libya is simply because the pesky African undesirables might reach their EU shores? What would Oprah Winfrey say?  and to think President Obama is black – oh my.   Liberal ideology cuts across almost every boundary, unless that boundary is around your home that is…..