[BRIEF NOTE] Two News Items

From the Canadian Press, 18 July 2006:

Israel will do whatever it can to ensure safe passage for Canadians fleeing Lebanon but Israel's ambassador warns there's no guarantee they won't be targeted by Islamic guerrillas.

Indeed, Alan Baker suggested Tuesday that Hezbollah, the militant Islamic group that controls much of southern Lebanon, might deliberately target Canadian refugees in order to provoke an international incident.

[. . .]

Asked if he believes Hezbollah would deliberately target fleeing foreigners to create an international incident, Baker said: "Absolutely.

"Look, why do they put their artillery launching things in the back gardens of private homes? In order to provoke a response by Israel which would kill innocent people, including, as happened, eight Canadians."

Seven Canadians were killed over the weekend and another has since succumbed to wounds suffered during Israeli attacks on Hezbollah sites in Lebanon.

That said, Baker added that he doesn't think Hezbollah "has any reason to harm Canadians" in particular.

"The opposite. They should want that Canadians won't be annoyed with them."

From The Globe and Mail, 25 July 2006:

Like most residents of her village, Wafa Mahfouz was hiding with her family when she heard and felt the explosion 500 metres away that killed a Canadian family. Eight days later, she was still angry and confused about why it had happened.

"What was the guilt of those Canadians? They were not Hezbollah," she shouted, referring to the Islamic militia Israel says it was targeting in the hard-hit village of Aytaroun, in south Lebanon. She and other villagers say they knew the Montreal side of the Al-Akhrass family only by sight.

Details of the attack on the Al-Akhrass home started to emerge for the first time yesterday, as bedraggled residents of Aytaroun began to arrive at an elementary school-turned-refugee camp in this Christian town on the outskirts of Beirut. All said that while Hezbollah had fired rockets into northern Israel from the olive groves and tobacco fields that surround the village, none were fired from close to civilian homes, as Israel contends.

[. . .]

The Israeli army has called Aytaroun, a village of 10,000 that swells to 15,000 in the summer, according to residents, "a launching ground for missiles fired at Israel," and says it warned villagers that they would be at risk if they were near missile-launching sites. The day of that particular attack, residents say, the Israelis had been firing at Hezbollah positions around the village with artillery rounds. The Al-Akhrass home, a two-storey concrete building, was destroyed by an air strike in the afternoon, and villagers say that either they or one of their immediate neighbours seem to have been specifically targeted. It was the only attack inside the village that day. Two other homes were destroyed by the same bomb, but both of them were empty.

After hearing the blast that blew out windows over a wide radius, Manal Hassan al-Allawiyeh and other villagers ran to the scene of the Al-Akhrass family home and with their bare hands dug frantically at the rubble .

There was little left of the structure, or of the more than a dozen people who had been inside. "We ran toward the homes to try and save them, but we found only parts of people," Ms. al-Allawiyeh said. "We recovered six to eight bodies, but they were all in pieces."

She and other villagers believe there are still several bodies trapped in the ruins of the home.

Residents said the 11 deceased were buried in a quick funeral. At least three others were wounded.

The full death count in Aytaroun is impossible to determine, since the village is now the effective front line in the confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah.

Israel 8, Hezbollah 0.

[BRIEF NOTE] The New British Melting Pot, and Europe's Future

Matthew Hickley's recent article in the Daily Mail, "Britain's biggest wave of migrants in history", provides an interesting survey of new British immigration trends.

Britain is experiencing the 'largest ever single wave of immigration' in its history two years after ministers opened the door to millions of eastern European, leading academics have claimed.

Poland has produced 'the largest ever single national group of entrants' and Poles have now overtaken the Irish as the largest group of foreign workers in the UK, according to a study headed by a respected migration expert.

An estimated 600,000 eastern Europeans have flocked into the UK since 10 new states joined the EU in 1994, of whom around 300,000 are Polish - easily outnumbering 175,000 Irish workers, who were previously the largest group.

Britain was the only major EU economy to give the new citizens free access to its labour markets - along with Ireland and Sweden - while others such as Germany and France opted to keep them out.

Ministers claimed at the time 13,000 eastern Europeans would arrive each year, but the true figures have shown that prediction to be ludicrously wrong.

Professor John Salt, director of University College London's Migration Research Unit and co-author of today's report, claims the eastern European invasion is the largest wave of immigration Britain has ever seen.

His findings raise fresh questions about Labour's claims to operate a 'managed migration' policy, and are likely to strengthen calls for firm limits on immigration from beyond the EU.

The huge influx has changed the face of the UK labour market especially in London and the south east, and in some areas has begun to effect public services.

Last month Slough Council in Berkshire warned that local schools were struggling to cope following the arrival of 10,000 Poles in the space of a few months.

The invading army of cheap labourers has been welcomed by employers in the building, catering and farming sectors - and the archetypal 'Polish plumber' is a popular figure in many areas.

However economists warn that the influx is hitting British workers by keeping low-skilled wages at rock bottom, and pushing up unemployment.

Professor Salt co-wrote today's report with Professor Phil Rees of Leeds University's School of Geography for the Economic and Social Research Council.

Their study shows the number of foreign workers in Britain rising sharply in recent years, topping one million in 1998 and reaching 1.5 million last year - one in every 25 workers.

Net immigration into the UK has more than trebled since Labour came to power, from 106,000 in 1997 to 342,000 in 2004.

Irish workers have traditionally been the largest group in the UK. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century huge numbers of Irish 'navvies' arrived to help build canals and railways.

But the Irish never matched the scale and speed of recent immigration from eastern Europe, and they have shrunk as a proportion of Britain's foreign workforce from one in five 1995 to one in ten last year - by which time they only just outnumbered eastern Europeans on 11.2 per cent and were about to be overtaken.

One observation: If relatively well-off Poland is providing such a huge number of immigrants to the United Kingdom, the numbers of Romanians and Bulgarians who will make their way north and west in 2007-2008 when their countries join the European Union will be significant indeed. "Last one out, turn out the lights"? And, of course, there's the European Union's southeastern and eastern peripheries to take into account, along with Turkey and the Maghreb, and (via Spain and Portugal) South America, all regions significantly poorer than Poland, all with populations already associated with the European Union labour market and the Western cultural sphere.