Walled In, Walled Out

There's that old folk wisdom that good fences make good neighbours. Sometimes the neighbours are just thugs and you'd want to have something erected between you and them to ensure they don't get too close. China's Great Wall, that ancient, historic monument to marauding hordes threatening to invade stands as testament to the fact that human beings have always presented as a nuisance to one another and sometimes the nuisance factor was sufficient to persuade a great nation to rally its resources for a separating device.

An area of the sections of the Great Wall at Jinshanling

There seems to be an element in the human DNA that afflicts us with un-neighbourliness. Little wonder when some neighbours are savagely averse to good relations. In those circumstances a fence, a wall, whatever can be erected to separate the peaceful from the war-mongering barbarians can only be a good thing; not for the latter particularly but certainly for the former.

There's a wall separating Turks and Greeks on Cyprus. To keep them from one another's throats. And the wall separating East and West Berlin was meant to keep the Communist east Germans where they were, rather than sprinting across to the West to escape living under the strictures of communism and endemic poverty and suspicion.

When Israel desperately looked for a solution to the suicide attacks aimed at civilian Israelis, where psychotic Palestinians sought Paradise and a martyr's distinguishing honours to have a street named after them and their families paid handsome monthly benefits by blowing up city buses and shopping malls and restaurants with all those within being blown to smithereens, the solution arrived in the form of an extensive separation wall.

Which led to cries of horror in the international community, because this was so unfair, to cut off contact between peoples. Since, after all, so many Palestinians earned their daily bread by being employed inside Israel and how could they travel conveniently without the nuisance of check-points with a wall in place? Israel was slandered as an apartheid state, a cruel occupier, but the incidence of suicide bombings fell flat.

Before the security fence whose purpose was to thwart terrorist attacks 457 Israelis were slaughtered. Once most of the work was completed the death toll fell to 8 Israelis killed. The Gaza Strip had earlier been the focus of a protective security perimeter and that problem too was solved in the very same way. The apartheid state was looking after itself by preventing those intent on murder and mayhem from achieving their goal.

Now, it's the U.S. that is behaving like an apartheid state. Contemplating a barrier between itself and Canada, its neighbour to the north, from whence, it fears, terrorists will pass through the border to attack America. Of course there's also plans for a wall to be built along the southern border with Mexico, to try to prevent all those Mexicans from finding haven from poverty and violence, in America.

Okay, drugs and people and weapons smuggling, all of that, as well. A great disagreement of ideological dimensions is concentrating the minds of Republicans and Democrats as the race for president, over a year and more distant, begins to really heat up. At a cost of a projected $49-billion that wall between Mexico and the U.S. will not be cheap.

Egypt, looking to stop infiltration by malign Salafist Islamist fanatics has concerned itself as well with a protective wall, separating its border from that of Gaza, to prevent weapons smuggling and terrorists entering at will. Saudi Arabia has built a high concrete wall along its border with Yemen and plans another along the border with Iraq.

The Hungarian parliament has overwhelmingly voted for the building of a 110-mile-long fence at the border with Serbia. Illegal immigrants have exploded. Some 95 percent of the migrants appear to emanate from Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and other havens for terrorists. Greece has built a fence in deterrence of migrants from the Middle East as well coming through from Turkey.

The United Kingdom has fenced its fixed link through the Chunnell and its ferry port in Calais because of the tens of thousands of migrants attempting to conceal themselves in the back of cars or to break into trucks to smuggle themselves across the English Channel.

Blame the fence-builders for unfriendliness but it is the places from which the migrants come that have created the desperate conditions from which their citizens flee. And strangely enough, most of those citizens are Muslim, fleeing those espousing a pure brand of their shared religion. Islam has become a curse of humankind, religion of peace though its faithful claim it to be.