Page - 79 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis 79 the refugees of the Bible are never described in such language: ‘the only reference to swarm in Exodus is the “swarm of flies”’, adding ‘Little wonder people felt insulted by that’.84 Migrants responded similarly: Berekat, a young Eritrean in the Calais camp, asked of Britain’s political leaders, ‘Why are you closing the door? We’re not animals, barbarians’.85 At the same time, David Cameron pledged £50 million pounds of government funding for the memorial and educational work of his Holocaust Commission which emphasises the need to learn the ‘lessons of the Holocaust’. It would seem that no connection is made by Cameron to the restrictionism that Jewish refugees faced in the Nazi era and his inflammatory outburst against recent asylum seekers. But there is still a linkage, even if Cameron failed to have the self-awareness to realise it: in the twentieth and twenty first centuries, hate language to describe migrants as illegal and inhuman continues the persecution and misery from which they fled. In the words of a Sudanese asylum seeker in Britain interviewed by the BBC: ‘There I was attak- ked by bullets and here by words’. He explicitly had in mind the Prime Minister’s insect/swarm analogy.86 As a fitting coda, David Cameron spearheaded the campaign to keep Britain in the European Union. His failure to do so (which ended his term as Prime Minister) reflected the importance of popular anti-migrant sentiment that he himself and the British press had done so much to forment. 84 Giles Fraser, ‘A church in the wild’, The Guardian, 5 August 2015. 85 Quoted by Matthew Taylor and Josh Halliday, ‘It’s easier if you say we’re bad, not human’, The Guardian, 31 July 2015. 86 Sudanese asylum seeker interviewed on BBC television Breakfast News, 12 November 2015. Fig. 12: Outside Porto M, Photo: Tony Kushner