Anne Applebaum: Pictures of Ceuta Crisis May Have Been Designed to Look Like an Invasion

EXCERPT:

APPLEBAUM: "It looked like an invasion. And it may have been designed to look like an invasion. We know that there was a social media campaign that encouraged people to come, including giving them instructions on how to swim there, what kinds of flippers and goggles to buy, and also giving them false information that once they reach Ceuta, which is the Spanish enclave in North Africa, that they would have automatic access to Spain and therefore the European Union. None of that was true. And the people who posted the photographs with pictures of people climbing walls and landing on the beach and so on also knew that it wasn't true. Even — Ceuta doesn't have immediate access to Spain. It's not immediately part of Schengen. You have to show papers at the border. There was never any chance that these 70,000 people who'd been lied to were going to get to Europe. Nevertheless, it was — two cents, it was an orchestrated crisis. It was created by someone, we don't know who, in order to persuade people to come, and then it was the photographs and pictures were sent around the world by people who also had the duty to know that the crisis would soon be over and it wasn't what they were saying it was."