Such an attitude is not surprising. Al-Shalami was simply trying to protect his society from the problems he believes it would inherit if very large numbers of refugees entered. What is strange is that the default attitude of Europe is to agree that the Gulf States and other societies are fragile, whereas Europe is endlessly malleable. Nobody in Europe blamed Turkey or Oman for the death of Aylan Kurdi. And while the Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said of another migrant boat sinking in the Mediterranean, that Europe risked ‘damaging our credibility if we are not able to prevent these tragic situations’, few people claimed that Arab or African credibility was at stake. Indeed, throughout the Syrian portion of the refugee crisis alone, next to nobody blamed the countries actually involved in that civil war – including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Russia – for the human cost of the conflict. There was no wide European call for Iran to take in the refugees from the conflict, anymore than there was any pressure to insist Qatar take its fair proportion of refugees.

There are many political and strategic assumptions that lie beneath such a failure. But there is also a moral self-absorption that overrides it all. And that moral self-absorption did not begin with the refugee crisis. Rather it is one of the underlying themes of all of contemporary Europe – a unique, abiding and perhaps finally fatal sense of, and obsession with, guilt.

In April 2015, after another migrant boat had sunk in the Mediterranean, the Swedish MEP Cecilia Wilkstrom stepped up her existing campaign for migrants to be given ‘legal and safe’ routes into Europe. The failure to do so, she insisted, would be compared by future generations to the Holocaust. ‘I think that my children and grandchildren are going to ask why more wasn’t done to help people running away from Isis, or violence in Eritrea or wherever, when we knew that people were dying in their thousands. People will ask the same question they did after the war, “If you were aware, why didn’t you do something?” In Sweden we allowed our railroads to be used to transfer Jews to Nazi death camps. There are more refugees in the world today than during and after the Second World War. The world is on fire at the moment and we need to cope with that.’2