The media has provided horrifying pictures of burning villages, endless lines of people threading their way across muddy rice paddy dikes to reach the river dividing Myanmar from Bangladesh, and then crossing in fishing boats to the other side where they will try to survive in huts made of canvas and sticks. What remains hidden to most people is the way this sickening crime is linked to colonialism and imperialism.

Nothing could be more hypocritical than Trump's claim to have bombed Syria because of the suffering of Syrian children. Deployment of weapons of mass destruction against civilians is a hallmark of America’s wars. Moreover, how can a man who ordered that not a single refugee be accepted from Syria, even keeping out children scheduled to undergo life-saving medical procedures, claim to act in the name of Syrian children?

People in every country must oppose the terror campaign the US is leading in Iraq and Syria. America seeks to maintain its intolerable political and economic domination of the region, which created the conditions for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the first place. The lives of the people of Iraq and Syria mean nothing.

The people in Calais are not just some unfortunate exception to the rule that the world is OK. Their desperate presence tells the truth about an unacceptable world dominated by a handful of countries that have prospered at the expense of the vast majority of the planet's people, through plunder and war. That there are 63.5 million refugees and displaced people in the world is an irrefutable proof – only one of too many – that the capitalist-imperialist system does not work for humanity and the planet. 

The refugee crisis in Europe continues to deepen, with knock-on effects around the world. Recently, NATO sent warships to the Aegean Sea in a very opaque manoeuvre – what could be the real intent of this? And what are the implications for the fleeing refugees?

The latest executions in Saudi Arabia should make it very clear that the Western powers' "war on terror" has nothing to do with opposition to chopping off heads and sectarian religious fanaticism. Instead of condemning this crime, the US, UK and other Western powers have continued to give the Saudi regime, if not their public political blessing, at least their practical backing – in the name of the necessary alliances they claim flow from that "war on terror".

If France is “at war”, as President Hollande announced after the horrific attacks in Paris last week, then it is an unjust war between reactionary forces equally disdainful of human life, neither of them less deliberately and consciously cruel in the pursuit of reactionary political objectives. Supporting either France or the Islamists will only worsen the dynamic between two unacceptable alternatives.

What has the "democracy" so praised by the West and its apologists brought Tunisia? And why does the rise of Islamism seem so unstoppable? The answer lies in the way the two trends reinforce each other, even as they ferociously contend for the country's future.

Imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism are locked in combat. Imperialist powers are the source of the problem. Islamism would not have the power it now enjoys in the world without the imperialist system. Both must be opposed