In 1683 a massive army of the Ottoman Empire laid siege to the Christian city of Vienna. After two months, an allied force that consisted of men from all over the Holy Roman Empire and from other central European states, including Hungary, and that was led by John III Sobieski, the King of Poland and Lithuania, turned the Ottoman soldiers back, preventing the potential Islamization of the continent.
In recent days, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of the Ottoman Empire’s successor state, Turkey, has unleashed thousands of Muslims, mostly young males of military age, upon the European Union, today’s not-so-holy but increasingly imperial reincarnation of the Holy Roman Empire. More specifically, Erdogan, in violation of an agreement with the EU that netted him billions, has allowed – and encouraged – these people, who have been routinely described in the Western media as “refugees” and “migrants,” to storm the border separating his country from the EU’s southeasternmost satrapy, Greece. Indeed, he’s lent them active support, providing many of them with free transport to the border, which they’ve attacked with rocks, “makeshift battering rams,” and tear-gas canisters (supplied by Ergodan) while setting fires and shouting “Allahu akbar!” Photos taken at the border underscore just how perverse it is to call these thugs “refugees” or “migrants.”
Seems like old times. What’s different this time around is that whereas seventeenth-century Europeans understood that they were confronting, in the Islamic invaders of their day, an existential threat to their way of life, many of their descendants don’t seem to have a clue about what they’re dealing with. On Tuesday of last week, and again on Saturday, thousands of Germans, rallying in Berlin and other cities, demanded that the “migrants” on the Greek borders be allowed to pour into the continent and to find their way to Germany, if they wish, so that they can help form “a solidarity society” in which there will be “no more suffering.”
The youth division (CUF) of the Swedish Center Party sent out a similar message, calling on Europeans to “Open your hearts – and your borders” and let the hustling hordes “come here and become part of our society.” In the Swedish cities of Gothenburg (last Wednesday) and Stockholm (Friday), crowds gathered in support of open borders; the latter demo was organized by the group Feminist Initiative, which, in a show of goodwill, has apparently decided to overlook the tendency of Muslim male arrivals to treat their own wives like chattel and treat Swedish women like sex dolls.
It was only five years ago that German chancellor Angela Merkel made the fateful decision to allow into her country tens of thousands of Muslims who were said to be Syrian refugees. Then as now, the Western world’s mainstream media distributed images of suffering women and children (not a few of which were staged). Ultimately, it turned out that the overwhelming majority of the “migrants” were not Syrian families fleeing war but, yes, young males of military age from all over the Muslim world. Nonetheless Merkel’s action was applauded by many of her country’s citizens, who, desperate as ever to prove that they aren’t Nazis, gathered at railroad stations to welcome these aspiring malefactors and welfare recipients with hugs and kisses.
One consequence of Merkel’s irresponsible move was that upwards of a thousand German women were sexually assaulted by their colorful and exotic new countrymen while celebrating New Year’s Eve 2015-16 in the central squares of Cologne and several other major cities. That was a particularly tough night, but hardly a brand-new phenomenon in a continent where the last few decades of Muslim immigration have led to an ever-rising incidence of violent crimes and to drastic funding cuts in everything from education to health care in order to feed, clothe, and house the restive, and not especially appreciative, denizens of ever-expanding sharia enclaves.
A few of the would-be conquerors who are charging the Greek border are indeed Syrians. But most, as an article in the British Metro acknowledged last Friday, are from “other Middle Eastern states and Afghanistan.” (Plus Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc.) Have Europeans forgotten the lessons of the 2015 debacle? Well, some of them obviously never learned them in the first place: the CUF’s chairperson, Ida Alterå, who is all of 22 years old, has reportedly expressed the view “that the main problem of the 2015 migrant crisis was that Europe did not let enough migrants in.”
Stephen Erlanger of the New York Times, who is presumably somewhat older than Ms. Alterå, had an equally fatuous take on what he called “the mismanaged chaos of the 2015 influx of migrants and refugees.” While stating that that inundation “produced horrible pictures of dead children, masses of unregistered people wandering the roads, political divisions and a significant boost to far-right populism across the Continent,” Erlanger avoided mentioning that the tide of immigrants also led to countless rapes and other weighty challenges to European freedom and security.
Some European leaders have taken these challenges seriously by acting to protect their nations, but here’s how Erlanger characterized their moves: “populists from Viktor Orban in Hungary to Matteo Salvini in Italy and the Alternative for Germany party have profited from the chaos of 2015 and the influx of more than a million people, mostly Muslim. The populists have vowed loudly to defend European and national borders, and identity.” So it is that responsible attempts by leaders to protect their own citizens are reduced to cynical, self-serving, and probably racist political moves.
As for the Greek government, it’s doing its best to push back the barbarians at its gates. It has no choice. Greece is an economic basket case and has already been overrun with more Muslims than it can ever hope to handle. As Patrick Strickland admitted last week in a long report on the border crisis for the New York Review of Books (NYRB), Greece – which at first reacted with hospitality to the arrival of Muslim masses on its shores – has long since become a “refugee warehouse” in which the residents of some islands are outnumbered by the needy and raucous newcomers.
Nonetheless, all the usual suspects are savaging Greece for trying to save itself. Amnesty International has accused Greece of violating EU and international law by putting an emergency one-month hold on accepting new asylum applications. The UN High Commissioner on Refugees adds that Greece is in breach of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Human Rights Watch (HRW), maintaining that there’s “no legal basis or justification” for Greece’s stance, has called on the EU to “respond with compassion to the arrival of people fleeing conflict and persecution by putting their dignity and humanity at the center of its response.” And Edouard Rodier of the Norwegian Refugee Council has urgedEuropean countries to take in the Muslims: “Europe needs to take responsibility for what is happening now at its external borders. It cannot suspend people’s right to seek asylum.”
A few questions. If the governments of Europe are obliged “to take responsibility for” foreigners – most of whom, frankly, are healthy-looking young males – what responsibility do those governments have to their own citizens – among them the elderly, the infirm, the women who are already scared to walk the streets at night, and the girls who are the same age as Britain’s grooming-gang victims? If the Muslims at the Greek border have a “right to seek asylum,” exactly what rights do the taxpayers of Europe have? Do they deserve the “compassion” to which HRW refers? Why should the “dignity and humanity” of Muslims from other continents trump the “dignity and humanity” of native Europeans? At what point in this decades-long Islamic tsunami will it be acceptable for the people of Europe to say “enough” without being called bigots?
Strickland, in his NYRB piece, introduced us to two men, “twenty-five-year-old Omar al-Daloo and thirty-year-old Saber al-Kolak,” whom he met at a Greek migrant camp. Both were from the Gaza strip; both had left home with the goal of reaching “Germany or somewhere else in Western Europe”; and both “have wives and children at home, and hope that obtaining asylum will afford them family reunification.”
Strickland was plainly out to gin up reader sympathy for these gents and their kinfolk. But they’re not refugees. They have absolutely no right of asylum in Europe. They’re economic migrants, plain and simple, who seek to exploit the present situation in order to relocate their broods to welfare states that already are diverting too much taxpayer money to pay for the upkeep of alien freeloaders. The irony here is that the countries Omar and Saber are eager to fleece have already poured untold sums into their native Gaza, money that was intended to relieve poverty and that has instead been used for a range of other purposes, all of them nefarious.
“With everyone living on top of one another” at the Greek refugee camp, reported Strickland, “fights over food and water distribution and spots in the morning queue to see the doctor” have become “a daily reality.” Note to Strickland: people live “on top of one another” in a great many cities around the world without constantly resorting to violence. A day before Strickland’s visit to the camp, “some Palestinians and Somalis had clashed after a minor disagreement, over exactly what no one could recall. There were threats, stones thrown, knives pulled out, and several men ended up being carted off to the hospital.” Yes, by all means let’s throw open the gates of Europe for these delightful folks.
In a report published last Thursday, Marie Jégo outdid Strickland in the sob-sister department, waxing poetic about the “haggard eyes” and “drawn features” of the people she encountered at a migrant camp in northwestern Turkey. “Distraught, demoralized, they no longer know where to go….Their most ardent dream, to live a dignified and peaceful life under the European sky, was shattered.” Jégo’s piece appeared in Le Monde, the most prominent newspaper in France, where millions of Frenchmen can no longer lead “a dignified and peaceful life” because their rulers, without ever consulting them, have set their country on the path to becoming an Islamic dystopia.
On the same day that Jégo’s article appeared, a writer for the Swedish daily Aftonbladet also engaged in a bit of hand-wringing: “Who will take responsibility for these people’s lives and freedoms?” Let’s turn that question around: why is the welfare of everybody from everywhere on the planet the responsibility of Europeans? The Aftonbladet writer called it “absurd” to suggest that “Sweden has no more room” for migrants – this in a nation that’s on the brink of social and economic collapse because of the huge number of Muslim immigrants it’s taken in.
Not to be outdone, Turkey’s deputy foreign minister, Yavuz Selim Kiran, sent out a tweet on Saturday in which he compared Greece’s treatment of “innocent migrants crossing the border” to the incineration of Jews at Auschwitz. Yesterday, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was scheduled to meet Angela Merkel in Berlin. Meanwhile Erdogan was headed for Brussels to butt heads with officials of the EU, which disclosed yesterday that it might take in 1,000 to 1,500 children currently living in Greek migrant camps.
Is there any good news here? Just this: while Western European politicians, activists, and commentators keep virtue signaling, the leaders of the Visegrad countries – Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia – have affirmed their readiness to help Greece guard its borders. On Sunday, Cyprus announced it would pitch in as well. At least one weekend report indicatedthat the EU, too, is prepared to take action on behalf of Greece; if true, this might mark a turning point. In any event, how appropriate is it people from pretty much the same places whose inhabitants defended Vienna in 1683 are standing with Greece in the year 2020? Somewhere up there, one likes to imagine, John III Sobieski is smiling.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/europe-under-siege-bruce-bawer-0/
