While sob-sister German chancellor Angela Merkel scrambles to contain the looming damage to Germany’s cultural integrity, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is being praised for finally saying enough to the Muslim hordes traipsing through his country:
Viktor Orban’s fence may have earned the wrath of rights groups but it’s going down well at a flower market near the Hungarian border town of Roszke, where the flow of migrants through fields of corn and sunflowers has suddenly dried up. The right-wing prime minister’s critics say the fence on the frontier with Serbia flies in the face of international law. But to many on Hungary’s southern frontier, the end justifies the means.
“Thank God that Viktor Orban is our prime minister,” said a 46-year-old man who gave his name as Istvan and was selling flowers on Thursday at the Roszke market. “He doesn’t have to be loved, but what he does is good.” Echoing Orban in framing the issue as a defense of Europe’s “Christian states” against mainly Muslim migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, Istvan said: “So far it seems that Hungary is the most Christian of all.”
It’s not very chic to be Christian these days, but Orban and a sizable number of Hungarians don’t care. They have vivid cultural memories of several centuries of oppression under the Muslim Turks and they’re not prepared to surrender their hard-won freedom for the sake of some guilt-ridden European notion of asylum.
Two days after Hungary sealed the frontier to thousands of migrants crossing the Balkan peninsula daily, the flow had dried to a trickle. Several hundred were arrested for breaching the fence on Wednesday, and face imprisonment or expulsion. Hundreds of stone-throwing men clashed with Hungarian riot police over the fence on Wednesday, demanding passage. But by Thursday their makeshift camps were emptying out, as migrants, many of them refugees from the Syrian war, sought out other routes to western Europe through Croatia.
Under Orban’s new rules, many of those who formally seek asylum in Hungary face rejection within hours. He has warned that Muslims risk outnumbering Christians in Europe, and launched an anti-immigration campaign earlier this year with billboards around the country saying migrants must respect Hungarian culture and keep their hands off local jobs.
Orban’s just-build-the-damn-fence approach has paid off for him politically: more than 70 percent of his countrymen approve. He’s also stiffened the backbones of other small-state premiers in the region.
At a meeting Monday of EU interior ministers, officials agreed to distribute 40,000 migrants currently in Greece and Italy, but only on a voluntary basis. No deal is in sight for a further 120,000 asylum-seekers the European Commission would like to spread out among all EU member states. Orbán may be leading the opposition, it’s not as if he’s isolated in Europe. Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic also continue to reject the idea of mandatory EU quotas. Indeed, the Hungarian prime minister has so far emerged as the political victor in the European refugee crisis.
The United Nations human rights chief on Thursday “deplored the xenophobic and anti-Muslim views that appear to lie at the heart of current Hungarian government policy.”
Welcome to the New World Order, where national self-preservation is now a hate crime. This won’t end well.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member