Closing time in the gardens of the West

A British Pakistani friend wrote to me yesterday that

"We are seeing the invasion and destruction of Europe. Hundreds of millions of people are thinking of heading towards Europe now. We need to determined to keep them out and to preserve Western Europe. Instead, people have gone all soppy and sentimental."

A British Indian friend tells me she feels much the same. 

So does an Albanian Muslim friend.

A black American friend just sent me this message:

"This is much worse than 9/11 in the long run."

I agree with them. 

I never generally get downhearted for long by the news but this army of economic migrants crossing Europe and breaking through immigration borders makes me almost hopeless.

Just when it should have been clear to most people that, if European countries were to keep their identities and indigenous majorities, they - regrettably - have to stop taking refugees from outside Europe, this huge migration erupts, accompanied and caused by an extraordinary outbreak of sentimentality among virtue signallers. Their noise is great, even though opinion polls show that most voters, in the UK at least, do not want to admit any refugees. 

What European countries should do, by contrast, is make reservations to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, removing their obligation to accept refugees from outside Europe. This would be a return to the status quo ante. The UK and other countries made such reservations when they originally signed the Convention.

Mr. Viktor Orban is widely attacked for pointing out that if refugees in numbers continue to be accepted Europe will eventually have a Muslim majority. Though Mr. Orban is in many ways a very unsatisfactory hero he is obviously right on this, but being right does not make you friends when most people are wrong. 

What would the BBC and the Economist have made of Charles Martel, Stephen the Great of Moldavia, John Sibiesky, John Hunyadi (Ioan de Hunedoara) or the Albanian hero Skanderbeg, who all fought wars to protect Europe from Muslim invasion?

This is a turning point more important than September 11th and comparable to 1989 and to 1979 - 1979 being the Iranian revolution.

I saw immigrants in Belgrade on Wednesday. Some were families but many were young men in their twenties without women. The older people looked bewildered but some of the young men looked like cunning opportunists, which you have to be to make such a journey. Quite a number obviously came from Central Asia (the Stans at a guess?), not Syria. 

The PERGIDA people (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) were not Nazis or racists, not at first at least, but originally nice, concerned East Germans who simply thought there were enough Muslims in Europe. For their pains they were accused by Mrs. Merkel, just a very few days after the Hebdo massacre, of

"having hate in their heart."

They look justified today, though not in her eyes.

I am told since then PERGIDA has changed for the worse but I do not know.

I have a great deal of sympathy for Syrians, though I am not sure how many of these migrants are fleeing danger. I'm not sure how many are even Syrian. 

I'd like to allow asylum seekers to enter Europe, on the very strict condition that they must leave after a maximum of three years. As Australia does. Many will leave voluntarily and return home, but the majority will not and once in Europe it would prove very difficult to make them leave, even did the will to do so exist. They would mostly disappear. 

So that won't work. What would work would be to fund the refugee camps in neighbouring countries - as Saudi Arabia is doing - and turn back the people smugglers instead.

What would also work is for EU countries to allow suitably qualified immigrants to enter and work in Europe on the understanding that their right to stay ends when their contract does. In this way we get the economic growth Europe needs and preserve European countries as organic communities, as nations.

The only alternatives to my suggestions are Fortress Europe or an immigrant society that draws people from every part of the world, what America, Canada and Australia have become since the 1960s.

Hungary's robust response to illegal immigration is admirable. Dozens of young men lobbing stones at the Hungarian police were captured on film. These youths were trying to harm Hungary before they had even got in. People who lob bricks at border guards are not people who should be given asylum and yet on Facebook and Twitter silly people are cross with Hungary, not the invaders. These silly people include many journalists and historians -including ones who write for allegedly conservative papers.

Serbia is safe for asylum seekers so why should Hungary accept them? As for Germany - the government there has made a problem for itself. Why should other countries help? But Germany is trying to use majority voting to force Eastern Europe to do so.  To change East European societies to make up for Angela Merkel's inexplicable decision to accept eight - hundred - thousand people in her country. 

And another thing. If she wants the migrants, why isn't she sending buses and trains to get them?

Germany has ensured that a huge flood of immigrants will continue year after year unless people are prepared to use the arguments Viktor Orban deploys against the idea of migrations. My money unfortunately is not on him winning the debate. Hence I feel so despondent. After all these years Count Oxenstierna is still right. 

"Thou dost not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed."

And then there's the issue of terrorism. Most Muslims are exemplary people but some are not. We have a problem with Muslims born in Europe who want to kill people to restore the Caliphate. That problem is going to get much worse.

A Lebanese minister has said that his gut feeling told him that about one in fifty of the Syrian refugees is likely to be an ISIS terrorist. If he is right, for those wanting to follow Pope Francis' admonition to take in a refugee, your chance of taking a terrorist into your home is only about 2%. 

The number of ISIS sympathisers and Islamists among the genuine Syrian refugees is, however, probably very much higher than 2%. 22% of Syrians think that ISIS are a positive influence in their country, according to a recent poll by a British market research company. I imagine that a similar proportion of the Syrian refugees like ISIS too. After all ISIS supporters are attracted to life in Germany as much as Syrian democrats. 

Quite a few other migrants do not like ISIS in the least but are still Islamists, radicalised by the cruel war against a tyrannical, secular government. These would be the moderate rebels that we read about. Assuming that decades of secular government means Syria  does not have as many Islamists as Egypt, where Islamists won the recent election, we can still expect, on a conservative estimate, that a quarter of the refugees will be by European standards extremists.

If only people as resolute as Margaret Thatcher or as cunning as Francois Mitterand were still in charge in Europe. It may be closing time in the gardens of the West, in Cyril Connolly’s  words. It certainly feels like amateur night.