Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has long used a very old tactic to advance his will: threat of invasion. A current preferred variety is the enabling of Muslim migrants’ passage into Europe, and Erdogan has again threatened this kind of cold invasion if the EU criticizes his hot invasion of Syria.
But one European leader isn’t taking this lying down: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (shown) has said that no migrants will pass into his nation — in fact, he has vowed to “use force” to stop them if necessary.
Erdogan’s latest threat is a big one. As the Daily Mail reports, “‘Hey EU, wake up. I say it again: if you try to frame our operation there [in Syria] as an invasion, our task is simple: we will open the doors and send 3.6 million migrants to you,’ Erdogan told the parliament in Ankara last Thursday as his bombardments began on northern Syria.”
As for Orbán, the Mail informs that he has already “built a steel fence on Hungary’s border with Serbia to seal off the Balkans route of migration, where hundreds of thousands of people marched through from the Middle East to Western Europe at the peak of the crisis in 2015.”
“‘If Turkey sets off further hundreds of thousands (on top of those it has already), then we will need to use force to protect the Hungarian border and the Serbian-Hungarian frontier and I do not wish for anyone that we should need to resort to that,’ Orban said Wednesday night,” the Mail continues.
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“The EU relies on Turkey to curb the arrival of refugees into Europe following a 2016 agreement to seal off the Aegean route after more than 1 million people entered the bloc,” writes Haaretz. But with Erdogan threatening to “open the gates,” the “‘next weeks will decide what Turkey does with these people,’ Orban told private broadcaster HirTV in an interview late on Wednesday,” Haaretz also tells us. “‘It can steer them in two directions: take them back to Syria or set them off towards Europe.’”
“‘If Turkey chooses the latter, these people will arrive at Hungary’s southern border in huge masses,’ Orban said, adding that the EU, while criticizing Ankara, should provide more funds to Turkey to help rebuild Syrian towns,” the site continues.
Orbán has often been at odds with the EU, as his nation (along with Poland) has been steadfast in its refusal to accept Muslim migrants (video below). It’s not just that Hungary has witnessed the problems associated with these newcomers, such as increased crime, including sexual attacks; terrorism; cultural dislocation; and the exacerbation of the “no-go zone” phenomenon. It’s also that Turkey and Hungary share an interesting history.
To wit: A large portion of Hungary was ruled by Turkey, when the latter was known as the Ottoman Empire, from 1541 to 1699. So the Hungarians may be more sensitive to Muslim invasion (hot or cold) than most other Europeans.
Is “invasion” too strong a word for the current phenomenon? Not according to commentator Michele Hickford. “It’s actually an ancient strategy, straight from the Islamic playbook called The Hijra (Arabic: هِجْرَة hijrah), … the migration or journey,” she wrote in 2015 of the Muslims flooding Europe. “Hijra is one of the most effective methods of jihad which requires no military or wars. But it is an invasion nonetheless, and the politically-correct, humanitarian West is inviting it with open arms.”
The Islamic world is laughing, too, according to Dr. Mudar Zahran, a Jordanian academic and political leader currently living as an asylee in the United Kingdom. As he put it in a 2015 interview, addressing the Muslim migration, “I have to be honest, you read Arab magazines and Arab newspapers; they are talking about, ‘Good job! Now we’re going to conquest [sic] Europe.’ So it’s not even a secret.” Zahran, a self-professed practicing Muslim, called this “the soft Islamic conquest of the West” (video below).
And this is an aim Erdogan — whom critics might call a Western-suit-and-tie jihadist — absolutely encourages. For example, in March 2017 he echoed other Islamic leaders in expressing demographic-jihadist sentiments, saying to Turks in Europe, “Have five children, not three. You are Europe’s future.” Just a little while later, after Germany and Holland clamped down on pro-Turkish rallies, he growled that “Europe will pay for what they have done.”
This is all the more shocking when considering that Turkey, as a NATO member, is directing the vitriol and threats at by-treaty allies. Yet just as shocking is why the threats work: The West has become such a doormat, governed by internationalist/immigrationist, de facto establishment traitors, that it won’t even perform the most basic government function of securing its own borders.
And that’s the modern West, with its combination of military strength and moral weakness, of way but not will. Erdogan warned last year about a war between Islam and Christianity, but as late Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi put it in 2006, “We have 50 million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe — without swords, without guns, without conquest — we will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”
Meanwhile, Turkey has built a 475-mile security wall on its border with Syria — funded, in part, by the EU and the United States. Hey, it’s progress. For it’s clear now that Western pseudo-elites know that border walls do work, at least everywhere but in their own countries.
Photo: AP Images