Call it the European DisUnion: While Angela Merkel is battling for her political life in Germany, a brief Franco-Italian war of words was fought over Muslim migration. France’s president Emmanuel Macron (shown, right) said that Italy was guilty of “cynicism and irresponsibility” for recently rejecting a transport vessel carrying 629 African migrants. This prompted Italy’s new premier, Giuseppe Conte (shown, left), to call the French “hypocritical” on immigration questions.
The two leaders quickly mended fences (which are precisely what the Europeans need at their borders), agreeing to push for new European Union (EU) asylum rules. Providing some background, France 24 reported last Wednesday:
Italy summoned the French ambassador on Friday and challenged Paris to take in more migrants after the French presidency criticised its “cynical” decision to turn away an NGO-run rescue ship with hundreds of migrants on board.
In an address to the Italian Senate, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini demanded an apology after French President Emmanuel Macron accused Italy of cynical and irresponsible behaviour by refusing entry to the Aquarius rescue ship.
… Gabriel Attal, a spokesman for Macron’s party, [had gone even] further, telling Public Senat TV: “The Italian position makes me vomit.”
… The criticism prompted an angry response from Italy’s new government, a coalition of Eurosceptic and anti-establishment parties.
“I cannot accept hypocritical lessons from countries that have always preferred to turn their backs when it comes to immigration,” Prime Minister Conte said in a statement.
Both Italy and Malta refused entry to the Aquarius, which carried illegal migrants picked up off the Libyan coast and has since been accepted by, and has docked in, Spain.
Macron later extended an olive branch to Conte, saying he meant “no offense” in making his comments. The two leaders later met to hammer out new EU asylum rules. As the AFP reports, “France and Italy on Friday called on the European Union to set up asylum processing centres in Africa to prevent ‘voyages of death’ by migrants across the Mediterranean, in a crisis that has divided Europe.”
“At a meeting in Paris[,] President Emmanuel Macron and Italy’s new premier Giuseppe Conte also demanded ‘profound’ changes to the EU’s asylum rules, which put the migrant burden on their port of entry to Europe — mainly Italy and Greece,” the news organ continued. (Video on the Franco-Italian row below.)
Left unsaid is that the “refugee crisis” is a confidence game, as I reported earlier today. Among other things, I wrote that the “Syrian Civil War was billed as the cause of the migration. Yet most of the migrants aren’t Syrian.” This has now again been vindicated, by a Sunday report that the Aquarius migrants represent 31 different countries.
Listening to the globalist, open-borders propagandists, one would think that war and strife — used as a pretext for flooding Europe with unassimilable foreigners — are something new in the Mideast and Africa. But they’re not, and the world is actually the safest it has been in history, according to studies. So why now, all of a sudden, has Muslim wave migration into Europe become an issue?
Simply, they’re coming because they can.
The reality is that the migrants are generally leaving safe countries such as Turkey and Jordan and are bypassing poorer European nations to “reach the generous welfare states of Western and Northern Europe,” as Breitbart recently reported. This isn’t mainly about seeking haven, but handouts.
And it may be no coincidence that the Aquarius migrants were picked up off Libya. In March 2011, late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi warned that were it not for his government acting as an impediment, millions of Africans would use his nation as a conduit through which to reach Europe via the Mediterranean. In fairness, Gaddafi did use this reality to extort money from the Europeans. Nonetheless, the Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton-enabled overthrow of the strongman has proven disastrous, plunging Libya, the Mediterranean, and European migration realities into chaos.
The ouster and killing of Gaddafi — about which then-Secretary of State Clinton would later boast, “We came, we saw, he died” — was, some theorize, part of Clinton’s effort to build a foreign-policy resume designed to buttress her political ambitions.
Ironically, though, while Clinton and Obama certainly would relish the chance to flood the West with millions of left-leaning voters-to-be, their scheme now threatens to unravel the EU, a statist entity they cherish. It’s a lesson the same in Libya, no-go-zone-plagued European countries, or anywhere: When you destabilize a nation, you never can really know what the monsters you release will devour.
Photo: AP Images
