Hungary'sMigrantCrisisEnds,Europe'sHasJustBegun

byGeorgeIgler
November12,2015at5:00am
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6861/hungarymigrantcrisiseurope

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"[H]alf any given year's total migrants arrive by the start of October. The
other half arrives between October and the end of December... If these
tendencies remain relevant, we should expect the very opposite of a
winter break, and should prepare instead for an increasing flood of
people." -- Viktor Orbn, Prime Minister of Hungary, September 21, 2015.
The UN High Commission for Refugees announced on Nov. 2 that the
number of people who illegally migrated to Europe in October alone
(218,394) nearly outstripped the number of those who entered throughout
the whole of 2014 (219,000).
The reality at Hungary's central railway station in Budapest had to be seen
to be believed. Hungarians were easily outnumbered 200 to 1 by
predominantly young Muslim males. These newcomers engaged in
sporadic violence, rioted at the sight of camera crews, and left the station
littered with human excrement.
According to Bjrn Hcke, of the populist Alternative for Germany Party
(AfD), by the end of 2016 there will be as many Muslim males of military
age in Germany (5.5 million), as there are young German men of that age.
On Nov. 2, Libya threatened to send to Europe millions of migrants from
Africa, unless the EU recognizes its self-declared (Islamist) government.

Earlier this year, Hungary's ferociously articulate Prime Minister Viktor Orbn
became the bte noir of European politics. Since then, Orbn has transitioned
from being castigated as a threat to European values, into the most
recognized defender of his continent's Christian identity.
In a Europe whose central policy-makers seem in thrall to multiculturalism,
Hungarians, after centuries of invasions and attempted invasions, appear

unapologetically immune to political correctness. Even in their language, the

colloquial phrase for communicating with the bluntest possible candor
is magyarul mondva, literally "speaking in Hungarian."
As over 400,000 predominantly Muslim migrants crossed illegally into Hungary
before the completion of a border fence -- which ground such incursions to an
effective halt by the end of October -- there has been a sanctimonious effort in
the world's press either to mischaracterize realities on the ground, or omit them
altogether.
The concealment of sobering truths, openly reported in Hungary ironically a
nation whose press freedom has been criticized under Orbn's leadership can
only have serious long-term consequences, in migrant-friendly countries such
as Belgium, Sweden and Germany, especially the scale.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) announced on
November 2 that the number of people who illegally migrated to Europe in
October alone (218,394) nearly outstripped the number of those who entered
throughout the whole of 2014 (219,000).
The figures, which even shocked members of the UNCHR, constitute the greatest
monthly entry of illegal migrants into the European Union to date. Many had
apparently felt that the legalimposition of quotas, initiated on September 22, and
aimed at relocating migrants across EU member states, would have at least
begun to tackle the EU's migrant problem.
The quota scheme, which pivoted on forcing non-consenting member states to
accept illegal migrants, has, in fact, been an abject failure. Only Sweden has
participated directly.
Meanwhile, crossings from Turkey to nearby islands in Greece, the first step in the
so-calledWestern Balkan route -- the dominant corridor for illegal migrants at
present -- have far from peaked, and are accelerating. As winter seas make
Mediterranean conditions more difficult, the journey is apparently being offered
at a discount.
To observers who speak Hungarian, however, the UNHCR's figures probably come
as no surprise.
Addressing his nation's parliament, on September 21, and calling this year's
mass migration to Europe an "invasion," Viktor Orbn declared:

There will be no such thing as a winter hiatus with respect to the illegal
immigration issue ... If one looks at the tables, graphs and statistics -- often
available in the public domain -- which show the month-by-month influx of illegal
immigrants to date, what one sees largely is that half any given year's total
migrants arrive by the start of October. The other half arrives between October
and the end of December.
Unlike his European partners, Orbn sees this year's events not as an
unprecedented "crisis," but the result of a steady and
entirely predictable escalation, centered on the unwillingness of member states
to defend the union's external frontiers from human smuggling, which is
anobligation under the EU's freedom-of-movement Schengen Treaty.
Orbn's analysis led him to conclude:
There will be no let up; we should expect escalating pressure. There is no reason
for us to think that people-smugglers will arrange their affairs and the routes they
exploit any differently this year than they have in previous years. If these
tendencies remain relevant, we should expect the very opposite of a winter
break, and should prepare instead for an increasing flood of people.
As Hungary constructed its southern border fence, in line with its Prime Minister's
calculations and in consultation with Israel, experts worldwide called the move
both pointless and counter-productive.
Currently, as Germany is opening new migrant reception centers weekly,
Hungary is winding upits own.
On November 3, Hungary's parliament voted overwhelmingly to reject the
imposition of mandatory quotas, paving the way for legal action against the
EU, in concert with the left-wing government of Slovakia led by Robert Fico.
Poland is very likely to follow suit.
Many political analysts have concurred that Orbn has cynically exploited the
migration issue to shore up waning domestic popularity. This could not be more
wrong. Although Orbn's poll numbers certainly took a slide in 2014, analysts
similarly agreed in April that his national consultation on migration constituted a
catastrophic miscalculation.
It is easy to see why. Hungarians, after the 1956 uprising against the Soviet
Union, are extremely conscious of their own historic status as genuine refugees.
Some national billboards accompanying the nationwide survey were even

defaced, as the consultation had posed robust questions on the likely

consequences of mass Muslim immigration, which most Hungarians had yet to
witness, and which some found discomfiting.
But public opinion swung firmly in Orbn's favor, with the effective occupation of
Budapest's central railway station (Keleti plyaudvar).
The realities on the ground at Hungary's international railway terminus had to be
seen to be believed. Hungarians were easily outnumbered 200 to 1 by
predominantly young Muslim males. These newcomers engaged
in sporadic violence; rioted at the sight of passing camera crews, and left the
station littered with human excrement.
Migrants refusing to cooperate with authorities who wanted to take them to
reception centers, to participate in the EU's compulsory EURODAC asylum
registration process, chanted "no fingerprint" in unison. Frustrated, many
charged down motorways towards Austria, a move that led to the closure of
major transport arteries.
Unlike the domestic Hungarian media, the international press reported little of
the full gravity of events in Hungary. The international press failed to warn
nations from Austria to Finland of what was headed their way. Journalists
concentrated instead on the handful of children present, to sell a sob story.
Such reporting led Croatia to charge Hungary with the "inhumane" treatment of
"refugees," while Austria claimed, astonishingly, that Hungary's behavior was
reminiscent of the Holocaust. As migrants arrived in those nations, however, both
countries rapidly backtracked.
While Hungary was being castigated for supposed xenophobia and for Orbn's
rhetoric, no one seemed to have considered that perhaps the most historicallyinvaded country in Europe knew what an invasion actually looked like, better
than most.
Nor did many of the people criticizing Hungary stop to think that maybe, with
such a prominent awareness of once being refugees themselves, Hungarians
might be more cognizant of the gratitude, relief and forbearance that marks the
conduct of a genuine refugee.
Instead, Hungary was confronted by aggressive economic migrants in numbers
so huge that the authorities were "all but submerged." As the
migrants demanded transit to welfare states they had paid handsomely to reach,

they threw food and water back at the same Hungarian officials being pilloried by
the world's media for their own efforts to cope.
The nadir of the global press coverage of Hungary came with a
defensive action involving tear gas and water cannons, when, on September 16,
its frontier post at Rszke was closed to illegal entry. The false story sold by the
world's media led the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, tocondemn Hungary.
No mention was made outside the country of how Hungary's police had reacted
solely with non-lethal crowd control tactics -- resorting to these only after a three
hour standoff that injured 20 police officers, who had resisted
persistent violent efforts to storm the country's border.
The most conspicuous press failure, however, concerns the key question: With
the EU's border agency Frontex confirming on November 4 that 800,000 have
illegally crossed into Europe so far in 2015, each likely paying $1000 to $5000 to
a people-smuggler, how is this colossal total expenditure -- entirely outside the
means of genuine refugee camp residents in Turkey or Jordan -- being funded?
Georg Spttle, an Arabic-speaking German national security expert resident in
Hungary, with unique access to the intelligence communities in both countries,
has been studying the sources of money used by migrants to traverse Europe. He
has frequently identified Gulf States, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates, as the true source of the funds.
Spttle has also examined some of the thousands of pictures and videos found
on mobile phones discarded by migrants before entering Hungary. Many images,
in his view, are likely to be in the possession only "of those either sympathetic to
terrorism or terrorists themselves."
For other observers, the most alarming evidence thrown up in central Europe by
this year's migrant influx lies in the nature of the identity documents being
discarded, at the last stop on the Western Balkan route, before migrants head
towards the EU's freedom-of-movement zone.

ThousandsofmigrantscrossillegallyintoSloveniaonfoot,inthisscreenshotfromYouTubevideofilmedinOctober2015.

In Serbia, the price of superglue has increased 100-fold, given that, when spread
across a person's fingertips, it temporarily allows an imprint of bogus fingerprints
on a biometric EURODAC scanner.
Many of the documents thrown away at the Hungarian border include genuine
Syrian civilian and military identity papers that would automatically entitle their
holder to residence in Germany. The act seems highly irregular: Serbian identity
papers, valid Swedish residency documents, papers confirming political refugee
status from Jordan, and European passports, have all been found strewn across
the border.
The only conclusion that can be drawn from such evidence collected at the EU's
external frontier, argues Hungary's most notable security analyst, is that it points
to the behavior of individuals intent on establishing jihadist sleeper cells in
Europe. Or alternatively, that many Muslims with criminal records, already
resident in the EU, could be exploiting the migrant crisis to establish entirely new
identities for themselves before disappearing across the continent.

The only solution to an ever increasing influx, first from the Middle East, and
then, in Orbn's view, of even greater numbers from Africa, is to intercept and
safely return migrant boats to their points of departure. On May 11, however, this
"pushback" policy was utterly repudiated by Federica Mogherini, the European
Commission's foreign policy chief. Her announcement may well have acted as the
spark for this year's unprecedented migrant figures.
Orbn's proposal, a combined European effort to police the narrow stretch of
water between Turkey and nearby islands of Greece, has been rejected by the
EU's leaders. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people are still being allowed
to enter the EU illegally, thanks to the newly strengthened Islamist government
of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan. At the moment, he is trying to bully
Brussels into giving Turkey the features of an actual European Union
membership step-by-step.
Hungary, perhaps to demonstrate how a combined border-protection initiative
could work, is already using a joint cooperation force to defend its own EU
frontier, with local partners fromSlovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland.
The presence and power of Mogherini, whose fondness for political Islam has
already beenanalyzed at the Gatestone Institute, is a damning indictment of the
European Union's claim to democratic legitimacy.
Thanks to what many felt was a profound dissatisfaction with mass migration into
the EU, Europe experienced a marked turn to the political right in the 2014
European parliamentary elections.
A conservative European Commission was "elected" in turn -- but it nevertheless
appointed Mogherini, a former Italian Communist, to the most senior borderprotection role in Europe. No matter how its people vote, the commitment of the
EU's institutions to a borderless Europe, both internally and externally, appears to
remain undaunted.
It is clear, however, from remarks delivered in his nation's capital on October 31,
that Viktor Orbn's patience with the EU has finally been exhausted. "Europe is
being betrayed," he told aChristian conference in Budapest. "It is being taken
from us."
Thousands of migrants shipped to the EU daily, Orbn argued, are "not a result of
indecisiveness," but the product of a conscious "left-wing" conspiracy to curb the
relevance of Europe's sovereign nation states by undermining their ethnic
foundations.

With the EU having no perceptible mandate, this effort amounts to "treason," he

said, which must be countered by national democracies turning to their people. If
not, he said, these people risk losing the ownership of their continent unless a
Europe-wide consultation on mass migration immediately takes place.
The next migrant wave (50,000) is scheduled to arrive at the Austrian border
next week. A ferry strike in Greece has caused a backlog, which is now moving its
way through the Balkans.
According to Bjrn Hcke, of the populist Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), by
the end of 2016 there will be as many Muslim males of military age in Germany
(5.5 million), as there are young German men of that age.
Meanwhile, on November 2, Libya threatened to send to Europe millions of
migrants from Africa, unless the EU recognizes its self-declared (Islamist)
government.
George Igler is a political analyst in the City of London and the Director of the
Discourse Institute.