Financial Times: Migrant Crisis Adds To Europe’s Anxiety About Islam

From the Financial Times:

Among Britain’s best-loved sportsmen of the 1970s was a mild-mannered heavyweight boxer named Joe Bugner. Born Jozsef Kreul Bugner in southern Hungary, he fled to Britain as a child with his parents after a Soviet invasion in 1956 crushed an anti-communist uprising.

The Bugner family were among 21,000 Hungarians who arrived in Britain. These refugees formed part of a wave of more than 200,000 Hungarians who crossed the Iron Curtain and found shelter in western countries. Everywhere they benefited from spontaneous donations of clothes, bedding and household goods from the general public.

Europe’s refugee and migrant crisis is striking not just for the reluctance of most EU governments to open doors on the scale of 1956. A motif of cultural self-defence, of Europe as a Christian fortress justifiably barred to Muslim hordes, runs through their rhetoric.

Syria’s savage civil war has generated 4m registered refugees in the Middle East and beyond. But a person following Europe’s debate might wonder if the clock has reverted to 1529 and the armies of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman sultan, are at the gates of Vienna.

Read the rest of Tony Barber’s piece, ‘Migrant Crisis Adds To Europe’s Anxiety About Islam’, here.