Europe should build a Guantanamo-bay style prison on a Mediterranean island for Islamists, says the leader of Austria’s increasingly popular Freedom party (FPO).
Although FPO party leader Heinz-Christian Strache is an avowed Eurosceptic, he has called for continental cooperation in dealing with incarceration for Muslim extremists, and a common European super prison for Muslim villains.
Blasting the weak response to the migrant crisis and transnational extremism, Mr. Strache called for a prison to be built on an island like Italy’s Lampedusa, or one of the Greek Islands. He said they should be used to house ‘European’ extremists returning to the continent from fighting jihad with the Islamic State and others convicted of terror offences, reports TheLocal.at.
Mr. Strache said of the crisis: “It is now high time for our government and the EU to take action against Islamist terror, apply existing laws and protect borders”.
“European governments have just stood by during the mass immigration from Islamic countries and these people’s refusal to integrate over decades, wondering why there are so-called ‘no-go areas’ in many cities where the rule of law has de facto been replaced by sharia”. Strache called for “fortress Europe” around the borders of the political bloc.
Wherever the prison would be situated, Mr. Strache said the territory should become stateless and independent of the host nation, instead being managed as a European Union prison, or even becoming its own prison-state, with independent borders and laws. Despite the obvious paralels, the FPO leader did not make a comparison with the American prison camp in Cuba, Guantanamo bay, reports Der Kronen Zeitung.
Placing dangerous political prisoners in exile in the Mediterranean has precedence in Europe, but the past holds important lessons for today’s would-be island gaolers. The defeated Emperor and would be European dictator Napoleon was banished to the island of Elba by the British and their Allies in 1814 after Paris fell, but despite the island being defended by the Royal Navy he enjoyed too much liberty and soon escaped.
Leading an insurgency and retaking Paris in 1815, Napoleon was only defeated by a coalition of Allied forces at the battle of Waterloo, before being again exiled to the Mediterranean — and this time for good.
The Freedom party’s Heinz-Christian Strache may soon be in a stronger position to influence such European policy. Recent polls and local election results have seen them riding high on the back of anti-Migrant sentiment, and the party took over 30 per cent of the vote in September’s local elections.