Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó has blamed the “hypocrisy and political correctness” of EU leaders on migration for enabling terrorism in Europe.
Mr Szijjártó levelled the accusation during an exclusive interview with Breitbart’s Amanda House, after she asked him how Hungary had avoided some of the problems countries such as Germany and Italy have encountered since the onset of the migrant crisis.
“We made it very clear from the beginning that we are not ready to receive any illegal immigrants on the territory of our country,” explained the Hungarian, in reference to the EU’s attempts to impose compulsory migrant quotas on all its member-states after German chancellor Angela Merkel’s open invitation to anyone claiming to be a Syrian refugee resulted in millions of illegal border crossings.
“That’s why we have been protecting our border from the very first moment,” he added.
“We have built a fence — a very long one. We are protecting 550 kilometres [342 miles] of border… we made it very clear that there’s only one way to come to Hungary, which is the legal way: through the official border crossing points, with the proper documentation, during opening hours. Period.”
“Some other European countries, unfortunately, got stuck into hypocrisy and political correctness, and now the consequences are very clear,” Szijjártó continued.
“If you look back for the last three years of European history, you will see that 29 major terrorist attacks have been committed, killing more than 330 persons, causing injuries to an additional 1,300, and this is a clear outcome of the migration crisis.
“Because imagine, there were around one-and-a-half million people entering the territory of the European Union without any kind of control, without any kind of check,” he said.
Research by the Heritage Foundation appears to support the Hungarian foreign minister’s assessment, having uncovered some 32 terrorist plots involving asylum seekers since 2014, resulting in some 357 deaths and 1,678 injuries — slightly higher than Szijjártó’s figures.
Hungarian counter-terrorism officials have previously disclosed that a majority of the terrorists who killed 130 people in Paris in November 2015 used migrant routes passing through Hungary while entering (or re-entering) Europe, before the government could seal the border.
The migrant crisis has also had a profound impact on the level of criminality in Europe, with a study for Germany’s Federal Ministry for Family Affairs uncovering a 10.4 percent increase in violent crime in Lower Saxony — considered a typical German state — between 2014 and 2016, of which 92.1 percent was attributed to migrants.
Elsewhere in the interview, Mr Szijjártó outlined some of the more fundamental differences in outlook between the Hungarian government and the governments of Western European countries, such as Germany and Sweden, which have embraced mass migration and state-sponsored multiculturalism.
“We have a serious debate with some of our Western [European] friends, who put it forward like migration is by definition good; migration by definition is the best thing that could happen to humanity — no, we don’t agree with this,” he said bluntly.
“Migration poses a huge security risk, and instead of encouraging people to leave their homes and come to Europe, we should help them to be able to stay at home under safe and secure circumstances.
“So there’s a false context which has been built, and this false context says migration is a ‘fundamental human right’ — no.
“No, migration is not a ‘fundamental human right’. It is not a ‘fundamental human right’ to pick a country where you would like to live, and then get there by violating a series of borders.
“It’s not a fundamental human right to pick the United States where I want to live, it’s not a fundamental human right to pick Germany where I want to live,” he concluded.
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