Eastern Europe Chooses To Keep Western Civilization, by Giulio Meotti.
After an Islamist suicide-bomber murdered 22 concert-goers in Manchester, including two Poles, Poland’s prime minister, Beata Szydlo, said that Poland would not be “blackmailed” into accepting thousands of refugees under the European Union’s quota system. …
After Szydlo’s speech, Zoltan Balog, Hungary’s Minister for Human Resources, declared: “Islam is a major culture and religion, which we must respect, but Europe has a different identity, and it is clear that these two cultures are incapable of coexisting without conflict… The greatest difference is that in Europe, politics and religion have been separated from one another, but in the case of Islam it is religion that determines politics”.
That is why Viktor Orban has been labelled as “Europe’s enemy within” — because he spelled out what the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, will never do: “Keeping Europe Christian”.
These speeches from Visegrad officials — the European group made up of the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia — are just two examples of deep ideological divisions between Western European countries and those in Central- and Eastern Europe.
There has been a growing tendency of Visegrad leaders to depict Islam as a civilizational threat to Christian Europe. If, in Western Europe, Christianity has been dramatically cast aside by public opinion and severely restricted by EU official rules, in Eastern Europe new polls reveal that Christianity is as robust and patriotic as ever. …
A brief look at the NATO’s members’ military spending as a percentage of GDP shows that Poland meets the 2% target, unlike all the Western European countries. Only five of NATO’s 28 members — the U.S., Greece, Poland, Estonia and the U.K. — meet the 2% target. Where is France? And Belgium? And Germany? And The Netherlands? …
It is no coincidence that President Trump selected Poland, a country that fought both Nazism and Communism, to call on the West to show a little willingness in its existential fight against the new totalitarianism: radical Islam.
Philip:
There is a major realignment in the offing. If Trump is a two-term president, then I would be confident that it will happen.
Western Europe has cancelled tomorrow. It is, in the wonderful words of Stefan Zweig (fin de siècle) ‘The World of Yesterday’. The post WW2 natural alignment of anti-Soviet forces is well past its use-by-date.
Now is the battle for civilisation. The US and Eastern Europe, I hope including the Russians, will be in the forefront of that fight. Once again (Jan Sobieski 1683, Siege/Battle of Vienna) the Poles are leading the charge in the fight against Islam.
hat-tip Philip Barton
