"The walls are going up all over Europe. In Hungary, they take the physical form of razor and barbed wire fences, like much of the old iron curtain. In France, Germany, Austria and Sweden, they are border controls temporarily reimposed, within the border-free Schengen area.
And everywhere in Europe there are the mind walls, growing higher by the day. Their psychological mortar mixes totally understandable fears – after massacres perpetrated in Paris by people who could skip freely to and fro across the frontier to Belgium – with gross prejudice, stirred up by xenophobic politicians and irresponsible journalists.
What we are seeing in 2015 is Europe’s reverse 1989. Remember that the physical demolition of the iron curtain started with the cutting of the barbed wire fence between Hungary and Austria. Now it is Hungary that has led the way in building new fences, and its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, in stoking prejudice. Europe must keep out Muslim migrants, Orbán said earlier this autumn, “to keep Europe Christian”.
He is joined in this chorus by such exemplary Christians as France’s Marine le Pen, the Front National politician who has been making the running in French politics, and Kelvin MacKenzie of the Sun. Brother MacKenzie used that newspaper’s grossly misleading presentation of its opinion poll among British Muslims to write a column under the headline: “This shocking poll means we must shut door on young Muslim migrants”.
As if Britain’s already 2.7 million Muslims were not going to have any more children. As if Europe’s tiny but deadly minority of Islamist terrorists were not here already, many of them born, brought up and radicalised on the back streets of Britain, Belgium and France."