Czech President: Muslim Migrants Fueling Terrorist Attacks In Europe
Czech President Milos Zeman attributed the recent terror attacks on European soil to the incoming droves of migrants fleeing from dire situations in war-torn countries like Syria, the Associated Press reported Monday. Though Zeman said he had no problems taking in migrants from neighboring European countries, he said followers of Islam were “hardly compatible” with Western values and taking them in would create a “breeding ground for potential terrorist attacks.”
"Today almost no one doubts the connection between the migration wave and terrorist attacks," Zeman said to his people during his annual Christmas speech. Therefore, he said the only way to avoid such attacks from happening in the Czech Republic, which has a population of about 10 million people, would be by abstaining from admitting migrants into the land-locked European country on a “so-called volunteer basis.”
Zeman was referring to a European Union initiative to try and alleviate the financial strains the influx of migrants has had on European governments by rationing smaller numbers of them to different countries throughout the continent.
Much has been made about perpetrators of recent European terrorist attacks hailing from predominantly Muslim nations. The latest attack occurred on Dec. 19, when an asylum seeker from Tunisia drove a truck into a crowded pedestrian Christmas Market in Berlin, killing 12 and wounding 20. Afterwards, the 24-year-old Tunisian nationalist was able to evade a massive police manhunt for five days and travel 644 miles south to Milan before eventually being shot and killed Friday by an interim Italian officer. The suspect, Anis Amri, was allowed to freely roam the streets of Germany despite the fact that German law enforcement had been aware of his criminal past, to the extent that he was placed under covert surveillance months prior to the fatal attack.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Berlin attack, the Washington Post reported Wednesday. United States President-elect Donald Trump called the killings an “attack against humanity” and said the incident was proof that he was “100 percent correct” about his association between recent terrorist acts and an uptick in Muslim immigrants, Politico reported Wednesday.
Trump has blamed U.S. immigration policies for an attack on the campus of Ohio State University in November that hospitalized 11 people at the hands of a Somali refugee. Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump called for a ban for Muslims traveling to the U.S. and the establishment of Muslim registries, which has been likened to the internment of Japanese-American in the country during World War II.
“What's going on is terrible,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. “It's an attack on humanity, that's what it is. It's an attack on humanity and it's got to be stopped.”
At least 1,011,700 migrants traveled to Europe by sea in 2015, and roughly 34,900 did so by land, according to a The International Organization for Migration report on May 31, 2016.
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