Seriously, have all these “conservative commentators” now screaming about the “orgy of tolerance that caused the terrorist attacks in Paris” ever even been on the Moscow metro?
This is not a case of seeing a speck in someone else’s eye while ignoring the log in your own—it’s a log versus a log.
It is very important right now to remind everyone that Europe is forced to take in Muslim migrants—they are breaking through by the thousands across sea and land borders, and the only way to stop them would be with mass shootings. Europe is not transporting them, not inviting them, not issuing them visas, and is constantly trying to implement deportation programs (albeit with little success).
At the same time, Russian state policy is directly aimed at attracting young Muslim men to the country. We do not even have a visa regime with the countries of Central Asia, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of the population supports one.
When I said during the election campaign and afterward that introducing a visa regime should be a top state priority, all the government propagandists shrieked, “Navalny is a fascist” and “Russia’s geopolitical interests require that everyone from the former USSR be able to come here.” Now the very same people are writing columns saying, “The French brought in Muslims by the truckload, and now they’re paying the price.”
And who is coming here, exactly? Rastafarians? Shintoists?
Ninety percent of immigrants to Russia are young Muslim men from rural areas—that is precisely the social environment from which terrorists are recruited. The main sources of migration are Uzbekistan and Tajikistan—countries whose borders, frankly speaking, are highly porous and close to centers of aggressive Islamism.
For an Islamist from Syria to get to Belgium disguised as a refugee, he has to cross borders illegally, pay middlemen, sail in a leaky boat at the risk of his life, or travel in a deadly sealed truck. And then still have to storm a fence somewhere on the Hungarian border.
For an Islamist from Uzbekistan to get to Moscow, all he has to do is buy a ticket.
And never mind an Islamist. If you are a blue-eyed Russian atheist living somewhere like Yekaterinburg, to get a Schengen visa you have to make a special trip to Moscow to go to the consulate and be fingerprinted.
And does Russia have universal fingerprinting for arrivals from countries that pose a potential terrorist threat? Exactly. All it has is vague plans for the future.
When we read a headline saying “thousands of refugees storm a police cordon in Austria,” it is not only about the existence of thousands of refugees; it is also about the existence of a police cordon. Here, cordons exist only during opposition rallies, while at the border it is: please, come right through.
In Switzerland, a referendum banned the construction of minarets. In Russia, anyone proposing such a thing would immediately be thrown in jail “for extremism.” It is Russia that produces headlines like “the largest mosque has been built.” From London, the news is that permission was denied for the largest mosque.
It is here, not in Europe, that there is an entire federal subject (a constituent region of Russia) where state-funded secular schools are being replaced with “hafiz schools”.
And who exactly are they training in schools with a curriculum like that, tell me please?
For all Europe’s many problems, it is simply impossible to imagine there a division of thousands of armed, bearded Islamists, some kind of unidentifiable force, openly gathering in a stadium and answering to no one knows whom.
And the grim results are obvious: in the number of people killed in terrorist attacks in recent years, we surpass all European countries combined.
So if Europe does have an “orgy of tolerance” toward Islamists, then in Russia it is simply a Sodom and Gomorrah of lies, hypocrisy, corruption, and the outright encouragement of aggressive Islamism.
The only thing saving us—if that word even applies here—is the low standard of living and the country’s economic problems. That is what makes Russia a far less attractive destination for migration, not state policy.
We should at least introduce European-style measures here before dreaming about how to do even better.
Tags