EU commissioner opposes Turkish admission

Back in early September (I missed the story since I was canoeing in the northern Minnesota wilderness at the time), a European Commissioner denounced in very strong terms the admission of Turkey to the European Union. Calling demography the “mother of politics” (oowee!), Fritz Bolkestein, a former leader of the Dutch Liberals, “said the European Union would ‘implode’ in its current form if 70 million Turkish Muslims were allowed to join,” according to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writing in The Telegraph. Quoting Bernard Lewis, Bolkestein said that Europe’s destiny is to be Islamized in the next century, though presumably he was trying to save Europea from that destiny through his dissent on the Turkish issue.

In response to the speech, our fellow Defenders of the West in the British government repeated their emphatic endorsement of Turkey, while Andrew Duff, a Liberal member of the European Parliament, remarked: “We are not slaves to prejudice or historical nostalgia.” A liberal for sure. Try to visualize the soul of a person who would speak of his own nation and civilization as nothing but “prejudice” and “historical nostalgia,” and then you will understand the true nature of the crisis we are in.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 28, 2004 01:10 AM | Send