Soeren Kern joins SFR to discuss the 2015 Migrant Crisis in Europe

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio. This is Frank Gaffney, your host and guide for what I think of as an intelligence briefing on the war for the free world. In the course of 2015, one of the men I’ve been most impressed by in terms of his intelligence and his ability to convey with great clarity important stories that are not getting, at least here in the United States, the sort of attention they warrant. Notably, from Europe. He is Soeren Kern, a distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute. He’s also a senior analyst for transatlantic relations at the Madrid based Grupo de Estudios Estrategicos. He is a guy whose writings at Gatestone, I think, are really required reading and it’s been a privilege to talk with him, I guess once earlier in the year and now to have a full hour to chat about what’s been going on in Europe and what it might mean, not only for the security of important allies of the United States, elements of the free world as I think of it, but also for us as well. Soeren Kern, welcome back to Secure Freedom Radio. The best for the News Year and thank you very much for joining us here at the tail end of 2015.

SOEREN KERN:

Thank you very much for having me. My pleasure.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

I guess I’d like to start with sort of your principal insight, Soeren, about 2015 and as it relates to Europe, obviously the migration story is huge. Maybe you want to start there, but take us where you’d like to in terms of assessing what we saw in 2015 in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

SOEREN KERN:

Sure. I think that at the beginning of 2015 no one could have possibly imagined how this year was going to end up, especially with the migration crisis. I think that the thing has been building up, this migration crisis has been building up for many years. Obviously, with the chaos in Syria and Iraq, with the spread of the Islamic State, this has sort of exacerbated the problem. But I think really what we’re looking at here is, in the big picture, is really the demise, I guess you could say, or the beginning of the demise of the European nation-states. I think what we have here is a situation where these countries, all these countries, particularly Germany, but also Greece and some of the other – Italy, in particular – are becoming totally overwhelmed by this influx of migrants. And we’re going to see over the coming year or two that these migrants are completely unintegratable into European society. And what we’re going to see is essentially European bureaucrats and European leaders like Angela Merkel really using this crisis as a way to transfer more sovereignty and more power to the European Union. There’s sort of a mantra within the European Union to never let any crisis go to waste. And the idea over many years has been to build up the institutions of the EU, that is, to transfer national sovereignty away from the nation-state towards the EU. And I think what we’re going to see here, really, as a consequence of 2015 is really a push to develop a full-fledged European army. There’s already talk about the European Commission, the administrative arm of the EU that’s based in Brussels, of essentially building up a border security force that would be allowed to go into countries like Greece or countries that are unable to secure their border without the permission of a nation-state and to take control over aspects of border patrolling. And we’re seeing much, much more of this. And I think, really, as we look back at 2015, we see where this is all going. That’s to my mind, really, the key issue here.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah, it seems, at least from this perspective, to be athwart what a lot of European nations, not by any means all of them, but a number of them, certainly in what Don Rumsfeld famously called New Europe, the Eastern European states, but also in the aftermath of the attacks in Paris, France as well, one of the absolute founding members of the whole European transnational experiment, have seemingly said, you know, enough of this subordination of our sovereignty. We’re going to restore our national borders. We’re going to in other ways depart from sort of the precepts of the European super-state. Am I missing something there?

SOEREN KERN:

No. I think Donald Rumsfeld’s comments years ago were very prescient and they hold very clear today. There’s clearly a split within the EU of the Eastern European countries that spent most of the 20^th Century under the domination of communism, finally got their freedom at the end of the 20^th Century and now they’re in this EU structure which is in many ways very similar to Soviet centralization. And they’re saying no, no way. And I think on the continent it’s felt the other holdout really is the UK. Britain has been very reluctant to play along with these migrant quotas that the Brussels people are trying to impose on the other EU nation-states. So we have clearly a split between the central European powers, which is really Germany and France, Italy to some extent, and of course Belgium, the smaller countries. And then the Eastern European countries and the UK.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

But in France, Soeren Kern, and let me press you on this, because I think that there was kind of the, you know, the old line about a conservative being a liberal who was mugged by reality, you had a very avid promoter of this idea of pan-Europeanism in France, under Francois Hollande, no less, a socialist who nonetheless, after the attacks in Paris, saying, you know, we have to close our borders, we have to pull back from, as I say, that sort of most fundamental of Europeanist visions. Has that gone over the side or was that just a temporary reaction to a particular crisis and that the ship of, well, super-statism, I guess you’d call it, you know, plunges on?

SOEREN KERN:

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think that there’s – politics has a huge play in the equation in France. And that is because a lot of ordinary people are completely fed up with the European Union, with the centralization and, particularly with the EU migration crisis. And I think that the continental leaders, particularly in France, are very concerned about the surge of more right wing parties. They’re called right wing in the European context. But in the American context it would be sort of, I guess you could say like sort of a Tea Party movement, a popular uprising against all these policies that are really non-democratic. And I think that after the Charlie Hebdo attack in January and the recent Paris attacks in November, that there’s this constant tension between the drive for more European Union, more European comity, and on the other hand, trying to stave off a popular rebellion against all of these policies. And I think that’s what the French president is trying to play here. He’s trying to play it both sides. France has historically always been one of the main promoters of European integration. Even before Germany was really on board with this thing, during the Helmet Kohl era, it was the French who were really driving this. The idea always was that the German Mark was so strong that France had no possibility to compete with that and one of the ideas was to be, take away the German D-Mark would be a way for France sort of to, I guess, equalize its power in a way with Germany on the continental scene.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And build these sort of state edifices or super-state edifices that would constrain Germany’s future trajectory. But the point that I guess we were going to pause here momentarily and then discuss at greater length with Soeren Kern in the following segments of this program is what kind of transformative effect has the migration crisis, by some estimates now a million people have been introduced into Europe from places like Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan and Eritrea and elsewhere, done to this notion of either sovereign national states or a European Union that will essentially replace them. This is the kind of question that has bearing not only on the future of Europe, of course, and our alliance partners there, but also to a very considerable degree, as important insights for us here in the United States as we face some of the repercussions both in terms of migration and otherwise here in this country as well. Soeren Kern, from the Gatestone Institute is our guest for this full hour wrap up of 2015, looking at Europe. More straight ahead.

SECURE FREEDOM RADIO; KERN SEGMENT 2

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re back joined by Soeren Kern for a full hour of conversation about some of the most important security developments of 2015, notably with respect to Europe. And in particular, we’re talking about the repercussions of the migration, the hijra, as some call it, of roughly a million people, many of them it appears of a particular demographic, and it’s got a lot of us quite concerned about it. Soeren is an expert in these matters, covers very closely and I think brilliantly for Gatestone the European beat and its security repercussions in particular. Soeren, again, thank you very much for joining us. Talk about the seeming large number of what have been called military age men who make up, it appears by some estimates about seventy percent of the migrants coming in, does that sound right to you? And if so, what are the implications of that?

SOEREN KERN:

Yes, that is true. A lot of migrants, a vast majority, are young, unmarried, unaccompanied males. The most important factor, of course, is that most of these people are coming from Muslim countries. There is already a problem in most European countries, France, Germany, the UK, with the idea of parallel societies. That’s the idea, basically, that a lot of Muslim immigrants do not integrate into their host countries. And so what you have is sort of the development of parallel societies. Societies that are just made up of migrants from different countries and different sects of Islam that basically keep to themselves, that do not learn the local language, that do not integrate. That in many cases live off of the social welfare state of the host country. And in the most problematic of all of these, of course, is the rise of Islamic shariah law as sort of a parallel justice system in many European countries. This is very well documented. It is not a made up problem. It is a very real problem.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re joined by Soeren Kern of the Gatestone Institute. You were just making a tremendously important point, which is not only that we have a very large number of military aged males who are migrating primarily from Muslim countries, creating or exacerbating, I guess one might say, the parallel societies and seeking to bring with them or at least practice inside these nations of Europe, shariah, the repressive Islamist supremacist code. Put all that together, Soeren, and what does that portend for security in these nations of Europe?

SOEREN KERN:

Well, in the legal sense, the problem is that Western society has always been based on the idea that everyone is equal, male and female are equal, and the shariah does not hold by that. So you have a system basically where little by little you are – you are whittling away at fundamental principles of the Western nation-states. And so I think that this is really the long term problem in terms of the constitution, in terms of the large legal aspect of what is going on in European countries. But obviously, as these people become unintegratable, as they realise the reality of their situation in European countries, I think that the pull of radical Islam will be increasingly more attractive. We see already in many European countries, is these young guys, young men, who do not have labour skills, in many cases illiterate, not only in German or in French, but in Arabic, from the countries where they come from. And I call them essentially stateless people. They’re people, basically, who are no longer tied to their home country and they’re not part of their host country. And particularly Salafism is sort of a very radical form of Islam. It’s really the largest, fastest-rising Islamic movement in Europe. And it’s basically rising so fast because it’s attracting many disillusioned young Muslim males who realise that they have no future in European society. And sort of Salafism, Islamic radicalism, gives them a meaning or a purpose in their lives. And this, for me, in my perspective, is really the key security consequence of this in the future. You have many, many thousands of males who are essentially shiftless and who are drawn to radical Islamic ideology and are willing to act on that in the future.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

One of the people that has been describing this phenomenon with you at the Gatestone Institute, of course, is Ingrid Carlqvist, who’s been talking particularly about what’s been going on in Sweden. And I think both of you have been describing how such folks, these, well, actual or certainly potential jihadists are behaving at the moment in a way that is highly destructive to the first, if you will, of those parallel societies or systems, namely, the host country. Notably through the use of rape as a sort of, well, it would appear as a means of waging kind of a jihad against the population. Talk about, you know, the fabric of these societies as you see it and whether there’s a serious risk of actually seeing these states unravel.

SOEREN KERN:

Yes, I think that and in the case of Germany, the incidents of rape committed by migrants is skyrocketing. This is something that’s been kept completely under wraps by the government and by the mainstream media. They’re trying to downplay the scale of this problem. But I think on the other side, other hand of the equation you can see that Germans are arming themselves in unprecedented numbers. We have a country, Germany, which has very strict gun control laws. But Germans are trying to work within that structure to get their hands on whatever kinds of self-defence weapons they can. As I understand it, sales of pepper spray, for example, have skyrocketed by six hundred percent just since September and October when really the mass, when there were something like ten thousand people per day coming across the border into Germany. So what you have is a situation where the security situation in all of these European countries is unravelling. And the ability of the nation-state to keep a lid on this is diminished.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

The point being that what is taking place, whether it’s through rapes are whether it’s through other crimes, or whether it’s through the simple inability of the society to accommodate this kind of influx or even just to police it is extraordinarily traumatic for the society. And you’re saying some in Germany have sought to arm themselves within very severe limitations. Go back to something you talked about in the beginning, if you would quickly, Soeren, and that is the idea that there may be some sort of trans-European police force that would be operating – could they conceivably be operating not just in, you know, outliers like Greece, but in Germany and Sweden as well?

SOEREN KERN:

Sure, the idea of – this is always incrementalism. You start with a crisis, you use that crisis to build up the capabilities of the European Union, you use that for this particular crisis and then that institution sort of sticks around and it grows, the bureaucracy grows. This particular instance, what the European Union wants to do is it wants to essentially send border control people to Greece at the behest of Germany to try to force the Greeks to seal their borders and also to keep the migrants who are coming across the border in Greece and not allowing them to come even further into continental Europe. The idea, one of the principles of the EU, the EU migration policy, is essentially that when – the country that the migrant first enters into is the country essentially where they should stay.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

It just hasn’t worked out that way for reasons that we’ll talk about more in a moment with Soeren Kern, a senior fellow of the Gatestone Institute, one of the really astute observers and chroniclers of developments in Europe and what they might mean for us. Much more with Soeren right after this.

SECURE FREEDOM RADIO; KERN SEGMENT 3

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re back. Our guest is Soeren Kern for a full hour of sort of 2015 in retrospective, looking hard at what has happened on the continent of Europe with respect to migration of jihadists and others, the implications that that holds for parallel societies and possibly very serious insecurity, even ultimately, transformation of Europe before our eyes. Soeren, I hated to interrupt you there, but you were talking about the idea that the first nation to which migrants come in Europe is supposed to be the place where they stay. That hasn’t worked out. Talk a little bit about why, in Greece in particular, and then let’s talk about where many of these migrants have wound up.

SOEREN KERN:

Sure. Well, Greece is one of the poorest nation-states within the EU, economically speaking. And it just does not have the capacity to take in a half a million or six hundred thousand migrants. The vast majority of migrants, really, have come through either Italy or Greece. The rest coming by land through Hungary, Slovakia, some of the Eastern European countries. And I think that there is a lot of bad blood between Greece and Germany, particularly over the economic crisis. Germany has really treated Greece in a very humiliating way in the economic crisis. And I think that this is playing itself out now in the migrant crisis in the sense that the Greek authorities are really abusing, treating the migrants who are coming into their country very poorly as a way to incentivise these migrants to get out of Greece as fast as possible and move on to somewhere else. This is essentially a consequence of Germany’s heavy-handed policies for many years with Greece and other countries. And again, this really stems, again, from the issue of EU integration. The economic crisis in Greece really threatened to unravel the greatest accomplishment of the EU so far, which is the Euro. And the reason why Germany has been so heavy handed with Greece in terms of its spending and its debt problems is really to – there’s an attempt to try to salvage what is left of the Euro. The Euro really, about a year ago, was really on the verge of completely disintegrating. And really the fundamental problems of the Euro are still there. So we see these themes of European integration and the larger European project – this project of creating a United States of Europe is really underlying everything that’s going on in European politics today with the migration crisis, with the currency crisis, really with the attempts to build a European army, the whole issue of the EU – the British referendum on staying in the EU. All of these things really are part of this larger gambit by Angela Merkel, really, to try to preserve the EU, what the EU has accomplished so far, and to expand upon that in coming years.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Let’s turn to Angela Merkel at the moment. Time has recognised her as their Person of the Year. But let me ask you about Merkel, if I can, Soeren, in this way. She seems to be, at the moment, laudably unpopular for having essentially opened the borders to any number of migrants who wish to come there. You talked a little bit earlier about some of the repercussions of that in terms of growing insecurity in the country. I think you’ve also documented, if I’m not mistaken, others have, that some of these migrants, many of whom, let’s face it, have not been vetted in any significant sense of the word, have simply disappeared from the refugee centres in which they have been placed. There is now, according to the Wall Street Journal, in today’s paper, a rising enthusiasm for some of the opposition parties, including some, as you say, on what are described as the far right. Where is Angela Merkel headed at the moment? If it is in the direction of a greater transnational European Union, is she likely to be able, given her political circumstances, to pull it off?

SOEREN KERN:

Yeah, Angela Merkel has really two Achilles heels at this moment, I think. The big issue for her is to insure that there’s no terrorist attack in Germany on her watch. And I think this is increasingly a problem in these sort of attacks that happened in Paris could very easily happen in Germany as well. And the German interior minister recently said that the only reason why it hasn’t happened in Germany is because of luck. So if there is a terrorist attack on a mass scale in Germany on Angela Merkel’s watch, it’s really the end for her. I think that that is really where the patience with her will snap and will end.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Let me just say, in connection with this possibility that there may be a terrorist attack, one of the concerns has been that in addition to these guys simply disappearing is that German authorities have reportedly become increasingly concerned that even if they don’t come into the country with maligned intent, quite a number of them are being recruited by the Salafists, as you call them, into mosques or into Muslim Brotherhood front groups or other entities that are believed to be likely to move them to become part of the jihad. How serious a problem do you think that is at this point, especially if one attack might take down Angela Merkel’s government?

SOEREN KERN:

Sure. The other thing that Angela Merkel really has going for her right now is that there’s no other leader in Germany right now that is able to challenge her. There’s no one really that has the political support, really, to dethrone her at this moment. As far as I can understand, that roughly thirty percent of the migrants that have come into Germany have since disappeared, in other words, that the German government really has no idea where they are. About two days ago, the German interior ministry issued an alert that they’re looking for twelve individuals who came into Germany on false passports. That possibly ten or fifteen thousand migrants that came into Germany on false passports that were created, printed falsely by the Islamic State. This issue probably has multiplied in other EU countries as well. So this is really a problem that is just waiting to happen.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

But talk if you would, Soeren Kern of the Gatestone Institute, about the infrastructure that is in place in Germany at the moment that is creating this potential magnet for folks, even if they don’t have the intent coming in, to become very much part of this Islamic supremacist threat to German and for that matter then European societies.

SOEREN KERN:

Sure. One of the benefits that Germans offer that the other European states don’t offer is that migrants receive a very good handout from the German state. They’re planning on – the German state is planning on giving every migrant 670 Euros a month as of next year. So this draws as a magnet, this really brings people from the rest of the EU countries to Germany. Because economically it makes sense. But many people in Germany are beginning to realise that many of these people are not integratable. They don’t have job skills, they are not qualified even to internships with European – with German companies. The idea – one of the ideas behind this migration crisis was always to try to alleviate the demographic crisis in Europe by bringing in lots of these young people. And now German industry is essentially complaining that this is bound to fail. I think as these frustrations build up with these young people coming into Germany, the Salafists are really out there recruiting, they are really looking for to increase their numbers. The most recent intelligence report from German intelligence in the interior ministry that came out just a few months ago just shows a massive increase in the number of Salafists, year after year after year. And these individuals are now going to the refugee centres and essentially trying to recruit these men from Syria and other countries who are – they have money because the German government is giving them the monthly stipends, but they don’t have jobs. They don’t really do anything. So they sit around, they’re essentially shiftless, frustrated. And this is really an ideal recruiting ground for the radical Islamists, not only in Germany but in some of the other EU countries as well.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re going to talk more about how this is likely to shape the future security of Europe and of the United States, whether there are lessons to be learned for us from the European migration crisis and how the EU is handling it. That and much more with Soeren Kern right after this.

SECURE FREEDOM RADIO; KERN SEGMENT 4

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re back. We’re visiting with Soeren Kern, a man whose expertise and skill is much in evidence these days at the Gatestone Institute. It is a terrific resource. You can find it at gatestoneinstitute.org. His reporting on what’s been going on in Europe is informing our conversation today and I think should inform all of our thinking about a crisis that is not simply afflicting our friends and fellow members of the free world, but has real implications, as we’ll discuss with him, for the United States as well. Soeren, before we turn to the United States, let me just ask you a couple of other questions related to how this phenomenon, this million person migration, or hidra, the invasion, some have called it, mostly of Muslims into Europe into which they are not assimilating as a general rule, how does this come about? And I guess we have to start with Turkey. There’s, of course, been the Syrian crisis there with the Libyan civil war and all of that. But most of these folks, as I understand it, would not be in Europe today but for the decision of the Erdogan regime in Turkey to facilitate their migration northward into Europe. What role have the Turks played and what kind of response have they received to date from the Europeans?

SOEREN KERN:

Yeah, well, the Turks have played this brilliantly from their perspective. For many years, the Turks have tried to get into the EU and the Europeans have essentially given them lip service. And for many years the Turks have actually made a lot of changes into their legal systems and tried to adapt some of their human rights, I guess, issues to European standards, EU standards. The Turks have become very frustrated by their inability to continue to proceed with the EU session talks. And this really has been stalled for a long time. And I think the Turks have really played this brilliantly because recently the Europeans have essentially made a lot of concessions to Turkey. Essentially they gave Turkey three billion Euros as an incentive to try to seal the borders. What the Europeans have now done is they’ve said that the EU session talks are back on track. Now I personally do not believe that Turkey will ever be a member of the EU. But if it were, you would instantly have a country with ninety million people, Muslim, a Muslim country essentially would be the most populous country of the EU. And so it would geopolitically completely transform the EU into essentially an Islamic power for one way to essentially look at it.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Well, at the very least, Soeren, it would certainly be the case that once that large population of Muslims were inside the European Union boundaries and free, at least as has been the goal in Europe, to migrate at will anywhere inside the EU, you would certainly have a further transformation if not all the way to the extreme that you’ve just described, it would make that parallel society problem you’ve described vastly worse, would it not?

SOEREN KERN:

Sure. And this is one of the other issues the EU project has, open borders. This issue has been sacrosanct for many, many years. And a lot of Europeans are beginning to realise that this is no longer viable, that you need to have border checks. There’s a lot of resistance to doing the border checks. After the attacks in Paris, there were temporary border controls between France and Belgium and France and Germany and a number of the other countries. But clearly, if Turkey would become a member, even a close associate of the EU, and there is talk now that Turks can actually, the process is beginning essentially to allow Turks to enter the EU without visas. This really would open a whole new security situation for the EU.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

It really does seem as though this would be the death warrant for Europe as we’ve known it and, again, something that would be of profound concern to Americans as well. What I am being told, Soeren, is that some of these folks are already able to utilise dual passports, whether they’re, you know, fraudulent or legally obtained, to take advantage of our visa waiver program. And this, what you’ve just described would greatly exacerbate that problem, needless to say. Let me ask you further, Soeren, one of the controversies that has arisen in this country, as you probably are aware, in 2015 was over the description of some places in Europe, I think the kind of places you’re describing, really, as parts of the parallel societies, are properly described as no-go zones. Whether that’s the right term or not, is there in fact now a problem with parts of Europe, set Turkey aside, but parts of Europe where Muslim populations now essentially are able to govern and exclude the authorities of the nations in which they live from interfering with I guess the application, among other things, of shariah?

SOEREN KERN:

Sure. These zones do exist. This is a taboo subject in Europe. And it’s becoming a taboo subject in America as well. People try to ridicule anyone who uses the term no-go zone or tries to talk about this problem. But it is a very real problem. It’s been very well documented by myself. It’s been documented by British authorities, by British police, by people who are on the ground, it’s been documented by French police who are on the ground and most recently it’s been documented by German police unions who are afraid of entering certain sections, certain parts of German cities, because of the Muslim populations in these areas, in these neighbourhoods. It makes it very unsafe for police to go in, in their uniforms, or to go in, in police cars, without being stoned, without being – without having to fear for their own lives. And what this – these are areas, essentially, where the nation-state, whether it’s Germany or the UK or France, have indeed lost sovereignty, lost control. It’s largely a question of will. I guess if the French state really wanted to recover some of these areas, it could, but for political reasons, I guess, or for not trying to agitate the Muslim populations in these communities, they essentially let them – let them go, let them be what, let them do what they want to do in these areas.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

But this really does seem to raise the question that at some point, if they need to re-establish control, and it seemed as though the French were sort of testing that proposition in the aftermath of the most recent attacks in Paris, in some of the so-called belle eaux [PH] that they risk, really, conflagrations with those populations and I’m assuming that’s why they’ve refrained from addressing them as they should have long before now. Soeren, this is a topic we may need to continue, but let me just ask you quickly, another aspect of what’s been happening in terms of the transformation of Europe at the hands of or at least under the strong influence of, if not the present wave of migrants, previous waves, is a certain propensity within Europe to restrict freedom of speech. You’ve reported on a pastor in Belfast who was prosecuted by the British government for having done this. He’s not alone. Talk if you would a little bit about what that is about. And what it might mean for one of the most fundamental freedoms of Europe, the freedom of speech.

SOEREN KERN:

Sure. I think that in all of these countries what’s driving restrictions on the no-go zones and on free speech and all that is fear. There’s a real fear by European authorities that Muslim minorities in their countries will rebel or will go on riots as we’ve seen in France, and I think that there’s an attempt, really, by European countries, by governments, to restrict criticism of Muslims, of Islam –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Soeren, hold the thought. We’ll be right back with more with Soeren Kern of the Gatestone Institute. Right after this.

SECURE FREEDOM RADIO; KERN SEGMENT 5

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome back. We’re talking about Europe and what has happened to it in 2015 and what is likely to come in the momentous year ahead with Soeren Kern. He is a senior fellow with the Gatestone Institute, a man whose writing there at gatestoneinstitute.org is really required reading. And we’ve been graced in the previous months with Soeren’s presence here, we’re very pleased to have him for a full hour, this segment concluding that very important conversation. Soeren, I want to just pick up on the thought that you were discussing a moment ago and that is Europe has essentially acquiesced to a shakedown by Turkey on the one hand and to the threat of violence in no-go zones and parallel societies and among the now burgeoning Muslim populations, including by agreeing to restrictions on freedom of speech. And I want to just sort of allow you to finish that thought, but also draw to you what are the insights, what are the lessons that the United States should be learning from what has been happening to Europe in the past year?

SOEREN KERN:

Yeah, that’s a very good question. It’s important to realise that most European countries do not have First Amendment rights, so there are less protections on free speech in Europe than there are in the United States. There is a real fear of criticism of Islam. This is being driven by pressure from the mosques, from Muslim lobbying groups, from the OIC, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and again, this is all being driven by fear. There’s a real fear that if there is criticism, if there is scrutiny of Islam, and there’s scrutiny of Muslim migration into European countries, that this will create dissatisfaction, that it will create unrest among the migrant minorities in European countries. I think the thing about Islam really is that there’s a real fear in European countries and to a certain extent in Western countries, the United States and Canada as well, of the consequences of going too far, of provoking, I guess. And what this essentially is creating sort of are self-restrictions on free speech and those people who are not willing to restrict their criticism are essentially compelled to do so through sort of strategic lawsuits as a way to silence, really, critics of all of these policies, all of these things that we’re talking about.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah. Soeren, you mentioned earlier the brilliance of the Turkish stratagem in sort of jujitsuing migration flows into a new set of accommodations by Europe. I wonder if what we’re seeing here isn’t an equally brilliant stratagem by the Muslim Brotherhood, an outfit that is operating throughout Europe, as you know, widely perceived, at least until now, as a non-violence alternative to the violent jihadists. But basically, a group that is exploiting this threat of violence, if by others, to demand concessions and accommodations. I’d like to ask you about the report that was issued by the British government just in the past ten days about the Muslim Brotherhood and what insights it should have for us as well about this quite insidious civilisation jihadist force in our own country.

SOEREN KERN:

Yes. This Muslim Brotherhood report has been in the making for many years. And it was commissioned by the British government to sort of help the government understand the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK. This report found that the Muslim Brotherhood was not directly responsible or involved in terrorist attacks in the UK, but it also found that the Muslim Brotherhood is involved in financing and in promoting a lot of main Muslim groups in the UK. And I think that the main thrust of the report, essentially, is that there are – that the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK operates secretly, there’s no transparency. So the government really cannot understand the true extent of the activities of that organisation in the UK. After that report was released, Prime Minister David Cameron made some comments on that that were actually much harsher than the conclusions of the report itself. And he left no doubt that the British government was going to be monitoring the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities on a much more heavy scale in the future.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And properly so. In the closing couple of minutes we have with you, Soeren Kern of the Gatestone Institute, let me just ask you to sort of summarise this really grim picture that you have painted for us of what’s happening in Europe, what has developed there particularly in 2015 with a million additional mostly Muslims, mostly young men, migrating to the parallel societies that already operate there, much of them under the influence, it seems, of Salafists, as you call them, Muslim Brotherhood organisations as well, for our own country. Quickly, what would you say about the advisability of taking in large numbers of unvettable individuals from some of these same populations into this country?

SOEREN KERN:

Well, I think that Europe is ahead of the United States by a generation, by maybe twenty years. And we can look to Europe to see what will happen in the United States if the United States does not learn from the mistakes that the Europeans are making. I think really the biggest issue with immigration is the issue of integration. That migrants from wherever they come from, if they come to the United States, they should be expected to learn the language, and they should be expected to integrate into the culture, to assimilate, and to become a productive part of American society. That’s the way immigration has always worked in the United States. But it seems like with the immigration from, particularly from the Muslim countries in Europe, this is a completely new form of immigration. It’s an immigration where migrants come, but they don’t integrate into the host country. And this really is the issue, I think, of migration from here on out.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Let me ask you – last, final, and very important question, Soeren Kern, given what you’ve said about the Muslim Brotherhood, given the insights of this work by the British government, if you were counselling the United States government, what would you say about the continued reliance it has placed in 2015 and now for some years, actually, before all this, on Brotherhood associated individuals as advisors, as in some cases employees of the government with responsibility for at least influencing the kinds of policies towards migrants, towards mosques, towards Muslim Brotherhood operations, towards the Islamic State and so on?

SOEREN KERN:

Yes, I think the problem with Islam as a phenomenon, as a system, essentially, that it’s more than just a religious system. It’s a political system and a legal system that is shrouded in religion. And I think that –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

[OVERLAP] – shariah, of course.

SOEREN KERN:

Of course. So a lot of the advisors, the people in the Muslim Brotherhood really have dual loyalties. They have loyalties to their religious system of Islam, but also to the political ends. And the whole idea of Islam is essentially submission. Submission to the will of Allah. And you cannot take the religious part and separate it from the political or the legal, the shariah part. It’s all one system. It’s inimical to the US constitution and to freedom of speech and a lot of the rights that we have. And I think that there’s a – I don’t know if it’s a failure, but a refusal to recognise this reality of the phenomenon of Islam. That it’s a full system, and there are ulterior motives in mind.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Indeed. And in part I think that failure, it has to be said, is at least shaped or influenced by the aforementioned reliance we’re placing on Muslim Brotherhood operatives to tell us what we can think and know and do and say and with whom we can meet and so on as a government. And to varying degrees in other civil society institutions as well. Soeren Kern, we are at the end of a long hour. I appreciate enormously the work that you do at the Gatestone Institute and the chance that we’ve had to visit, I think now twice this year. I hope we’ll talk often in 2016. You are a national treasure and your reporting on what is happening in other parts of the free world as we try to assess what I call the war for the free world is incalculably important and deeply appreciated. Thank you so much for your time today. I hope that the rest of you will join us again for more conversation tomorrow. Same time, same station. Until then, this is Frank Gaffney. Thanks for listening.