fahrenheit451:132

First,the context.A year ago Peter Hitchens, journalist and commentator non pareil wrote the following for Mail Online :-

A THREAT FAR BIGGER THAN PUTIN

 noisy promoters of a ‘New Cold War’ rage and shriek at the wrongdoings of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, even though Russia has no designs on us and poses less of a threat to this country’s freedom and autonomy than Jean-Claude Juncker or Angela Merkel.

How odd that these people seldom if ever say anything about Turkey’s swollen and increasingly dangerous despot, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

President Erdogan, who rules his spectacularly corrupt country from a gigantic new palace, kills his own people by thuggishly suppressing peaceful demonstrations. He hates criticism. His political opponents are arrested at dawn and tried on absurd charges.

He throws journalists into prison and seizes control of newspapers that attack him. He has been one of the keenest promoters of the disastrous Syrian war, which has turned millions into refugees and hundreds of thousands into corpses.

He is an intolerant religious fanatic, and curiously unwilling to deploy his large armed forces against Islamic State. And now he seeks to blackmail Western Europe into allowing his country into the EU and dropping visa restrictions on Turks, not to mention demanding trainloads of money.

If we do not give him these things, then he will continue to do little or nothing about the multitudes of migrants who use Turkey as a bridge into the prosperous West.

And yet for years he has been falsely described as a ‘moderate’ by Western media flatterers, and his country has been allowed to remain in Nato, supposedly an alliance of free democracies.

He is a direct threat to us. Yet the anti-Putin chorus never mention him. Is it because they cannot pronounce his name?  "

Or is it because they have a silly phobia about Russia, left over from the real Cold War, and aren’t paying attention to what’s really going on?

Behold, fast forward a year and Turks are rioting on the streets of Rotterdam having been incited by Erdogan and his cronies.The last few days have seen the Netherlands deny entry into their country by leading Turkish politicians, a similar refusal of permission having previously been enacted by Germany.The faux-casus belli is the imminent referendum on the constitution and extension of presidential powers, being held in Turkey. Turkish Law itself expressly prohibits electioneering abroad by politicians.The particular edict itself is almost uniformly ignored by the very legislators who promulgated it. No matter, what drives the demagogues in the cheap suits to wander all across western europe are the hundreds of thousands of potential voters who retain,in effect, dual  Turkish nationality. Given all the preceding and seemingly ineluctable events involving Erdogan,Syria,the Migrant/Refugee crises,EU accession ,etc. to say that the rioting in Rotterdam is disconcerting is an understatement.  The legions of gastarbeiter / guestworkers who were enticed to pour into the booming national economies of post war western europe have over the decades metastasized into a clear and present existential danger for the hosts. #brexit has for lucky Old Albion presented us with a chance,and a slim one at that, to cauterise and avert to a large degree the unholy cataclysm set to engulf  the PC multiculturalist,neoliberal, globalist Continent. But only by a whisker.