Terror Attacks Fuel Debate Over Migrants in Europe (VIDEO)

I'm past worrying about when people are going to wake up.

There's actually no outrage in Europe. It's all daisy-chains and hippie candles (and calls for French fries, oddly enough). The Paris piano-man's going to be singing "Imagine" in Maelbeek any minute now, no doubt. "Solidarity" will see us through, you know. There's no time for the "hate."

It's Pollyanna all the way around.

At the New York Times, "Brussels Attacks Fuel Debate Over Migrants in a Fractured Europe":

LONDON — It did not take long. Almost as soon as the bombs went off in Brussels on Tuesday morning, the new act of terrorism in the heart of Europe was employed in the bitter debate about the influx of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

Even before the identities and nationalities of the attackers were known, there was an immediate association in popular discourse between the attacks on the airport and subway station in Brussels and the migrant crisis. Right-wing politicians and average citizens alike raised concerns that groups like the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attacks, are slipping radicalized recruits, including European jihadists, through the vast migrant stream and into an unprepared Europe.

The murderous attacks in another European capital — just days after the Belgians finally tracked down the sole surviving suspect in a series of similarly coordinated attacks that killed 130 people in and around Paris in November — prompted new questions about European solidarity and security. And they came during a period of severe self-doubt about the European Union, with low growth, high unemployment, and the threat of a British exit from the bloc, to be decided in a June referendum.

“There is a growing perception among European public opinion that E.U. leaders are not in control of the Continent’s terrorist threat,” said Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia Group, a political risk and consulting company. “Combined, these attacks will increase xenophobic and anti-immigration sentiment across the E.U., which has already been rising in light of the E.U.’s ongoing refugee crisis.”

Right-wing parties all over Europe, and especially the Alternative for Germany party, “have and will continue to conflate refugees with terrorism,” Mr. Rahman said. “This will in turn put more pressure on incumbent governments and limit their space for policy action to address Europe’s multiple crises.”

Nigel Farage, a leader of the populist, conservative U.K. Independence Party, said: “I think we’ve reached a point where we have to admit to ourselves, in Britain and France and much of the rest of Europe, that mass immigration and multicultural division has for now been a failure.”

The attacks will also put more strain on the deal brokered last week by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany with the Turkish government to restrict the migrant flow into Europe, in return for more liberal visa arrangements for travel into Europe by Turkish nationals. That deal was already being criticized as a security threat to Europe and had been questioned on humanitarian and legal grounds...

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