RUTHFULLY YOURS

— Viktor Orban is the prime minister of Hungary.

In the annals of European history, 2015 will go down as the inception of a new era. It marked the end of an age when we could take Europe’s secure and sheltered status for granted, assured in the knowledge that it was all up to Europe and no one else. More than a year and a half has passed since I first warned of the danger posed by a potential new wave of mass migration. Today, that mass migration is an accomplished fact, one that no sane person would dispute.

Why were we, Hungarians — or, rather, East Central Europeans — the first to recognize this threat? Several possibly concurrent explanations are conceivable. Perhaps it had to do with the tempestuous times we lived through, the shock waves of historic turmoil, the toil and struggle that followed the democratic turn of history in 1990. Our Western partners experienced the last 50 to 60 years very differently. There, it was all about success, prosperity, a predictable future, well-trodden paths to a better life. To us, all that seems like a fantasy world where ideology mingles with illusion and reality, the boundaries become blurred between nation and nation, culture and culture, man and woman, the sacred and the profane, freedom and responsibility, noble intentions and actual action.

The Danger Is Here, Now
For the West, “what is” has become increasingly difficult to disentangle from “what ought to be.” By contrast, our perception of the real remains as sharp and cold as common sense. We have learned that the real is that which refuses to disappear even if we have stopped believing in it.

That compels us to recognize that the second and third decades of the 21st century will be defined by the mass migration of peoples. Until recently we thought such things could happen only in times gone by and were relegated to history books. We would not face the impending danger of an unprecedented mass of people — greater than the total population of some European countries — setting out for our continent in the coming years. Now that danger is upon us.

Parallel societies have been rearing their heads in several European countries — displacing the world we know as ours, the one we hope to pass to our children and grandchildren. Not all of those who come here intend to accept our ways of life. Some see their own customs and worldview as more valuable, stronger, and more viable. But these are of little use to us as we struggle to replenish the work force that is now abandoning the manufacturing plants of Western Europe — for generations, the unemployment rate among residents not born in Europe has many times higher than that among natives. In most cases, the nations of Europe have failed to integrate even the masses that have gradually poured in from Asia and Africa over the course of several decades. How can we now expect countries to integrate migrants quickly, with large numbers arriving all at once?

Admittedly, Europe is suffering from an aging and dwindling population. But if we try to solve this problem by relying on newly arriving Muslims, we will squander our way of life, our security, our very selves. Unless we make a stand, and do so quickly, the tension between an aging Europe and a young Muslim world — between a Europe unable to provide its own young with work and an undertrained Muslim ghetto — will spiral out of hand in the heart of Europe.

Ordinary Europeans know this well enough. In the past year, the Hungarian government commissioned a public-opinion poll encompassing 28 member states of the European Union. It revealed that more than 60 percent of Europeans have no doubt whatsoever that a direct correlation exists between the escalation of terrorism, higher crime rates, and migration. By the same token, 63 percent believe that migration transforms the culture of the host country. Illegal migration presents a threat, facilitates terrorism, and boosts crime. It repaints Europe’s cultural face, brushing over national cultures on a massive scale.

Welcome to our brave new digital world in which raping women is all fun and games:

Police are reportedly investigating the suspected gang rape of a woman after the attack was live-streamed on Facebook.

An online witness said the victim had her clothes pulled off by armed men and was sexually assaulted before cops arrived and turned off the camera.

According to Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet, three people have been arrested after the alleged attack was broadcast in a closed Facebook group last night.

Dutch website De Dagelijkse Standaard (of which I’m editor-in-chief) adds that the three suspects have been identified. It must come as a shock to all those who worship at the altar of political correctness and multiculturalism, but the rapists are, wait for it, all immigrants. In this screenshot of the gang rape, you can see two of the three suspects in action:

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The first suspect’s name is Emillem ‘Lemon’ Khodagholi. Khodagholi was on probation for a variety of crimes (theft, assault, drugs crimes, and death threats) when he participated in this horrendous crime. Shortly before he and his friends raped the poor woman at the point of a gun, Khodagholi announced his plans to his followers. “Listen, today I will f*ck. I swear it on my mother,” he said, adding that he would cause “a rampage.”

Not long after, he and the other two suspects entered the young woman’s apartment in the city of Uppsala. They raped her for a full three hours. The entire crime was broadcast live on Facebook. Yesterday, footage was released of Khodagholi bullying his victim when she was calling someone for help. The poor girl was barely conscious, but her rapist couldn’t control himself. “You got raped. There, we have the answers. You’ve been raped,” he shouted gleefully at her. He then laughed like a psychopath and continued to make fun of her.

Illiberal and hypocritical — those few words capture the contortions of British judges who have ruled that the voices and votes of Brexit supporters need parliamentary endorsement. Consider the contradiction: those who would bow to Brussels also insist their own lawmakers are paramount.
The constitutional soap opera that is Brexit took on an interesting new plot line in November when the Queen’s bench division of the High Court for Justice heard the case of R Miller v The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. The panel of three judges found that the government did “not have power under the Crown’s prerogative to give notice pursuant to Article 50 of the Treaty of European Union for the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union”.

The political and media reaction was predictable. The Independent described the decision as a “momentous defeat” for the May government. The Guardian thought it the most “encouraging day” for Remainers since the vote on June 23. Champagne socialist MP for the super-rich ghetto of Hampstead, Tulip Siddiq, tweeted that the decision was a vindication of “parliament’s sovereignty”, whilst Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg promised that parliament would amend “any legislation” before triggering Article 50. By contrast, the Sun wondered, “Who do EU think you are?” and the Daily Mail disparaged “gloating Europhiles” who hailed Theresa May’s “humiliation”, and condemned the “out of touch judges” as “enemies of the people”.

The decision by the three High Court judges, all of whom have significant ties to the European Court and judicial system, has added a surreal new act to the evolving political drama. It also creates an unanticipated impediment to Theresa May’s announcement, at the Conservative conference in October, of “a quiet revolution” that would make the United Kingdom a “sovereign and independent” country once again. Australians, of course, need no such revolution as they already enjoy the sovereignty and constitutional liberty bequeathed to them by what the nineteenth-century constitutional authority A.V. Dicey termed the “imperial mother of parliaments”.

What was the ground for the judges’ dramatic decision, which they asserted dealt “only with a pure question of law”, and does it make legal or constitutional sense? Interestingly, in rejecting the prerogative power of the Crown, the judges reaffirmed Dicey’s view that only parliament has “the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law … as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament”.

In order to establish the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, both Dicey and the High Court judges referred to the history of English common law and the great constitutional debates of the seventeenth century. In particular, alongside Dicey the judges cited the great oracle of the common law, Sir Edward Coke, who in his legal report on The Case of Proclamations (1610), ruled that “the King by his proclamation or other ways cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm”, because “the King hath no prerogative, but that which the law of the land allows him”. This position was confirmed in the first two parts of section 1 of the Bill of Rights (1688), which stated “that the pretended power of suspending of laws or the execution of laws by regall authority without consent of Parlyament is illegall”.