Posted on July 18, 2005

Klaus Says Multiculturalism, Immigration Cause Terrorism

Prague Daily Monitor, July 18

The excessive openness of the West to immigrants from other cultural environments facilitates attacks by radical Islamists in western countries, President Vaclav Klaus said in an interview printed Saturday in the daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD).

“This [openness] is in any case a suitable soil for these things [attacks] to happen,” Klaus said.

He said that multiculturalism is a tragic mistake of western civilisation for which all will pay dearly. Such openness is not the direct cause of terror, but it is terrorism’s fundamental cause, Klaus said. He compared multiculturalism to the role Marx’s teaching played in the crimes of communism.

He said at the same time that multiculturalism is not an explanation for the recent attacks in London. “Multiculturalism is an ideology that says that you should emigrate and to make claim to your civilisation, your group and ethnic interests” in the new countries, Klaus said.

“Mass emigration has emerged as a false ideology according to which there exists a kind of claim, a general human right to wander anywhere around the world,” Klaus said.

He added that this suppresses the civil rights of the original inhabitants.

If people leave for a place, they should fully accept the place, Klaus said. He said there is a hope for remedy in that this demand is shared by more and more countries, and that the naive ideas from about 30 years ago no longer