Posted on October 16, 2015

Islam Was ‘Never Part of Europe’: Hungary’s Orban

Yahoo! News, October 16, 2015

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban defended his hardline stance against refugees, the vast majority of whom are Muslim, saying in an interview published Friday that Islam “has never been part of Europe”.

Speaking to Germany’s Focus news weekly about the record migrant influx, he said “the language of the European elite is ideological and dogmatic”.

“Islam has never been part of Europe, it came to us,” Orban told Focus in an interview to be published in full Saturday.

He conceded that Germany’s Turkish migrants, who arrived in their tens of thousands from the 1960s for work, now “belong to German history and therefore Europe’s too”.

“But spiritually, Islam was never part of Europe. It’s the rulebook of another world,” said Orban.

He also hit out at France and Germany for refusing to countenance “any doubts” over a multicultural society.

“We in Hungary decide what we want or don’t want. We don’t want that,” he said.

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