Extremists demand a very tough response

When a hedgehog feels threatened, it rolls itself in a tight ball offering its attacker a choice: risk injury by trying to penetrate its sharp defences, or move along and find something else to do. 

We are not at the man-the-barricades point just yet, or even at the build-the-baricades point, but Europe is beginning to roll itself into a defensive ball — and maybe with some justification.

Though Sweden’s counterintuitive decision to impose identity checks on the five-mile Öresund bridge between Denmark and Sweden was made before the appalling and utterly unacceptable New Year’s Eve sex attacks on women in German and Finnish cities by gangs of men believed to be immigrants or refugees, those attacks make it more difficult to argue against stern measures to protect European societies and the values we have established over centuries, values of inclusion, tolerance, and equity.

There must be a message too in the fact Sweden, one of the most generous open-door societies, decided to impose these restrictions. Official estimates suggest that Sweden, a country with a population of 10m, accepted around 190,000 refugees last year, a figure that shows Ireland’s plans to accept 4,000 refugees over a number of years in a pretty poor, pathetic, and unchristian light. Sweden, as well as being overwhelmed, is entitled to feel let down that other European countries were happy to let it, and Germany, do the heavy lifting in the face of what is one of the great humanitarian challenges of our time.

Among the responses being discussed across Europe, as the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre is marked, is the idea that anyone who goes to live in the IS caliphate would forfeit whatever European nationality they are lucky enough to enjoy. This would mean these people, the agents of a movement dedicated to our destruction, would be denied re-entry to their European country of origin.

This idea, first mooted in Britain — home to an estimated 700 IS jihadis, half of whom have, it is believed, returned to the UK — seems a balanced response, one that would justify the policing and intelligence gathering resources required. The measure might be an effective counter balance to the laws around deportation that seem to make it more difficult than is prudent to expel those promoting extreme Islam in Europe. Indeed those laws almost seem skewed in favour of those who openly, and aggressivley, call for the destruction of our way of life. It also seems more than bizzare that we welcome returning graduates of fascist organisations trying to turn the clock back to the sixth century.

It is more than probable that before the refugee crisis is resolved, there will be many more examples of the worst of human nature — like soaring gangrene rates because of frostbite in Balkans’ refugee camps, facing — 14 degrees cold — but it is also certain that unless we prepare to determinedly protect our beliefs, we will not be able to offer sanctuary to the great majority of ordinary refugees caught in a desperate struggle for survival. We must be very tough, unflinchingly so, with the dangerous minority to help the great majority.