Europe's Christian Roots Threatened by Muslims, Hungarian Prime Minister Says Amid Refugee Crisis
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said that his country is struggling to cope with the overwhelming number of refugees crossing its borders. Orban said that most of the refugees are Muslims, and suggested that the crisis is threatening Europe's Christian roots.
"The people want us to master the situation and protect our borders," he wrote in an opinion piece for Germany's Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung. "Only when we have protected our borders can questions be asked about the numbers of people we can take in, or whether there should be quotas."
Orban added: "That is an important question, because Europe and European culture have Christian roots. Or is it not already and in itself alarming that Europe's Christian culture is barely in a position to uphold Europe's own Christian values?"
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Millions of refugees from war-torn Syria and other conflict places in the Middle East and Africa are asking European nations for refuge, and have received various different responses. While Germany has said that it will take in 800,000 refugees, Hungary is in the process of building a 110-mile long face along its border with Serbia in an attempt to control the flow of migrants.
A crisis situation has been developing over the past couple of days at Budapest's Keleti railway station, with large masses of refugees seeking to board trains heading to Austria and Germany — something which they are not being allowed to do, since the lack proper documentation.
BBC News reported on Thursday that "chaotic scenes" have broken out at the train stations with police trying to force migrants off the trains, leading to confrontations.
"Nothing illustrates how difficult this crisis is to resolve than what has happened to these several hundred refugees who are currently on this train at Bicske. They jumped on the train after waiting at Budapest station for three hours," the report states.
"They were tightly crammed in — women and babies. They were told no international trains would leave, but eventually they were told this train would leave and they believed and hoped it would take them close enough to the Austrian border to get across."
Slovakia has also expressed concern at the prospect of Muslim refugees coming to its country, which is predominantly Roman Catholic. Interior ministry spokesman Ivan Metik said that while his country wants to help Europe with the migration crisis, it can not accommodate Muslim refugees.
"We could take 800 Muslims but we don't have any mosques in Slovakia so how can Muslims be integrated if they are not going to like it here?" Metik asked.
"We want to really help Europe with this migration wave, but … we are only a transit country and the people don't want to stay in Slovakia."
