Not that long ago, Austria’s Nazi collaborationist party was accusing Hungary of being Nazis for the whole border security thing. Now Austria appears to have had enough and has caught fence fever.
Austria on Wednesday said it plans to build a fence at its main crossing with Slovenia, the first such barrier between two members of Europe’s document-free travel area, in one of the clearest signs to date of how Europe’s migrant crisis is undermining Europe’s institutions and sowing discord across the bloc.
News of the plan, aimed to slow the stream of migrants headed toward Germany via Austria, drew sharp criticism from Berlin. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has sought to preserve freedom of travel across the continent, even as she struggles to maintain her own open-door refugee policy in the face of mounting opposition at home and growing impatience in other European countries on the migrants’ route.
“The federal government and the chancellor repeatedly have stressed that we believe that the refugee crisis can’t be solved with the building of fences,” Ms. Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said Wednesday.
Pretty sure it can. That’s what fences are for.
Austria has been overwhelmed by rising numbers of migrants streaming through tiny Slovenia since Hungary, once a key transit spot on the route, built razor-wire fences on its southern borders, first with Serbia and, earlier this month, with Croatia.
Austria has invoked its intention to beef up border security before but until now carefully avoided the word fence. That changed on Wednesday when Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner told public ORF radio “of course it’s about a fence, but not just that, it’s also about fortified structures in the border crossing areas.”
For now the fences are more about herding migrants in an orderly fashion and preventing them from just overrunning the country while redirecting them to other countries than really keeping them out, but it’s a start.
It’s also unclear whether Austria will be able to get this done without a moonshot effort like Hungary’s. Meanwhile Austrians are taking Joe Biden’s advice and buying a shotgun.
Yesterday, it emerged that weapon sales were soaring in Austria as citizens of the small Alpine nation become paranoid over the numbers of refugees crowding into their country.
In a country of 8.5 million people, there are now an estimated 900,000 firearms in homes.
Gun dealers report that it is women driving the sales rush. This year alone, police say 70,000 guns have been sold.
‘Virtually all shotguns are currently sold out, because you need no permit for them’, said Thomas Ortner, spokesman for an arms dealer in Upper Austria.
Buy a shotgun, keep from getting raped by Mohammed.
‘The situation will deteriorate even further,’ European Council president Donald Tusk said, warning of a ‘new wave of refugees (arriving) from Aleppo and other Syrian regions under Russian bombardment’.
‘I have no doubt that this challenge has the potential to change the European Union we have built,’ he told the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
It has the potential to end the European Union. And Europe.
by Daniel Greenfield
