We face return to borders of barbed wire, says Hollande

EUROPE could see a return to barbed wire fences between countries unless it regains control of its borders, Francois Hollande warned last night. The French president called for tough controls on migrants entering the EU after it emerged that at least one of the terrorists involved in Friday’s Paris attacks may have been posing as a refugee.

He also called for ‘co-ordinated and systematic checks’ of people passing between EU countries in what would amount to the suspension of free movement rules.

‘If Europe doesn’t control its external borders, it is the return of national borders of walls and barbed wire as we’ve seen today,’ Mr Hollande said. ‘This would mean the dismantling of the European Union.’ In a speech to a joint session of Parliament, he began by saying his country was ‘at war’ with Islamic State. He concluded with the stark message: ‘We will eradicate terrorism.’

He announced measures including plans to speed up the expulsion of foreigners considered a threat, powers to strip dual nationals of their French passports if they damage national security, a constitutional amendment to strengthen the fight against terrorism, 5,000 extra police officers and an end to redundancies in the French army.

Mr Hollande also called for a coalition including the US and Russia to eradicate Islamic State, after a night in which French planes launched bombing raids against IS targets in Syria. He said the Paris attacks were ordered from Syria, planned in Belgium and carried out with the help of French people. France has moved to reimpose border checks after it emerged at least two of the terrorists involved arrived via Greece.

Mr Hollande said France would continue to wage war ‘mercilessly’ on IS and send an aircraft carrier to triple French air power in the region. He said he would meet President Barack Obama in Washington and President Vladimir Putin in Moscow ‘so we can unite our forces to achieve a result that has taken too long’.

Adding that he will table a bill to extend the state of emergency in France by three months, he vowed: ‘We will use all our strength within the law to defeat terrorism. France is at war. But we’re not engaged in a war of civilisations, because these assassins do not represent any.’

His comments on borders were seen as signalling an end – at least temporarily – to free movement across the EU.

Several countries have closed borders in recent months to halt the wave of migrants from the Middle East.

Mr Hollande is under pressure from the resurgent French far-Right, with the National Front (FN) leading the opinion polls in several regions.

Yesterday FN leader Marine Le Pen called an immediate halt to the intake of migrants.

British MPs also called for border controls to be imposed across the continent.

Tory Kevin Hollinrake said: ‘It’s now quite clear that the hundreds of thousands of migrants that have entered Europe over the last few months have not undergone basic security checks.’

‘France is at war’

IT was a simple but stark statement of intent from our greatest wartime leader in the face of the biggest threat the civilised world had ever faced.

Churchill bluntly told the Nazis: ‘We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst and we will do our best.’

Now evil on a commensurate scale is spreading again – another ‘grisly gang’ striking at the heart of Paris, more than 70 years after the city was freed from Nazi tyranny.

That message of defiance from Churchill resonates now because it reflects a quality that appears to be in short supply: not only a rational analysis of a seemingly insoluble problem, but also leadership.

There was something Churchillian about François Hollande’s declaration on Saturday that France is ‘at war’ with Islamic State (IS) – perhaps because it jars with the desperate lack of coherent or courageous thinking elsewhere.

That intellectual vacuum is best exemplified in Scotland by the Nationalists who make up the ranks of the liberal ‘Twitterati’, showcasing on social media their simplistic analysis of an issue they have clearly not begun to comprehend.

But even their followers must question some of the glib, knee-jerk assumptions of senior Nationalists, as they consistently fail to grapple with the scale of the IS menace.

Take shrill Nationalist MP Natalie McGarry, who wrote on Twitter: ‘Have to hope UK govt doesn’t respond to type and put air strikes in Syria on agenda as a result of Paris atrocity. I’ll oppose vehemently.’

The MP also said she did not want to ‘pre-empt the investigation’ but (proceeding to do just that) she said ‘many of those causing [the] atrocity in Paris were not refugees’.

Syrian refugees – some of whom are arriving in Scotland today – should not be viewed with ‘suspicion’ and those who are concerned about the possible security risks should, she suggests, be ashamed of themselves.

No one doubts that many of those being resettled are vulnerable people who have escaped from unspeakable barbarity in their homeland. But are we supposed to blind ourselves to the fact that one of the Paris bombers arrived in Greece on a raft with 198 Syrian refugees?

The priority for some in the SNP, it seems, is to shame the Right as racists for questioning the resettlement of refugees, whatever the consequences for national security.

An underestimation of IS and its modus operandi also underpins the risible analysis offered by Nationalist MP George Kerevan. He spoke of the need for Scotland to use its ‘modest diplomatic weight’ to push for an ‘international agreement on Syria, perhaps in conjunction with other small European nations’.

‘If the big Western nations are in denial,’ the East Lothian MP concludes, ‘the small ones should take the lead.’

The scale of this miscomprehension of the nature of IS is chilling. It is simply a death cult that longs for the destruction of the Western world.

Denial

The chances of its leaders sitting around the negotiating table are about as slim as IS executioner Jihadi John quietly agreeing to be led away in handcuffs, the proposal outlined by Jeremy Corbyn – who is also in deep denial over the enormous struggle against Islamic fundamentalism that lies ahead.

But the Nationalist leadership has never been renowned for surefootedness in the realm of international relations.

In 1999, Alex Salmond infamously spoke out over the air strikes against Serbia, calling them ‘an act of dubious legality, but above all one of unpardonable folly’.

In fact, the British intervention in Kosovo ended what the United Nations later described as ‘a systematic campaign of terror’, during which Serb troops tried to eradicate the ethnic Albanian population.

Regardless of this fact, Mr Salmond continues to make disastrous forays into global affairs, yesterday calling – rather vaguely – for ‘a war on conflict, a war on want and a war on man’s inhumanity to man’.

He also insists on calling IS ‘Daesh’, which he points out is ‘an Arabic acronym which mocks their pretensions of creating a new caliphate’.

This is a kind of virtue signalling, as it has come to be known: the way in which many people say or write things to indicate that they are virtuous (and, indeed, more virtuous than everyone else).

His approach presupposes that one of the most ruthless terror networks in history which, as the Pope suggested, has begun a Third World War against Western civilisation, might be cowed by a simple name change.

More despicable still is the commonplace argument of the Left, that we in the West have somehow brought these horrors upon ourselves.

Mr Kerevan argued yesterday that ‘we need to start by understanding why the West is seen as the “enemy” by so many young men of Islamic backgrounds’. He assured us that ‘to understand is not to condone the senseless murder of innocent people enjoying a Friday night meal’.

The MP added: ‘On the other hand, Friday’s carnage in Paris is replicated every day across Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan – in large measure because previous Western policies served to destabilise the region.’

This goes beyond mere simplification into wilful and dangerous self-delusion of a kind the Nationalists have made their own.

The discovery of mass graves with 130 bodies of members of the Yazidi religious minority in the Northern Iraqi town of Sinjar disproves Mr Kerevan’s contention.

The graves were found after Kurdish fighters last week drove IS militants from the centre of Sinjar, which is located on the Syrian border.

As IS swept through Northern Iraq, it forced the Yazidis, considered by the militant group to be apostates, to flee into the mountains.

Human rights monitors have accused IS of systematic rape and other acts of sexual violence against Yazidi women and girls.

This was not revenge on Western governments for their foreign policies in the Middle East: it was slaughter and depravity driven by religious zealotry.

IS grew in the wake of the Arab Spring, the series of revolutions in 2011 that toppled longstanding dictatorships in North Africa and the Middle East.

The terror organisation flourished in the power vacuum created by the Syrian civil war.

As the counter-extremism think-tank Quilliam has pointed out, the Arab Spring protests were partly caused by a rise in food prices across the region.

Support

Subsequently, one of the first actions by IS in any new territory it occupies is to lower the price of bread, helping to buy support for the regime.

Only in its birthplace, Tunisia, has the Arab Spring been successful in the establishment of anything that remotely resembles a Western-style democratic system.

IS exploited the upheaval and volatility of that period of immense political change for its own murderous ends.

The entirely legitimate popular desire for secular democracy inadvertently gave birth to the wholesale murder we witnessed on the streets of Paris.

The self-condemnation that Mr Kerevan and others on the Left recommend for the Western world will do nothing to crush that threat.

A key moment has now arisen for Nicola Sturgeon and her colleagues to demonstrate they can rise above virtue signalling and student union politics. They must rise to the challenge of leadership which, whatever Mr Corbyn and Mr Kerevan think, is about putting the needs of the nation ahead of your own pet beliefs.

However shrill the cries of Miss McGarry and her cohorts as they demonstrate their awesome ignorance on social media, they will never drown out the screams of those who were slaughtered at the Bataclan concert hall on Friday night.