Cheap shot at a German star

GERMANY’S new political star, Frauke Petry, is in trouble for allegedly calling on border patrols to shoot refugees.

Actually, she didn’t. Mrs Petry is not, in fact, Hitler. Though I suspect she wouldn’t be a reader of The Guardian either, there is quite a lot of ground between these two positions.

I’ve checked her interview with a Mannheim newspaper and she consciously tried to avoid saying any such thing. She repeatedly told her interviewers they were trying to lead her into saying something outrageous.

Eventually, pressed to say what a border policeman should do if refugees climb the fence and ignore orders to stop, she said: ‘He must prevent illegal entry across the border, if necessary even using firearms. This is the law.’

The reporter tried to suggest this was like East Germany’s hated policy of shooting anyone who tried to get out of that prison state. Mrs Petry replied: ‘No guard wants to shoot at a refugee. I don’t want it either. But in the last resort the use of firearms is appropriate. What is important is that we don’t let it get that far.’

She called for agreements with neighbouring Austria to slow the flow of migrants. I am told that Germany’s law on The Direct Use Of Force To Enforce Public Order By Law Enforcement Officials (Section 11) permits the use of weapons by border guards against those who ignore repeated orders to stop. This must have been passed by the same parties which now attack Mrs Petry, pictured right, for citing it.

But how far can Europe (all of it, not just the EU) go in defending its borders against the greatest economic mass migration in history? Countries surrounded by deep, rough, cold water used to be spared this problem, until the era of mass air travel. And we have that tunnel as well. Now, our frontier lies on the Mediterranean and the Aegean. These seas are not like those which surround Australia, nor are the countries from which the migrants come like the South East Asian nations. We cannot tow them back, or keep them on remote islands.

And I don’t think we can shoot them either. How long could we stomach such a thing, even occasionally?

Mass immigration has already happened. It began when we made our stupid interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. It speeded up when we did the same in Libya and Syria. We are paying for what we did, and will pay for decades to come.