Milos Zeman, the Czech president, has called for hundreds of thousands of economic migrants who arrived in Europe since early last year to be deported, and claimed Muslim migrants’ culture is fundamentally incompatible with European society. The Czech leader suggested migrants could be relocated to “empty places” in north Africa or on “uninhabited Greek islands”. He warned of a “strong connection” between the migrant influx and the “wave of jihadis” in Europe, arguing that moderate Muslims could be radicalized by extremists among them, as Germans were by the Nazis in the 1930s. Mr Zeman told the Financial Times in an interview that the only solution to Europe’s migrant crisis was to deport those not fleeing war.
“We are in Greece, and Greece has plenty of uninhabited islands, and big foreign debt. So if you have ‘hotspots’ in Greek islands, this would be a sort of payment of foreign debt,” Mr Zeman said.“I am for deportation of all economic migrants,” he added. “Of course I respect the cruelty of civil war in Syria, Iraq, and so on. But we do not speak about those people, we speak about economic migrants”, he concluded.