Eric Zemmour: Europe Itself Made the Solution of the Migrant Problem Impossible

The following video shows the popular French radio commentator Eric Zemmour talking on the radio about the recent kerfuffle between France and Italy over the NGO migrant-rescue ship Aquarius (which has now finally reached Spain).

Many thanks to Ava Lon for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Video transcript:

00:00   We don’t necessarily agree.
00:04   “We don’t necessarily agree” with Eric Zemmour. Hello, Eric. —Good day. —The controversy
00:08   concerning the migrant boat Aquarius caused a diplomatic crisis between France and Italy
00:12   and it is dividing the marching majority. —Well, “I know you are, but what am I?”
00:16   — we all remember this nursery rhyme. The EU is
00:20   a large playground where everyone accuses the other of cynicism,
00:25   where everyone accuses the other of hypocrisy. Where everyone is playing a hypocrite,
00:29   hypocrite and a half. A great contest where our president isn’t a wallflower. When he denounces
00:33   the role played by cynicism and irresponsibility on the part of the Italian government,
00:37   Emmanuel Macron is forgetting that in Summer of 2017, while one hundred thousand migrants
00:41   were flooding the Italian shores over the period of just a couple of months, he gave an order
00:45   to his interior minister to not open the borders, and to channel all the illegals
00:49   to Italy. This is that contrast between Macron the candidate,
00:54   who promoted an open France, and Macron the president who understood well that
00:58   the vast majority of the country wished only for closed [borders].
01:02   This is what some En Marche [Macron’s party] deputies seem not to understand, who award themselves
01:05   15 minutes of fame in the media with a humanist narrative of “openness”. One can, in this Festival
01:10   of Hypocrisy, award a Special Trophy to nationalists from Corsica
01:14   who offered to open their harbours all while knowing full well that the French government
01:18   wouldn’t allow them to do it and that their population wouldn’t like it.
01:22   Are you suggesting that hypocrisy is a French monopoly? —Oh, no, the hypocrisy and cynicism contest
01:27   doesn’t stop with France. Italian Interior Minister Salvini
01:31   managed a fantastic political operation in the last municipal elections: his party, the Lega,
01:35   crushed everybody, allies and adversaries.
01:39   As for the Spanish government, they opened their harbours to this boat; they know
01:43   that this way they’ll be worshipped by all the European media. They also know that most
01:47   migrants won’t stay in Spain. At one time, Italians were also playing
01:52   this game, until French and German closed their borders.
01:56   Brussels congratulated Madrid. One more example of hypocrisy
02:00   The countries [where the migrants arrive] — Italy and Greece — can’t carry on like that anymore.
02:04   And others don’t want them [migrants] anymore: those who say it, such as the Eastern Europeans, are
02:07   branded “the evil ones”, but those, like the French or the Germans, who don’t say it, to stay in
02:12   the good guys’ camp, pay the Turks or Libyans to keep their migrants
02:17   on their territory. The contest for the Hypocrisy Trophy doesn’t stop at the country level.
02:21   The NGOs who are pretending to be the saviors of humanity aren’t saving anybody,
02:25   because there isn’t anybody to save. The migrants have the phone number of the
02:29   Italian Navy to call for help the very second they put one toe in the Mediterranean Sea.
02:33   The NGOs and the smugglers are making very good living by exploiting the migrants and
02:37   the countries who accept them. So, as our prime minister Edouard Philippe says, there
02:42   is no hope for a national solution for this problem: it can only be a European [solution].
02:46   Oh, well, but it’s Europe itself which made the solution of the problem impossible
02:50   with the decision of the European Court of Justice forbidding Italy
02:54   to turn away the boats and send them back to where they came from, because those boats could
02:58   and should be brought by our navy to the harbours from where they originated.
03:03   It is done that way by countries such as Japan or Australia, who don’t welcome
03:07   any migrants, and who had no corpses in their territorial waters. Too simple.
03:11   Too efficient. You can tell that those people aren’t European. — Eric Zemmour.