JVLV: IS THE MUSLIM DELUGE AN INVASION AND NOT SPONTANEOUS IMMIGRATION? By Jiri and Leni Friedman Valenta

 “I am profoundly convinced that we are facing an organized [Muslim] invasion and not a spontaneous movement of refugees,” said Czech President Milos Zeman in his 2015 Christmas message to the Czech people. “Sometimes I feel like Cassandra who warns against pulling a Trojan horse into the city, and I am deeply convinced that what we face is an organized invasion and not a spontaneous movement of refugees… A large majority of the illegal migrants are young men in good health, and single.

He indicated he had no problem with elderly people, widows and children, but that all the young men fleeing their war-torn countries only served to strengthen ISIL. “I wonder why these men are not taking up arms to go fight for the freedom of their countries against the Islamic State."

 Our GOP presidential candidate, Donald Trump, has hinted at similar sentiments. He too has expressed concern that most of the Muslim immigrants are largely strong and husky young men and he has made comments about the large immigration intended by our president as a possible “Trojan horse.” He has particularly expressed reservations about immigrants from Syria  coming here on false passports and without proper vetting.

Voicing his concerns, Zeman has been labeled as a voice of the far right and some in this country have characterized Trump as a “Nazi.” But for both of them that is anything but the truth. Trump is a former liberal Democrat. Zeman was my classmate at the Prague School of Economics, class of ’68, and I know him well. Both of us finished and earned our graduate ING degree in four years rather than the usual five. I also encountered Milos later in life.

Since Zeman has voiced his concerns forthrightly to his people, I can at least explain more about who he is.  Zeman, as he repeatedly told me, is a democratic socialist. This brings him close to Bernie Sanders. However, while sharing some of Sanders’ philosophical outlook, he is much closer to the western social democrats of Europe who defended democracy against fascists in the late ‘40’s and communists in the late ‘50’s. Like most Czechs, Zeman is also a staunch supporter of the Jewish state.

As students at the Prague School of Economics, we were both part of a delegation of a Czechoslovak students delegation invited to visit Leningrad and Moscow universities in 1968. There we engaged in fiery debates with our Russian counterparts – students, but also professors and a few KGB officials assigned to watch us. Zeman, speaking good Russian, was the most eloquent in these interchanges. I was second.  Basically, we advanced the notion of Soviet Nobel Prize Winner and dissident, Andrei Sakharov, that the Russians “should follow the Czech example” and abolish censorship.

Milos and I were subsequently among the student activists participating against the Soviets during their invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the streets of Prague, we carried flags dipped in the blood of our fallen comrades.

But then our paths for some time diverged.   Wanted by the police as a student activist, I eventually immigrated to Switzerland as a political refugee. Then I came to the U.S. on a student visa. Zeman stayed home and rose to president of post-revolutionary Czech Republic.  

 Our relationship was renewed in 1991 when I was selected by the late Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jiri Dienstbier, to lead his post-revolutionary think tank, the Institute of International Relations. In this endeavor, I found Zeman to be among the most dedicated and supportive of Czech officials in getting rid of the communists in the government. He also backed Vaclav Havel and Dienstbier’s ties with the Cuban exiles in Miami who opposed the Castro regime. He fully backed my efforts to find a new route through Prague for Soviet Jews seeking to immigrate to Israel, accomplished with the help of a freedom flight underwritten by philanthropist Sandy Ziff.

 Having learned that the PLO ambassador was trained in the USSR and was a terrorist, I proposed that the PLO Embassy in Prague be closed. A large debate ensued. I was denounced by Yasser Arafat and my life was threatened by dozens of anonymous callers as well as a special publication financed by the PLO in the Czech press.

Meanwhile, on leave from my professorship at the University of Miami, I was undermined by a colleague, a former communist secret police agent turned expert on Marxism and Leninism. She accused me of being, as she put it, “a U.S. agent because he advised Dienstbier to close the PLO’s Prague office, which she sees as abandoning Czechoslovakia’s traditional Arab friends…”

But Zeman supported me. I had made that proposal partly because of a report I received from Czech intelligence that the PLO so-called “embassy” served as a support center for terrorist activities and contained explosives and arms. I was right. I interviewed the wife of a member of Czech counter-Intelligence who was shot because of his intimate knowledge of PLO activities.

At that time I was helped by Michael Cermak, a press attaché of Dienstbier’s. He helped to change the ministry think tank from a hotbed of pro-Soviet and Czech agents into a modern institution dedicated to conceptualizing a new and democratic foreign policy. Opposition leader Zeman also provided many useful suggestions that helped me to overcome the opposition of former communists and inexperienced dissidents. He helped us engage in concrete steps to execute President Vaclav Havel’s humanistic ideas,

On January 1, 2014, my concerns about the PLO Embassy were vindicated. A new PLO ambassador to Prague, Jamel al Jamal, was killed opening a PLO embassy safe in his ambassadorial flat, booby-trapped with 30 year old explosives.  

Now  Zeman has had the courage to declare for his country that the Muslim immigration may include those intent on invasion.  Frankly I cannot dismiss out hand concerns that are apparently shared by an unknown number of Americans including perhaps, our next president. That Zeman seems to be echoing Trump’s concerns about Islamist terrorist penetration of the west is significant.   If any such evidence exists in our own country, it surely needs to be explored and we must not, because of preconceptions or political correctness, be afraid to do so.

A long-standing member of the Council on Foreign Relations, N.Y., and the author and/or co-editor of numerous books. Dr. Jiri Valenta is the president of the Institute of Post-Communist Studies and Terrorism.  Leni Friedman Valenta is co-writer-editor of their website, jvlv.net.