Hungarian MEP suggests pigs’ heads along border might repel refugees

A MEMBER of the European Parliament has suggested that pigs’ head impaled on sticks along the border might be a useful way of dissuading refugees from entering Hungary. 

Gyorgy Schopflin, a member of the central European nation’s ruling Fidesz party, has come under fire for his remarks which, as with all bad controversies, emerged on Twitter. 

Various Hungarian activists have recently carved root vegetables into the form of human heads to forge an army of refugee repellent scarecrows, but the media director of Human Rights Watch took umbrage with the method, writing online that “refugees are fleeing war and torture, Hungary. Your root vegetable heads will not deter them.”

Schopflin, who once worked for the BBC in London, caustically replied in the affirmative, “Human images are haram…Pigs’ heads would deter more effectively,” he commented, before being denounced as an “embarrassment to Hungary, to Europe and to humanity.”

Although Schopflin has since claimed that his comment was not a concrete proposal to behead pigs and put their heads on pikes, he said he had no plans to apologise and thought it “anthropologically interesting how sensitive the topic is.”

Hungary is one of the EU’s most vehemently opposed nations to increased immigration from war-torn countries such as Syria and Iraq, and indeed almost all Muslim immigration regardless of origins. 

The southern border is now dominated by a razor wire-topped fence and patrolled by the army, although of course the irony is that very few refugees have any interest in Hungary other than as another, slightly inconvenient, stepping stone on the way to prosperous Germany. 

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