Former UK Independence Party leader and Brexit champion Nigel Farage won some small vindication this week, two years after being pilloried in the mainstream press as a racist and bigot for warning of the dangers posed to Britain and Europe by the migrant crisis.

On Wednesday The Times of London published an article titled “Europe Under Threat” and quoted Fayez al-Sarraj, head of the United Nations-backed unity government in Libya, warning that terrorists could be taking advantage of the migrant crisis, and that the EU’s free-movement agreement only heightens that threat.

“When migrants reach Europe, they will move freely,” said al-Sarraj. “If, God forbid, there are terrorist elements among the migrants, a result of any incident will affect all of the EU.”

Farage noted this is largely what he began saying two years ago.

“I warned Europe in 2015 that boats arriving from war-torn regions posed a huge threat. We are now paying the price,” he tweeted along with a picture of The Times article. “When ISIS said they would flood Europe with 500,000 Islamic extremists, Merkel and EU should have listened. They have now failed us all.”

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Raheem Kassam, editor in chief of Breitbart London and Farage’s former UKIP deputy, told LifeZette Wednesday that his old boss has been “unequivocally” vindicated. But “frankly, it didn’t even require this for that to be the case,” said Kassam. “The fact that we’ve had 33 terrorist attacks on European soil this year alone [shows that] it has already been the case. It’s something I’m sure [Farage] doesn’t like being right about.”

He continued: “I wouldn’t just say he’s been vindicated. I would say that everyone who is complicit in not heeding our warnings has blood on their hands — and I really mean that. Remember, when the migrant crisis started and we had some terrorist attacks happening at the time, and everyone was saying, ‘Yeah, but these aren’t related to the refugees, these aren’t related to the migrants, [and] it’s all homegrown terrorism’? They can’t make that claim anymore. There are terrorist attacks that are linked to this migration; there are Islamic State operatives who have made their way into Europe.”

Kassam, author of the recently released “No Go Zones: How Sharia Law Is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You,” recalled how Farage was mocked and ignored when he tried to warn his fellow Europeans of the impending danger during the nascent stages of the migrant crisis.

“In 2015 we flew to Strasbourg to the European Parliament to warn them, because the migrant crisis had basically just begun and we had intelligence that we knew of that the European authorities weren’t sharing with the public, which sort of explained how Africa — not just North Africa but the continent as a whole — had an impending migratory base heading towards Europe. And the European institutions hadn’t been doing anything about it,” he explained.

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“So in the middle of the 2015 [UK] election campaign we went to Strasbourg. We tried to warn them [and] gave a measured speech,” Kassam said. “All of the British media followed us there, and all of the European media covered it but they mocked it — they called him nuts, they said he was scare-mongering because he had an election to fight … and they ignored him. In reality, if you have an election to fight you don’t leave your constituency … to go and give a speech in Strasbourg — but I think that was a point willfully lost on them.”

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“So those who didn’t listen — I include Angela Merkel, I include Donald Tusk, I include Jean-Claude Juncker, I include the BBC — they are actually complicit in people’s deaths,” he said. Unfortunately, Kassam fears, even if Europe is beginning to wake up to the migrant threat, it is too late to stop it.

“We had the opportunity a couple of years ago to establish the truth. Instead, they established a political narrative, and now the horse has bolted,” he said. “You have all these people now in Germany, you have all these people now across Europe … are we going to start rounding people up and mass-deporting them? Well, there’s no political appetite for that — I believe there’s very little political appetite for it on the Right, too — so this is why I’m morose about the situation. Because the damage has been done.”

“Without repatriations, and that maybe voluntary or it maybe forced, then you can’t solve this problem,” Kassam explained. And even “if you do start repatriating people, especially if it’s voluntary, the terrorists aren’t going to be the ones who go back — they’re not going to volunteer themselves to go back, so you’d end up with genuine refugees or economic migrants who actually might be interested in integrating volunteering to go back, and you’d still be left with the terrorist problem.

“Most of the people who have ill will towards the West have disappeared off the radar of the authorities in Europe,” he said. “You can’t track them down anyway.”

(photo credit, homepage and article images: Gage Skidmore, Flickr)