Whoever claims that refugees are destroying Europe’s values should first answer which values are meant. The values of Sodom, same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption? Or the Judeo-Christian values of the Bible?

Image: Gpress Info

The images from Ceuta circulated around the world. Within just a few hours, 60,000 people surged across the border into the Spanish enclave; dozens lost their lives in the process. Europe’s external border became a symbol of a migration crisis that the continent has feared for years.

The reactions were swift. Right-wing parties and governments felt vindicated. Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni spoke of a concrete threat to Europe’s security and today even went so far as to suspend Schengen traffic with Spain. Other migration-critical parties, such as the AfD, took to the barricades, as if Ceuta were a German enclave. Spain’s right wing even speaks of treason in the actions of their government.

The concern is real. Anyone who sees the images from Ceuta immediately recognizes that no community can sustainably manage such a situation. And yet, many statements are dominated by a thought that goes far beyond the question of border security: that Europe is simply too good for African and Asian refugees.

Yet is that really the case?

It is one of the peculiarities of our time that Europe likes to divide the world into categories of moral maturity. Here the enlightened civilization, there the backward societies. Here the community of values, there those who must first learn these values.

When refugees come to Europe and bring conflicts, criminality, or a conservative family model with them, the lament quickly arises that the continent is being ruined. Europe, so the unspoken thought goes, is simply too good for such conditions.

Yet by what standard, exactly?

Those who invoke the Scriptures know the story of Lot’s people and are aware that homosexual acts are among those grave moral transgressions that civilizations declare unworthy of life. The Torah not only declares the act a sin, yet under its Law places it under the penalty of death.

One may reject these timeless Commandments today. One may declare them obsolete. Yet they will outlive us all, guaranteed! And thus the question is already answered: who must adapt to whom.

The real watershed was not the cessation of criminal prosecution of homosexual acts. The real revolution consisted of elevating them from a behavior that for millennia was considered a sin in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to a moral ideal worthy of societal recognition. What was once tolerated is now to be celebrated. What formerly counted as a violation of divine order now counts as a touchstone of human dignity. Whoever contradicts this must justify themselves.

It is precisely in this that Europe’s historical particularity lies. The continent has not simply distanced itself from religion. It has reversed the moral valuations of Revelation at central points. Sin became virtue. Tolerance became obligation.

Whoever claims that refugees are destroying Europe’s values should first answer which values are meant. The values of Sodom, same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption? Or the Judeo-Christian values of the Bible?

Of course, everyone is free to understand this development as progress. Yet then one should have the courage to renounce appeals to biblical morality. For by its standards, Europe, in contrast to the African and Asian refugees, is simply unworthy of life.

Okay Altinisik | 31-7-2026, 23:27:38