It’s another season, and another terror attack in Germany. This time, at the Christopher Street Day gay pride celebration in Berlin.
A young Muslim man—born in Germany to a naturalized-citizen mother from Lebanon—plowed a van into the revelers. After crashing into a tree, he ran into the crowd on foot with a machete. He managed to murder one woman and injure 29 people.
Germans—whether average citizens or politicians—are “horrified” and “stunned.” As they are every time a Muslim drives his car into a Christmas market or slits the throats of Germans at a summer festival.
They ask, as they always do, whether this attack could have been prevented. (One TV expert believes that an ankle bracelet could have prevented this latest massacre, as the 21-year-old Abdul Ballout, since shot dead by German police, was on a one-year-ten-month probation for planning terror acts (and he had attempted to join ISIS). His homework assignment: deradicalization. He was one of nearly 29,000 known Islamists under surveillance by German authorities.)
Chancellor Friedrich Merz didn’t mince words: Addressing the latest Islamist slaughter, he pointed to certain Germans, with their “intolerance, ostracism, discrimination, stupid expressions, and bad jokes.”
Good Germans always declare the obligatory, “We will not allow ourselves to be divided.” Meaning, they won’t allow those who state the obvious—that large Muslim populations are inherently incompatible with Western democracy and German life (or with making “bad jokes” on the subject)—to speak the obvious without being derided as Nazis. Germans are nothing if not consistent about demonstrating that they would rather be dead than admit that their notion of being weltoffen (open-minded—literally, and ironically, “open to the world”) has destabilized the entire country.
In the same country that chants endlessly “Never again,” there is no sense of irony about importing the mortal enemies of the Jews by the millions. No outcry about the fact that Jews are once again attacked in broad daylight for wearing a kippa or Star of David—this time not by Germans. No admission that the attackers are virtually always Arabs and Turks. No sense of reality about calling the very people who want to prevent a new slaughter of Jews “Nazis.”
About a six-hour drive south of Berlin, in southern Hesse (recall those Hessian mercenaries of the Revolutionary War) near Frankfurt, the streets of quaint small towns are filled with head-scarved women with baby carriages, as the outdoor cafes teem with young Arab men. These are familiar scenes across the country. In larger towns, Arab clans rule the underworld, and devout Muslims attempt to form sharia patrols.
I grew up here, in a quaint small town in southern Hesse—the daughter of a German woman and an American stationed here with the U.S. Army—when the country (West Germany, then) was arguably the best in the world. Certainly one of the safest, cleanest, and most fun. I now visit my mother, who, even years ago, was unable to go out for ice cream at night without being catcalled and verbally harassed by Turkish and Arab men who sit on the benches to watch for infidel women.
While Germany’s Christmas markets are best known in America, summer has always been a wondrous time in Germany. Outdoor wine and music festivals in virtually every town, large or small; cultural events; daylight until 10 p.m.; and weekends at the local lake or public swimming pool.
That is, until the Arab and African migrants, who have been systematically dispersed around the country since 2015, began to use the public pools to grope and rape girls and boys alike. Until attending an outdoor event meant a risk of getting stabbed or sliced by “people who come to us,” to use past chancellor Angela Merkel’s words. Until going out as a German after dark in many towns meant getting harassed or worse.
Summer in Germany remains wondrous in the sense that it is remarkable. Remarkable that no matter what happens, and how often, the vast majority of Germans simply will not admit that open borders and the never-ending special concessions to Muslims make normal life ever closer to impossible for the native population. (German judges are known to let Muslim rapists off the hook with barely a slap on the wrist—even giving a young German woman a harsher sentence for calling a Muslim rapist a “disgraceful rapist pig” and other “defamatory” things.)
In America—where Muslims in Texas want to build a Muslim-only city, where Somalis have devastated Minneapolis, where Jews in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan are attacked on the street, and where 25 years after 9/11 the once greatest city in the world has a jihadist mayor—the situation is quickly starting to resemble the reality in Germany, France, Britain, and nearly every other Western European country.
As a German-American, I need at least one of my home countries to fight back.