by Giulio Meotti
The photograph is only nine years old, but it seems to come from another era. And above all from another country. Ten days earlier, Chancellor Angela Merkel had uttered the famous phrase “Wir Schaffen Das”. We can do it. It would become the motto of the culture of welcome with which German-led Europe had responded to an unprecedented wave of migration.
That morning, the Chancellor visits a refugee reception center in Berlin. Shaker Kedida asks her for a selfie. Merkel nods and poses. The image became the visual equivalent of “Wir Schaffen Das”, a milestone in political communication at the time on a par with Obama’s Yes we can. There was no room for skepticism about immigration and borders. Merkel did it all on her own, without consulting the other EU governments.
Today, not only would a German Chancellor taking a selfie with migrants be an impossible action, but Olaf Scholz’s left-wing government has also decided the unthinkable: the suspension of Schengen and the return of border controls.
Why? Because, as former French intelligence chief Pierre Brochand put it, we have realized that “a model that refuses to distinguish between the aspirations of the Swedish accountant and the Pashtun warrior, the Californian nerd and the Sahelian shepherd, the Béarn farmer and the young Algerian ‘harrag’, as if they were all interchangeable, does not work”.
Germany has announced the suspension of Schengen (def, The Schengen Area is an area encompassing 29 European countries that have officially abolished border controls between each other, ed.) for six months and of the European dream of free movement of people and goods due to the danger of terrorist infiltration and uncontrolled migratory flows.
Even Jacques Attali, the intellectual champion of globalism, said it clearly: “The issue of borders is essential. Europe is a sieve and we have done everything to destroy internal and external borders. It is not that Europe does not know how to protect itself, it is that it does not want to protect itself”.
Schengen is a fantastic political and economic fact, but in the conditions that Europe has created from that fateful photograph it does not hold up: with the external borders of the EU fallen, from Ceuta to the Polish forests to the Greek islands to the waters of Lampedusa, Schengen becomes synonymous with a Titanic Europe.
In 1990, on a boat anchored in Schengen, a Luxembourg town on the Moselle bordering France and Germany, ministers from five European countries signed an agreement that would have eliminated their internal borders.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the soporific Luxembourger, as president of the European Commission will go so far as to say that “borders are the worst invention ever.”
If now even the progressive German government is reintroducing border controls, it means that the European situation is somewhere between desperate and irreparable.
The likely next German chancellor, Friedrich Merz of the CDU, has just said that knife attacks happen almost every day, that there are on average two gang rapes a day in Germany and that most of the perpetrators are young migrants who are totally disrespectful towards women. “This is the reality of Germany and we must put an end to it.”
In the first seven days of September, German police intervened in more than 100 crimes involving a knife. That’s according to a new website called Messerinzidenz (Knife Incidence), which analyzes daily police reports to create a real-time knife crime tracker.
Meanwhile, the terrorist threat is once again shaking Europe. And it takes a lot of censorship to hide these facts.
On August 23, an Islamist slit the necks of three people in the German city of Solingen. In Germany, this type of Islamist nihilism is, disturbingly, becoming the new normal.
In the city of Mannheim, an Islamist stabbed six people during an anti-Islam demonstration. A police officer died from his injuries.
During the European Football Championship, an Iraqi ISIS “sleeper agent” was arrested near Stuttgart.
Another ISIS plot is foiled before the Euro 2016 final between England and Spain.
Three teenagers, aged 15, 15 and 16, are arrested, accused of planning attacks on churches.
Two Afghans are detained for planning an attack on the Swedish Parliament.
German police arrest four Hamas members, who were planning to attack Jewish sites.
Two boys, aged 15 and 16, are arrested for an attack on a synagogue and a Christmas market.
Last month, if it hadn’t been for a CIA tip-off, Austria could have suffered one of the worst Islamist atrocities ever on European soil during a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna.
In March, four terrorists associated with ISIS-K killed 145 people at Moscow’s Crocus City Hall.
Without closing its external borders, Europe will implode.
In a long essay for Quadrant magazine, German essayist Wolfgang Kasper calls it “a stress test for Western civilization”.
Aristophanes satirized a civilization that did nothing but bet on horse races. Accustomed only to peace, most Romans had come to doubt that wars had ever really happened or were possible again. The population had entrusted its security to the garrisons stationed on distant borders. Within the walls, the empire had become a sort of “civil paradise”: the entire population, wrote Publius Aelius Aristides, had turned to pleasures of every kind. “Gyms, fountains, temples, arches and schools filled the cities…”.
Now Europeans discover that if you don’t defend the borders you are going to collapse. The question is whether it will be enough to put an end to the boiled frog syndrome.
Europe’s open border utopia is over | Israel National News – Arutz Sheva