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Every year, I have to write a version of this article because events like this never seem to stop. Every year, our political leaders promise to do something. And every year, it gets worse. For the past two weeks, it has been the turn of Germany. Next week — who knows?
Last Friday, at about 11:30am, a 25-year-old Afghan went on a knife spree at a rally in Mannheim. He stabbed Michael Stürzenberger, the convener of the rally, along with a policeman and four others, before a second policeman shot him. Two days later, the officer succumbed to his wounds.
We still don’t know everything about the incident. What we do know, though, is that it is a deeply sad — and obvious — metaphor for the way Western countries function. People protest Islamic violence. The press smears them. Islamists attack. The state tries to subdue the protestors. The Islamists continue attacking. Rinse and repeat.
It isn’t even the first time Stürzenberger’s protests have been attacked. He has been assaulted twice before by Islamists, in 2013 and in 2022. Why? Well, according to the mainstream media, he is a far-Right extremist. As Euronews puts it: he has been “previously linked to Pegida, a xenophobic extreme-Right group with a strong neo-Nazi following, prompting an investigation by the German federal state’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution”.
And what did this investigation uncover? Little more than the fact that he’s a relatively normal man who condemns Islamic violence — and who, like many such people, including some of my friends, has now ended up being stabbed. Yet Stürzenberger’s normalcy hasn’t stopped the German legal system from persecuting him. One of his convictions was for sharing a photo on Facebook of a Nazi shaking hands with an Islamic cleric, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Not a doctored photo. Just a photo. After all, photos reveal facts — but in Germany, even sharing the government’s own statistics can get you a criminal record.
Last week’s attack prompted the standard response from the German political establishment. The Chancellor condemned it. He expressed sadness. His government promises to investigate, to defend “against Islamist terrorism with determination”. But did anyone buy it? Though there are exceptions like Hungary, these attacks seem to happen regardless of national borders, and regardless of whether the country in question has a Left-wing or a Right-wing government.
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SubscribeI call it “Hitler’s Revenge”: the total inability of any elites anywhere in the western world to think rationally about populations–demographics, migrations, intra- and inter-population differences–because to do so means you’re a Nazi. Indeed, thinking about populations at all means you’re a Nazi. Decent people don’t notice things like that. Which explains the willful blindness and deliberate obtuseness of our elites when it comes to issues like immigration. For all that many on the right tout some wide-ranging immigration conspiracy theory unifying our feckless overclass, I suspect the truth is that none of them think coherently about immigration or any related issues in any way, shape, or form. This explains the ad hoc, almost moronical policies they enact whenever the dread specter of “nativism” rears its head. Like Biden’s ham-fisted decision to announce that after more than three years in office, he was finally going to enforce (or at least pretend to enforce) the United States’ border laws for the next five months, until the day after the election. In reality, I imagine he simply doesn’t care what’s going on down Mexico way, and would prefer not to think about it at all. But since the deplorables are up in arms, in order to protect his phony baloney job he needs to do something, and this is the best he and his team of merry pranksters can come up with.
While the term ‘Islamophobia’ is accepted and legitimised in western media, politics and educational institutions, the West is doomed to become intractably islamised: Look at the Lebanonisation of London and other major Western cities. British politicians are being elected for their pro-Islam (pro-Hamas!!) policies.
“Phobia” is also the wrong term. It means “irrational”.
I call it Islamoprudence. I practice it every day based on the statistics.
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“No doubt I’ll write this article again in a year. And the year after that.”
How many years do you think you’ll be rewriting this article, Ayaan, in view of your other observation:
“Things are different now, and the change is killing our nations.“
What exactly is your point?
I suspect JB is looking for a predicted time/situation that will force appropriate action.
Maybe, every year until Reform hold some power in the U.K. If so, then 2029. Having said that, there are signs that EU members are shifting their attitudes.
The photo of the Nazi shaking hands with the Grand Mufti ought to be on the front cover of history textbooks. Lest we forget.
Let’s also not forget that Nazi ideology then provided the anti-semitic component to Arab nationalist movements. That’s why there are now no Jews living in Arab countries where they’d peacefully co-existed for hundreds of years.
I keep seeing commentators urging the West not to abandon our liberal cultural values in order to fight the spread of Islamofascism. That’s all well and good, but nobody has ever articulated how we are meant to successfully fight fanatical religious extremism using the very values that allowed them to spread in the first place.
I’m highly reluctant to fight illiberal fire with fire. I know the risk that ditching tolerance and individualism will entail for our society. But the longer this goes on, the more I’m convinced that we simply HAVE to take a harder, more ruthless approach to those who want to destroy our society. If it means that we unilaterally withdraw from treaties (or ignore them completely), suspend laws used most egregiously as shields for tyranny and fanaticism, and even deport certain people who show no possibility of assimilation to Western society, so be it. It’s not how I want this to end, but given the failure of liberalism to offer anything but the slow erosion of civil society, I’d prefer to protect my culture and values by any means necessary.
We are blinded by a lifetime of respect and trust in British justice and the post war international law our jurists created. We have awoken too slowly to a hooror story; the outdated architecture has been infiltrated corrupted and utterly degraded by the new progressive elite whose moral compass has been lost. Why? They adhere to the globalist progressive credos of race identitarianism and human rights. The Western world is on fire due to their war on the very principle of national state border security. Blinded by dogma, they tacitly work in collaboration with mafia people traffickers and deliberately weaken our protection from vile terrorists hostile to our values. The law is worse than an ass. It and its entitled elite must be seen as Walkers, shambling zombies programmed to harm the living and crash social order. Reform of international asylum laws and refugee laws must be enacted within the next 3 years. Reform of our twisted human rights and equality laws which similarly spread social harm must happen here. But we are set to give political power to the High Priest of that Order. We must pray Europe and America turn the tide.
This is a good time to quote Thomas Sowell: there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Not everyone is fit for inclusion in an open society and tolerance is all well and good so long as it’s reciprocal. Sadly, our power structure has become so immersed in its own bullshit that it’s willing to sacrifice a few law-abiding native citizens for the sake of not being criticized for expecting immigrants to behave like humans rather than animals.
Criticism of Islamist terror may well soon be outlawed under Labour’s proposed new race equality laws. This 20 year crisis is set to deepen. Where are the leaders calling for reform of ‘international laws’ which are manifestly outdated and creating dangerous social convulsions across the Western world? To hear Starmer praise these debased laws was just horrifying. Keep writing Ayaan.
Just a month to go and it will be Prime Minister Starmer.
I doubt if Ayaan’s article will be published next year even if she does write it again.
I doubt if GB News will be on air, given how much the left hate it.
I’m not even sure if Reform will be allowed to exist.
The rest of Europe seems to be tacking to the right belatedly, but we’re about to elect Starmer. We’ll be the refugee camp of Europe.
Labour’s proposed law, as it is presented, seeks to remove ethnicity as a factor in staffing and pay, as it is already in many sectors. I don’t see that as a problem – why would ethnicity as such be relevant in employment? It also places a duty on public services to report on staffing and pay by ethnicity. That may be problematic if it leads to ‘positive discrimination’ that fails to take account of local demographics, and of education levels that may be affected by ‘elective’ discrimination e.g. by faith schools, or indeed the ethos of the organisation.
Knife attacks on the streets.
Slaughter at the Bataclan Theatre.
Another slaughter at Charlie Hebdo.
Suicide bomb in Manchester killing children and their mums.
But apparently the real threat comes from the far right. They’re kidding right?!
Alistair Campbell, Rory Stewart et all are puzzled by the apparent popularity of Farage. Really?!
Alistair Campbell being especially ironic, given his role in promoting the alleged WMD’s in Saddam Hussain’s Iraq, prior to the unprovoked attack on that country in 2003.
What goes round comes round..
This “rinse and repeat because we can’t do anything” is going to end so badly.
And I can’t believe that I’m getting a little nervous about, for example, going to my local outdoor pool this summer (something I look forward to every year) because there have been enough attacks on women in my city – even in my district – which have been suffused with this Islamist, anti-Western, anti-female freedom flavour that thinking some fanatic might take a knife to women in bikinis is no longer irrational.
I spent a weekend in Vienna(?) back in April. The tram system was immobilised due to what I suspect were anti-Israel marches.
We just left and went to Bratislava – much more relaxed and how Europe used to be. It’s terribly sad to see what’s happening to a once beautiful European city.
If it was April it might have been the city marathon – held on 21st April this year. The final few KM go round the Ringstrasse where alot of trams are routed so that all gets blocked for half a day and public transport disrupted.
It was the weekend before that.
We didn’t see an actual demo but did see a lot of potential participants, could hear continual bellowing through a PA system and what sounded like drums beating in the distance – and couldn’t get a bloody tram (No. 5 from Westbahnhof).
Marie-Terese Kaiser is the photogenic young woman who was convicted of drawing attention to government statistics regarding immigrant Afghan men’s proclivity fo indulge in gang rape. Time for photos of her in a T-shirt emblazoned with “This is what a modern feminist looks like”.
Why can’t women voice their concerns backed up by official statistics even if it casts some ethnic groups in a bad light? Leftists aren’t afraid to smear men generally as potential rapists on the basis of selective unrepresentative statistics.
Clearly, you do not understand the oppressor/oppressed narrative and are in dire need of remedial re-education. The male is always in a position of power. Even when he’s a homeless guy with nothing. Because he’s male. The Muslim is, by definition, a victim and a member of the oppressed class. First, he’s not white, which we all know is the single most important indicator of one’s social standing. And he’s Muslim, meaning not one of those awful crusading Christians bent on swaying everyone else to their view.
The tone here is sarcastic, as I hope you understand, but the thrust of the comment captures the mindset of the women, and many leftist men, to whom you allude. Theirs is the mentality that prompts people to have signs with inanities like “queers for Palestine.”
Kellie-Jay Keen has been doing just that. She’s been removed from, and reinstated to, YouTube and Twitter numerous times, and the police have hauled her in for questioning more than once. She speaks out against the Rotherham Pakistani r@pe gangs (as well as safeguarding children from gender ideology). She frequently gets branded a r@cist, usually by other women.
We are benignly sailing down the river, with hardly a care in the world, other than the occasional rapids, but they are soon gone, and we convince ourselves all is well, and we carry on down the same current, blindly headed straight for the waterfall of mass sectarian slaughter.
The fact is that Muslims take the West for suckers. They know they will overrun us, they simply have to bide their time, keep coming and keep breading, eventually, soon, there will be too many to stop. The next generation of wokester lefties will be living under Sharia law, I hope they enjoy it.
It simply won’t happen. Doom-mongering seems to be fashionable, but any attempt to introduce Sharia to the wider population would be met by a reaction that our political and journalist classes could barely imagine.
We’re a tolerant lot, us Brits, until we’re not…
Wait 10 years. Honestly, it’s started in Europe … official Sharia Zones being promoted … even Khan said ‘if enough people want it we should have it’.
When does this ‘not’ moment come? In the US, we have a president basing foreign policy on how badly he needs the votes of people who chant “death to America” while living in America, so the same question applies to my country. But, seriously; when does this come to Jesus moment occur?
“Come to Jesus”? Not the way i’d describe it…
If you ask me to give you a precise date, it’d be a foolish question, but there is simply no way the majority UK population (and it is still a large majority, and will remain so for a very long time) would accept anything even remotely approaching Sharia. If you think we would (and windbags like Sadiq Khan can witter as much as they like) then you simply don’t understand us.
Students in the West are already chanting ‘Kill the Hostages’ and ‘Globalize the Intifada’.
I’d like a pound for every time I’ve heard this ‘one day there’ll be a backlash’ prediction.
If it didn’t happen after the Manchester Arena bombing then it never will.
The same for France; if it didn’t happen after the Bataclan Theatre then it never will.
I so hope you’re right!
Nobody in the West has any balls anymore. They’re too afraid of being called a “racist” let alone take up a club and kill a migrant.
Look at the birth stats in the UK. It’s coming like it or not.
First there will be ‘Muslim areas’, then they’ll need their own police, then their own laws, then the ‘Muslim areas’ will grow. Balkanisation, Lebanonisation, call it what you will, it proceeds by stealth and then by force, by turns.
Unless you want to k1ll your elites en masse inside and outside the university, you will not change the cultural barometer enough to remain a non-Islamic European society. Rights and tolerance will have to be thrown out the window for a decade or two while the cleansing happens. Enoch Powell was a prophet.
I think the reaction will come, but the longer we wait, the bloodier it will be. If Europeans wait 20 year and have no choice but Islam or real Fascism, you’re going to get Fascism. And concentration camps, and mass deportations, and ethnic cleansing.
More information about the attack last Friday:
– the 25-year-old Afghan attacker had his asylum application rejected in 2014 ((!). Still, he has been staying in Germany for nine years without any action on the part of the authorities.
I look forward to next year’s article, though not without that deep sense of frustration that must affect so many of us.
Denmark appears to have taken practical steps, and created laws, to stem the tide of immigration through it’s borders in the last decade. Also steps to encourage integration of those who have already arrived. And this has happened with a Centre Left government.
Presumably the effectiveness of these policies has been made relatively easier by it’s neighbours Germany and Sweden having such an open door policy. It’s unlikely that all European countries could create such effective resistance to the influx.
Brilliant article.
How glad I am to have just subscribed to Unherd: it gives me the pleasure of reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali!
For all I know, the only remaining EU countries that don’t fall in that horrendous inversion of values (where the victim becomes the culprit in the eyes of the sel-righteouscracy) are Hungary and possibly Slovakia…
I live in France and sadly not a day goes by without the ocurrence of some sort of incident similar to the ones that happenned recently in Germany. The reaction of the French authorities is the same as Germany’s (and as ineffective) and the overwhelmingly left-leaning or centrist media simply look elsewhere (“Ignorance is bliss” seems to be their motto when it comes to certain subjects).
„What this means is that, without a seismic shift, there is actually very little that can easily be done about the first two problems …“
Well this obviously wrong. Hungary is part of the same treaty system and they can do it.
As for Germany see: https://x.com/HGMaassen/status/1781743484673651067
Correct. Likewise Poland. They both said “no refugees”, and nothing bad has happened besides some idle EU threats.
And threats that are only issued because of the wish to pass on some of the burdens the other EU countries currently carry as a result of refugees/migrants.
In the US, the media response was some variant of “man who was stabbed at far-right rally dies.” It was as predictable a display of “journalism” as it was comical. God forbid that any media outlet say out loud a discouraging word about the attacker and his religion of peace. No, we can’t have that, not when there are right-wingers to assail.
I’m skeptical about these claims that International treaties and bodies prevent action. If the governments of Germany, France, Italy, and the UK all got together and said. No more refugees. Full stop. No more immigrants from Muslim countries. Full stop. What’s going to happen?
Is any major country going to cut off trade with them over this? Does the EU have an army? We know the Arab petro-states don’t give a fig about the average Muslim.
Of course they don’t prevent action, but the politicians don’t actually want to take any action. They want millions of immigrants to offset demographic decline which will almost certainly result in, among other things, rising wages, workers being able to demand better working conditions, and a smaller share of the shrinking pie going to the global aristocrat class. The pie is shrinking and their share of that pie is shrinking, a double whammy. Of course they want immigrants. They’re all convinced it’s their genius and their leadership that has enabled all this prosperity in the first place and they expect the people to go along with whatever they say is right. How dare those racist peasants expect us to sacrifice our dreams and ambitions just to prevent an occasional bombing or knife attack.
The international treaties serves the only purpose they’ve ever had. What is that purpose? Why, it’s to give the aristocrat class and politicians a convenient bogeyman to point at to deflect responsibility away from themselves and onto something else. Even better, the bogeyman taking the deflected blows is an international treaty that’s not a person and not accountable to voters or even the politicians they elect. Politicians of course behave as if the treaty is some sacred object that can’t be done away with lest unstated dire consequences befall us. The mystique is part of the charade that’s being perpetrated, and far too many people seem to be buying it, though every incidence like this one chips away a little more. Europeans are being duped. Americans don’t stand for this because treaties have to get ratified by the Senate, and American politicians don’t want to be held to international treaties, because they know most Americans don’t give a rip about what the rest of the world does and won’t take ‘international obligations’ as an excuse for much of anything.
The “prosperity” is fake. It’s based on borrowed money which will be much more difficult to do in the future.
No one cares about Uighur genocide, so why should they care about treatment of “refugees?”
If it wasn’t for the far-right provoking them, muslims wouldn’t carry out these attacks.
Irony is dead!
Thank you, Gordon 🙂
The “far right” is mostly a figment of imagination. Also, do you know anything about the history of Islam — at all?
I was being facetious.
OK, I get it.
Governments in the West are mostly a conspiracy against their people.
The sad thing is that the German government’s failure to address Islamic terrorism in a practical manner will lead to exactly the kind of racism they fear. If people can’t get resolute action from their legitimate governments, they’ll eventually take matters into their own hands. We’re already in the early stages of this, but it WILL get worse. We are well on our way to street gangs, turf wars, ethnic segregation into hostile enclaves, and the whole nine yards of civil strife.
This is exactly the kind of environment where racist parties and groups can begin to accumulate power locally, and, if things get bad enough, nationally, just as the Nazis did. People often learn the wrong lessons from history. The racism of the Nazis and their supporters were both products of broader societal failures. When things go wrong, people want action taken, and they want someone to blame. Nazism gave them both. A big part of Nazism’s initial appeal is that it represented an alternative to the weak, ineffectual governments that had failed to ameliorate the effects of the Great Depression, which was particularly bad in Germany. Repeated failure comes with consequences that can’t be avoided or dodged by any amount of government anti-racist propaganda. If the elites in their echo chambers really want to prevent a revival of Nazism, they’ll do whatever it takes to put a stop to this violence. The best way to prevent ‘radical’ governments is for normal governments to do their job, that is protect the people, ensure their basic freedoms, and maintain civil order. If they do these things well, there will be no need to seek more radical alternatives.
“Even sharing the government’s own statistics can get you a criminal record”. That inaccuracy is unworthy of Dr Ali. Marie-Thérèse Kaiser was fined for tweeting “Afghanistan refugees; Hamburg SPD mayor for ‘unbureaucratic’ admission; Welcoming culture for gang rape?” in response to Hamburg’s mayor committing to receive 200 Afghan refugees.
The statistics (presumably those referred to) are in a separate tweet “Welcome culture for #group rape? Hamburger Abendblatt June 8th, 2021: ‘One in three Hamburg residents has foreign roots. (…) What is striking is the large proportion of young people with a #migration background. (…) 53.4% of all under-18-year-old Hamburg residents has foreign roots(…)’”
Nested throwaway bleats like these do not help to deal with the elements of the problem:
Push factors: failed or repressive and misogynistic theocratic states, with economic, social or climatic conditions that result in a population bulge of unemployed young men.
Pull factors: relative wealth not entirely derived from local production and extraction, labour shortage, enlightened secular principles of default equality and redistribution.
Cultural factors: the ‘stickiness’ of religious indoctrination, fragmentation of European moral frameworks considered dispensable under a consensual secular regime.
Demographic factors: above-replacement birth rates in Africa and most of the Middle East compared to below-replacement rates in Europe. The latter average around 1.5 meaning that not just the number of children but the number of fertile women will decline steadily, one observer putting this down to a high proportion of women choosing not to have children at all.
I might add that, whatever one may feel about women’s rights, patriarchal societies that limit women’s autonomy have a clear advantage in terms of numbers, though clearly not in terms of development.
Creaking moves to limit immigration popularly considered ‘alien’ without violating principles of non-discrimination cannot but be seen as unjust as long as there is no ethical framework that demands commitment to democratic principles: personal autonomy (within reason as parental influence cannot be suppressed, though it can and must be balanced by education), universal representation, political and judicial accountability, separation of powers.
Problem: how does one measure genuine commitment? I leave out freedom of speech and association because they should drop out of the above as sine qua non, and they can be and are ruthlessly exploited by anti-democratic movements.
There is a view that, as things are, a ‘race’ to address push and cultural factors may be lost to the demographic factors, before the pull factors can be corrected, even assuming that they can.
Every Time I take my belt and shoes off and go through the long security queue to get on a plane I blame the far right bombers – Oh except there aren’t any !
The Asylum laws were to help homeless displaced Europeans after WW2. Not to justify uncontrolled economic migration.
Migration from people who claim persecution- and then once offered visa then go back to those same persecuting countries on holiday.
If you can’t object to religious zealots so extreme that they stab, shoot or bomb non-p.l.u.s (‘p.l.u.’ = ‘people like us’), it isn’t racism you’re opposing but inferential logic.