Berlin Christmas market tragedy | Photo from Sacramento Bee
By John F. Di Leo –
On Monday, December 19, the last shopping week before Christmas, an islamofascist terrorist (most likely a recently-arrived “refugee,” as over a million such have arrived in Germany from the middle east this year alone) hijacked a truck and charged through a Berlin Christmas market, killing at least a dozen innocent shoppers, injuring some fifty more… in exactly the way that ISIS has been ordering its pretend “lone wolves” to attack innocents.
As Europeans have watched their birthrate plummet, leaving the tax base for their generous pensions in doubt, they have opened their doors to unfettered immigration. First, we saw England’s open doors welcome in Pakistanis and Indians, and Germany’s open doors welcome Turks… then the procession became a flood, as Angela Merkel and her like have opened the floodgates to all so-called “refugees” from all over the middle east in recent years. Europe was a Christian continent; it is difficult indeed to honestly say that today.
This rush of third-worlders – not just third-worlders, but subscribers to the most barbaric subsets of islam – has brought a horrific crime wave to Europe. Rape, murder, honor killings, every other imaginable abuse, as well as terrorism. Obviously there are good people among these crowds too – statistics being what they are, there certainly must be. But the percentage of dangerous criminals is inordinately high, by design, as so many so-called refugees are young men of military age, directed by their clerics to function as a silent invasion force.
Learning the Wrong Lesson
But this ghastly story of the Christmas week rampage in Berlin is not – in itself – the main horror of the news day. No, the major horror is actually a statement by one of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesmen, as quoted here in every news report about the attacks:
"Our worst fears have come true with this suspected attack on the Christmas market in Berlin," said Stephan Mayer, a member of Parliament in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party. "We've got to review the security for Christmas markets across Germany, and be ready to possibly accept that they can't take place anymore."
To the rational American mind, of course, such a conclusion is inconceivable. A centuries-old custom is threatened by a new kind of criminal? We set to work on catching, ejecting, or eliminating the criminal. We don’t consider closing down a cultural institution!
But these Europeans – who knows what percentage of them, but certainly, a large percentage of those in power – cannot even consider that possibility. As easy as it is to see, they will not allow themselves to consider it. Germans would rather shut down a German cultural tradition (and substantial commercial activity) than concentrate on ejecting the outsiders attacking their own people!
The modern islamist (something of an oxymoron, that, but it’s accurate, since the current effort to “grow the caliphate” is indeed a modern twist on this 1400-year-old “religion”) is as different from a Westerner as you can get, in every way. The European/Western mentality is of civilized relations between man and woman, and of courteous respect for hard work and honest business; it is a culture of equality under the law, political and economic freedom, charity for the weak.
But the islamist believes in tribalism, and in absolute patriarchy… he believes in a slavish devotion to the most warlike commands of the koran, while disregarding any exhortation to decency found in its pages. The modern islamist is in fact set against everything that is European.
The Christmas market marauder (name and origin unknown at this writing, but either he or his ideology was clearly imported from the Islamic world) was welcomed into Germany as a charity case, but began to bite the hand that fed him as soon as he arrived. The man was literally raised to oppose Western Civilization. How could we be shocked when he did so?
You and I know what to make of this situation; any rational person does. The only possible conclusion is that we must find a way to identify such people – people raised with that anti-Western culture as part of their zeitgeist – and keep them out of our countries. Use the tools of immigration control at our borders to turn them away. If it’s not easy, close the borders completely until we find a way. This is obvious to a functioning mind; it should go without saying.
But the modern European mind cannot allow itself to think so rationally. The modern European mind has been conditioned as well: to believe that charity trumps security, that multiculturalism trumps our own culture, to believe, in fact, that no culture is better or worse than another, that such “rational thinking” as we have described above, countering such modern openness, must be identified as unacceptable bigotry!
As we are rapidly learning – at Nice, at Paris, at London, at Wuerzburg, at Madrid, and now at Berlin – the openness of modern Europe to modern islamism is utterly suicidal.
Nationalism – Good and Bad
The Twentieth Century was a century of massive government growth. From the tax-and-spend mentality of leftist economists to the daily drudgery of the job-killing regulations written by petty bureaucrats, it was a century in which government’s size and destructiveness were swollen to mammoth proportions. Communism and fascism are identical in this, but they are often wrongly painted as being on opposite ends of the spectrum.
So it was that Nazism and Fascism, born with the claim of being nationalist movements, became painted as the right wing authoritarians, while Communism and Socialism, boasting a claim of internationalism, were freed from the Nazis’ taint.
Study their respective positions on the issues, and there can be no doubt: the only true difference between Nazis, Fascists, Communists and Socialists is their accents. But as long as their puppets in the media, and their pawns in the educational system, continue to follow orders, we will continue to be told that Nazis and Fascists are nationalists, and their evil is rooted in that description… however little nationalism actually has to do with their big government philosophy.
The fact is, the basic idea of nationalism – a pride in one’s culture – is only a problem if one’s culture is a bad one.
Western civilization – which boils down to a respect for equality under the law, for limited government and the Judeo-Christian traditions and religious outlook, honest efforts at universal literacy, universal employment and a fair shot at real, earned prosperity for all who are willing to work hard – is in fact something to be proud of. Western civilization truly is, objectively, a good culture; so to be nationalistic about it makes perfect sense!
And since the United States was founded to be the culmination of all that – the absolute pinnacle of limited government, economic opportunity, religious freedom and political liberty in the Judeo-Christian tradition – it makes sense for the people of the United States to be the most nationalist of all.
We Americans are – or at least, certainly used to be – proud patriots. And with good reason.
The Europeans have forgotten what they have to be proud of. They have accepted the lies of the political philosophers who poisoned the term of “nationalism” by linking it with Hitler and Mussolini.
For Europe to protect itself from its current enemies, it must rediscover honorable nationalism, and understand again that pride in Western Civilization is not bigotry, but civilization itself.
A Time for Kach
When I was a boy, growing up in south Evanston and Rogers Park, we spoke with respect of a visionary political leader named Meir Kahane. He made his Aliyah in 1971, moving from the United States to Israel and soon running for office in the Knesset, the leader of the new Kach Party. He was a flawed leader, and it was a flawed party; do not mistake my compliments for an endorsement of their errors. But the Kach Party stood alone in certain areas, and it is for these that it deserves our attention today.
When the Kach Party was born in Israel in the 1970s, it stood up to state certain truths that “you just don’t say out loud:” that Israel is a great country, based on both a great religion and a great culture… that the leaders of the arab world are committed to Israel’s destruction… and that demographics are such that the Jews will lose control of their country to the islamist bigots who are committed to annihilation of Judaism, unless Israel takes rational measures such as more carefully defining and limiting Israeli citizenship and republican participation.
In those days, there were many moderate islamic countries (remember the days of a moderate Lebanon and a moderate Turkey?), and it seemed reasonable for kind westerners to believe that this might be a trend; that moderate islam would eventually come around and join the rest of us in peace. In those days, the declarations of Kach that Israel must recognize islamist extremists as an existential threat were viewed as bigotry by the nation’s leaders. The political elites got the Kach Party decertified as a political organization, banned it from participation in elections, branded its leaders and members forever as bigots.
Now, the worst they said about some members of Kach may in fact have been true… but branding the party this way also served to discredit the party’s key points, and those key points were in fact correct.
Fifty years along now, we can see that everything the Kach Party said in the 1970s was true; that islamic opposition to a free Israel would grow, not diminish, that the islamists would never be satisfied until the Jewish state was emptied of Jews and completely taken over by the caliphate. The opponents of Israel no longer call themselves the PLO; now they go by ISIS or Taliban or Boko Haram, but they are the same haters, the same killers, the same extremists bent on wiping out the Judeo-Christian world.
We can see that Kach was right in the core issue, the worldview itself: Israel needed to be reminded that the Jewish culture is in fact something of which to be proud. Israelis needed to be reminded that they have something to defend, something worth defending, a culture that is in fact objectively better than the bankrupt barbarism that surrounds them on all sides.
Israel learned that lesson the hard way, through the Intifada, a period of almost constant attacks by the so-called Palestinian refugee neighbors whom the Israelis have tried to help for decades, since their fellow arabs find the refugees too useful as political pawns to help them themselves.
The time has come for the West to learn what Israel is only now beginning to acknowledge: That multiculturalism is a lie, that the Judeo-Christian worldview, and Western Civilization itself, is indeed objectively superior to that of the arab world. And we must act accordingly… which means defending our culture against those who seek to weaken, and eventually destroy, this superior culture.
The first steps have been taken, in both Europe and the United States. The self-destructive multicultural socialism of Europe is being rejected, as Britain voted to Brexit, and as other EU member states are calling for exits of their own. Angela Merkel is being mercilessly blamed – and rightly so – for her single-minded, suicidal insistence on inviting a million-strong invasion force into the very country that foolishly elected her as its head of state. And the United States of America have rejected the Obama years with the election of Donald Trump, a man who – flawed as he may be – never let the term ‘political correctness’ stop him from stating a truth.
Western Civilization is better than barbarism. Governments have an obligation to protect their own people from external attackers. The Judeo-Christian worldview is better than the islamic worldview. And we must take measures – in our education systems, our welfare states, our border controls, and our popular cultures – to again champion these facts.
We can no longer allow compassion to outrank good sense, or to allow substandard cultures to overrule our own. If others prefer their cultures, that’s fine… let them stay in their own countries, with people who think as they do.
The United States Constitution, and the Founding Fathers who established it for us, represent the peak of human civilization. For a century now, we have allowed these icons to slip away from the respect they deserve.
It is time we speak the truth, and defend our civilization again… peacefully whenever possible, but in any case, resolute in the recognition that Western Civilization is worth defending.
Copyright 2016 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Customs broker, actor, and writer. Active in his youth as president of the Northwestern University College Republicans, then president of the Ethnic American Council, vice chairman of the Chicagoland chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, and County Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has now been a recovering politician for nineteen years.
Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included.
