Twelve Germans killed due to reckless Western leaders: Mark Steyn

TWELVE people died in Germany due to a reckless Western political class doubling down on a mad sociopolitical experiment that can only end catastrophically, writes Mark Steyn.

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ON MY website last Saturday morning, I recalled a conversation I’d had in Germany over the summer with a lady who had “found herself on the receiving end of some vibrant multicultural outreach from one of Mutti Merkel’s boy charmers”.

I wrote: As a result, she no longer goes out after dark. She had also decided — with reluctance, because she enjoyed it — to cancel her participation in a local Christmas market, where she’d sung carols every year — in broad daylight.

“Why would you do that?” I asked.

“Because it’s Christmas,” she said, “and I’m worried Christmas will be a target.”

And I concluded: “Christmas markets are a grand German tradition, but probably not for much longer.”

Forty-eight hours later, 12 people were dead and 48 injured (at the time of writing) because they attended a Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin. This BBC headline conveys the madness of our times — “Lorry kills 12 at Christmas market”.

Police officers inspect the crime scene in Berlin, Germany. Picture: AP Photo/Markus Schreiber

Ah, so the truck did it. So it’s nothing that can’t be fixed by some basic truck control measures — like, say, licensing and registration of trucks. What a great idea.

Within moments, the familiar rituals of this latest vehicular misfortune emerged: “It was definitely deliberate,” said one intended victim. And as CNN reported:

“Witnesses told police the attacker had shouted out … ”

Go on, take a wild guess!

“… ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Infidels must die’ as he carried out the attacks.”

The less obviously evasive responses were almost as dispiriting. An English tourist visiting from Birmingham complained that in his native city ugly bollards line the sidewalks to obstruct any similarly homicidal lorries.

The Christkindlmarkt is a German tradition dating back to the Middle Ages: Munich’s is over 700 years old.

A society that can only hold three-quarters-of-a-millennium-old traditions behind an impenetrable security perimeter is a society that will soon lose those traditions. My own preference is that, if free countries have to have unsightly security controls, why don’t they have them around the national borders rather than around every single thing inside those borders?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, bottom left, visits the site of the attack in Berlin, Germany. Picture: AP Photo/Markus Schreiber

As I said on American radio a handful of mass slaughters ago: “I think this is insane when I listen to people say ‘Oh, we’re now going to have to have metal detectors in nightclubs, security in nightclubs’.”

Okay, so what happens next? They blow up a bakery, they blow up a little pastry shop, so then you’re gonna have to have metal detectors to get into the pastry shop?

“Instead of having all these individual perimeters around every Dunkin’ Donuts franchise or every gas station, or ever JC Penney, why not have just one big perimeter around the country? We could call it a border! And we could have, like, border security!”

But that’s just crazy talk. On Fox News’s top-rated Kelly File, guest host Martha MacCallum asked two experts about the Berlin carnage and both of them instantly pivoted to military strikes against IS, the need to form an Arab version of NATO, and other grand schemes. I’m all in favour of destroying IS, but IS is a mere symptom, not a cause.

After IS is destroyed, it’ll be something else. In many parts of the world, it’s already something else: al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram, Abu Sayyaf, al-Shabaab, al-Nusra Front, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, al-this, al-that, al-the other ...

Neither of MacCallum’s guests so much as raised the question of why people who want to murder you for attending a Christmas market are in your country in the first place — even as the familiar rituals of this latest vehicular misfortune emerged.

But relax. Malcolm Turnbull assured us an atrocity or 10 back that it is “a very, very small percentage” of the Muslim community who are “violent extremists”. Like other similarly soothing Western leaders, he never actually tells us what percentage it is — 1 per cent, 0.1, 0.0001 — but I’m sure he knows, or he wouldn’t say it so breezily, would he?

And at least our leaders are agreed it is a percentage. A percentage is a simple concept: If 0.001 per cent of the Muslim community are “violent extremists” and you have 100,000 Muslims, then, yes, it’s “a very, very small percentage” — and a small number. If you admit another 100,000 Muslims, you’ve doubled the number of “violent extremists”.

And, whether you keep on doing that year in year out or just cut to the chase and import (as Angela Merkel did) 1.5 million in one fell swoop, then, regardless of whether the percentage is stable, you are importing more and more people who want to kill your own citizens. Why? What’s the benefit? And why do people like that Birmingham tourist think the answer to more and more Muslims is more and more bollards?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrives to sign the condolence book at the Memorial Church in Berlin. Picture: Hannibal Hanschke/Pool Photo via AP

I spent most of the last year in France and other parts of Western Europe and there are soldiers everywhere — outside churches, post offices, railway stations, shopping malls, Jewish schools initially and now non-Jewish schools, topless beaches and Christmas markets ... and it’s not enough, and it can never be enough. And even if it was, who wants to live like that?

A few hours before 12 German families had a big bloody hole blown through them a week before Christmas, my former editor at Canada’s National Post, Jonathan Kay, with his usual impeccable timing, decided to Tweet another condescending sneer at those simpletons who fret about where all this is heading: “Great @CBC180 discussion. Due to Mark Steyn-esque hysteria, Canadians think Canada is 17% Muslim. It’s actually 3%.”

Ha! What rubes, eh? You hick Aussies are no better: According to the same poll, you reckon Australia’s 12 per cent Muslim; it’s actually 2.4 per cent. So what’s the big deal?

A policeman and firemen stand next to a truck at the scene where it crashed into a Christmas market near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. Picture: AFP/Tobias Schwarz

As flattering as it is to be blamed for an entire nation’s Islamophobia, I’d say the reason Canadians and Australians — like the French and Germans and Belgians and almost everybody else — think there are more Muslims than there are is fairly obvious: Islam punches above its weight.

Even on days when they’re not mowing down Christmas shoppers and assassinating Russian ambassadors — or stabbing French priests, or blowing up Belgian airports, or sexually assaulting German New Year revellers, or storming Sydney coffee shops — the less incendiary news of Islam in the West nevertheless conveys an assertiveness and confidence that would still be impressive even if it were 17 per cent. By the time it actually is 17 per cent, you’ll think it’s 48.

Since we seem to be obsessing on percentages, I suppose 12 dead Germans is likewise an insignificant percentage, and far too trivial to sophisticates to warrant “Mark Steyn-esque hysteria”.

But it is December 22, and for the victims’ families in three days’ time that will be 100 per cent of their children or parents or boyfriends or girlfriends missing at the Christmas table.

Say a prayer for them: They died because of the recklessness of a Western political class that has doubled down on a mad longshot sociopolitical experiment that can only end catastrophically.

Mark Steyn is an international best-selling author

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