Like the protagonist in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic Alice in Wonderland, Merkel appears to have fallen down a rabbit-hole into an alternate reality, one where logic and common sense simply do not apply.
By MICHAEL FREUNDGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel commemorates the centenary of the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turk forces, during a regular session of the German lower house of Parliament, April 24(photo credit: REUTERS)
Anyone looking for compelling proof that European civilization is hurtling inexorably towards its own self-inflicted demise need only listen to the utterly inane remarks made last week by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.Speaking at a campaign event in northern Germany, Merkel insisted – apparently with a straight face – that the recent upsurge in Islamic jihadist terrorist attacks that has left many Germans on edge had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the flood of over a million refugees from Syria and the Middle East that have overrun her country over the past year.“The phenomenon of Islamist terrorism including ISIS [Islamic State],” said Merkel, “is not one which has come to us through refugees.” Rather, she said, it was a challenge “which we already had here before.”There is only one small problem with Merkel’s statement: it simply isn’t true.Perhaps the chancellor’s memory has failed her, but it was just a month ago, on July 24, that a Syrian asylum-seeker named Mohammad Daleel carried out a suicide bombing outside a music festival in the Bavarian town of Ansbach, killing himself and wounding 15 others.That very same day, in the German city of Reutlingen, another Syrian refugee unsheathed a machete and used it to slaughter a pregnant woman, while on July 18, it was an Afghan migrant who chose to attack passengers with an axe on a train in Wurzberg.All three attacks were carried out by would-be refugees who came to Germany in the wake of Merkel’s open-door policy, so it staggers the mind that she would try to deny the link between Europe’s migrant crisis and the uptick in Islamic jihadist terrorism.Indeed, it was less than two weeks ago that a senior German intelligence official admitted publicly that there are ISIS terrorists who entered the country in the guise of asylum-seekers.“We have to accept that we have hit squads and sleeper cells in Germany,” Manfred Hauser, the deputy head of the Bavarian region’s intelligence-gathering agency, told the BBC. “We have substantial reports,” he added, “that among the refugees there are hit squads. There are hundreds of these reports, some from refugees themselves. We are still following up on these, and we haven’t investigated all of them fully,” Hauser said.In light of all the evidence to the contrary, it is clear that Merkel’s claims regarding the refugees are little more than wishful thinking, bordering on delusion.
Of course, politicians the world over are known for assuming that they can get away with saying frivolous things because people have short memories. Apparently, the same holds true in Berlin.But Merkel’s unwillingness to admit what just about everyone else on the planet understands is far more disturbing, if only because it indicates just how averse she and other Western leaders are to confronting the undeniable threat that Islamic jihadist terrorism poses to our collective future.After all, the writing has been on the wall ever since last year, when ISIS began claiming publicly that it had succeeded in smuggling terrorists into Europe. Everyone from the Libyan government to the Hungarian prime minister has been warning that the flow of refugees into Europe would inevitably result in increased Islamic extremism on the Continent.Yet Merkel and many of her colleagues simply cannot, or will not, admit the error they made when they decided to allow more than one million human beings, many from nations hostile to the West and its values, to enter Europe without even bothering to check who they were.Consider the following: reports earlier this year indicated that 80 percent of the refugees reaching Germany have no identification papers whatsoever. And yet, to buy a pre-paid cellphone in Munich or Frankfurt a person is required to show some form of identification.This means that in Merkel’s Germany, a person without any supporting documents can settle down permanently in the country, but his purchase of a prepaid phone is deemed too risky. Does that make any sense? If you are having trouble understanding what the chancellor is thinking, you are not alone.Like the protagonist in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic Alice in Wonderland, Merkel appears to have fallen down a rabbit-hole into an alternate reality, one where logic and common sense simply do not apply.But whereas Carrol’s volume was merely an entertaining children’s story, Merkel’s folly has real-world outcomes which have already proven lethal.And unless her obstinate determination to resettle millions of Middle East refugees in the heart of Europe with hardly any chance of integrating and absorbing them isn’t reversed, it will have calamitous consequences for years and even decades to come. Islamic jihadist terrorism and violence will continue to spiral out of control, and it will only be a matter of time before it spreads still further beyond the borders of Europe.But if Alice in Wonderland teaches us anything, it is that hope is never more than a dose of self-awareness away.In the book’s final chapter, Alice grows impatient with the King and Queen of Hearts and the preposterous proceedings they are conducting, finally telling them, “Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” The cards fly away, and Alice suddenly awakens with her head resting in the lap of her sister, realizing that it was all just a bad dream. In other words, once Alice comes to her senses, the day is saved.Here’s hoping that someone will at last awaken Angela Merkel and bring her, and the rest of her like-minded knaves, back from their own self-created wonderland before it is too late.