How liberals are promoting jihad in Germany

The jihadist attacker who drove a 32-ton truck through a Christmas market in Berlin has, for the nth time, proved that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policy is disastrous. The attack killed 12 and wounded 50. But we should not forget the vile role intellectuals have played in making Europe a dangerous place.

Merkel’s pigheadedness cannot be attributed only to obeisance to the dogmas and silliness of multiculturalism. It can be comprehended fully only against the backdrop of the collective German guilt: the guilt of having birthed and bolstered Hitler and his murderous ideology, of having participated in the Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews and countless others, of setting up and running such extermination camps as at Auschwitz and Dachau. Her government’s decision to accept a million Muslim refugees—against the objections of Rightwing groups and the warnings of experts—looks more an act of atonement for the country’s Nazi past than a rational move. In fact, it is anything but rational, for it is giving booster shots to an ideology as bad as, if not worse than, Nazism in Europe—jihad.

As Bernhard Schlink, the best-selling author, told The Independent (September 20, 2010), “When I grew up, I found there was a sense of guilt even among those who had not committed any crime. In my generation, there is a strong sense of guilt too. I got the idea to look at collective guilt from research into tribal communities. If one member of a tribe commits a crime, they have the option to expel the person who committed the crime, or maintain some solidarity with the perpetrator, which then entangles them morally, and leads to guilt.”

In the modern context, and in a milieu in which public morality has not relegated into oblivion, it assumes a different dimension. “If one cannot expel a parent or an uncle whom one loves, who turns out to have been involved with the Third Reich in a very bad way, this is what creates the ‘second guilt.’ There is a collective guilt that is created by not expelling such perpetrators,” Schlink said.

It needs to be mentioned here that collective guilt is not a bad thing per se; it becomes a problem when in excess. Guilt presupposes the existence of a society’s capacity to introspect, to critically analyze its own past; it also presupposes moral courage and considerable decency. Hence the guilt of capitalism: heartless treatment of children in the days of Charles Dickens, miserable conditions of workers in the nineteenth century England, etc. And Western guilt: oppression and exploitation of Asian and African nations, bad treatment of original inhabitants of the Americas and Australia, etc. And Hindu guilt: severity against the Shudras over the centuries, the rigid caste system, the subjugation of women, and so on. And the American guilt: the enslavement of blacks till one-and-a-half century ago and the segregation for another 100 years.

It is important to notice here that there is no Arab guilt, despite their well-known role in slavery for centuries. Similarly, there is no Muslim guilt (regarding ill-treatment of women, non-Muslims, extermination of civilizations and cultures, mass murder of infidels, forcible conversions, sex slavery, etc.). No socialist guilt (economic devastation in countries like India). No communist guilt (killing of millions of people in China, Soviet Union, Cambodia, etc.).

Academics, public intellectuals, and thought leaders all over the world have evolved into a kind of matrix; it has worked for decades to promote a couple of agendas. First, they drill guilt into the hearts and minds of the civilized. Therefore, most manmade ills are attributed to one or the other consummate fruit of civilization, be it capitalism, globalization, Western civilization, America, or Hinduism. Second, they ensure that any criticism of Islam, Muslims, Arabs, etc., is dubbed as racism, Islamophobia, Xenophobia, or some other abomination.

Liberals’ nefarious designs have worked perfectly in Europe in general and in Germany particular. They used guilt about the Holocaust to make certain that the authorities turned a blind eye to the odious practices of Muslim immigrants. Honor killings, female genital mutilation, polygamy, subjugation of Muslim women, dissemination of Islamist doctrines, petrodollar-funded clergy spreading anti-Western and jihadist messages—everything went on smoothly for decades.

Abigail R. Esman, the author of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West, wrote for Modern Tokyo Times (December 23), “Everything that needed to be known about Anis Amri, the Tunisian-born suspect in the attack was known well before he plowed his truck into the outdoor festivities on Dec. 19, killing 12 people and injuring 48. Authorities watched him for months, though the Daily Beast reports he ‘managed to slip off their radar’ sometime around September. He served time in Italy for arson. He had a history of drug trafficking. He had been convicted in absentia of robbery in his home country of Tunisia. He had known connections to an extremist imam. Germany even rejected his asylum claim, though he managed to escape deportation.”

And yet he was still free, she added, roaming the streets of Germany.

Rightists in Europe, who are maligned as ‘far-Right’ by the mainstream media, are correctly blaming Merkel for endangering the lives of her people. But the bigger culprits are the liberals who are peddling the myth of Islamophobia.