“In October 2010, Merkel told a meeting of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party at Potsdam that attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany had ‘utterly failed,’ stating that: ‘The concept that we are now living side by side and are happy about it’ does not work and ‘we feel attached to the Christian concept of mankind, that is what defines us. Anyone who doesn’t accept that is in the wrong place here.'” — from the Wikipedia entry for Angela Merkel

The announcement by Angela Merkel’s government that Germany will take in another 500,000 Muslim “refugees” in 2016, on top of the 1.1. million Germany took in in 2015, should fill any well-informed German, or European, with bewilderment and dread. After all, throwing open the doors of Europe to what is in effect an invasion by Muslims (an invasion that needs no weapons, and that is accomplishing its conquests through demography), represents a complete and astonishing break with the West’s long history of resisting Islamic imperialism, a resistance bolstered by Western Christendom’s historic memory of the subjugation, through violence, of non-Muslims by Muslims from North Africa to India. This expansion of Dar al-Islam – the Domain of Islam — at the expense of non-Muslims was recognized as being a natural and essential part of Islam, to which statesmen as various as John Quincy Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Winston Churchill have all testified. When the great mass of Christians thought about Muslims at all, they never doubted that they had been well-informed by those who had studied Islam or by those who had observed Muslims in their own lands: Islam was an all-encompassing and fanatical faith, deeply hostile to the two monotheisms – Judaism and Christianity – that preceded it. No Westerner prior to the present age would have employed that soothing and misleading phrase about “the three great Abrahamic faiths” that has gained such foolish currency, serving to conceal a great many differences at the very moment when Muslims are managing to enter the West in large numbers. In the Western world, even if they could not cite sura and ayat by number, non-Muslims in Europe for more than a millennium had a much better understanding of Islam than we do now, and instead of that “three Abrahamic faiths” nostrum, they knew, though perhaps not literally, the Muslim injunction to “take not Christians and Jews as friends, for they are friends only with each other.” This understanding did not depend on Europeans studying the contents of Sura 9 and a hundred other jihad verses in the Qur’an, or many hundreds of anti-Infidel hadiths. The inhabitants of Europe learned about Islam by coming into contact with Muslim raiders up and down their coasts, and with Muslim privateers attacking Christian shipping in the Mediterranean, seizing seamen as well as goods and the ships themselves.

Eventually Europe not only successfully resisted Islamic conquerors, but took the fight to Muslim lands and peoples. The French in Africa, the Italians in Libya, the Dutch in the East Indies, the British in India (with both Muslims and Hindus) were all examples of benign colonialism. Despite the current simple-minded denunciation of “colonialism,” in many places the colonial power helped civilize the uncivilized. The French in North Africa, for example, took their “mission civilisatrice” seriously. They founded schools, universities, hospitals, introduced modern agricultural methods, and spread the French language, which for many Muslims provided access to a wider intellectual world. The Italians in Libya (and in Somalia and Eritrea, too) built roads and schools, and introduced the Italian language, which had a similar opening-to-the-wider-world effect. Great Britain arrived in Egypt to install a competent civil service under Lord Cromer, a mission that lasted from 1882 to 1922, and in Iraq from 1922 to 1932, to usher a League of Nations’ mandate into statehood. There was and is no need to feel guilty over these examples of “colonialism” – the Muslim peoples were given far more than they gave.

But whatever one’s final judgment of individual examples of European “colonialism,” the general phenomenon signaled a relationship of the more powerful Europeans directing the less powerful Muslims. Europeans no longer saw Muslims as a threat, and began to forget the long history of Muslim aggression, and could not imagine that some day, they might be threatened from within, through the presence of large numbers of Muslims, wielding the silent weapon of demography. In an act of mass historical amnesia, the political and media elites of Europe have permitted millions of Muslim migrants to settle, virtually without serious discussion, within their countries. European leaders failed to study Islam, or to heed those who have (Jihad Watch would be a good place to start). so as to understand, and not after the fact, what the West was getting itself into.

There have always been some who, to borrow Matthew Arnold’s phrase, saw Islam steadily and saw it whole. In the Netherlands, the outspoken and brilliant Pim Fortuyn was the first to warn 0bout what Muslim immigration was doing to his country; after his assassination in 2002 (by a deranged man “defending” not just animal-rights but “defenseless” Muslims), Geert Wilders became the head of the anti-Islam movement in that country. In France, Marine Le Pen inherited her father’s political movement and transformed it, for she turned out to be much less offensive and more intelligent than he, with his dismissive remarks about the Nazi murders of Jews being a “detail” of World War II, had ever been. In Germany, a politician, writer, and Bundesbank officer, Thilo Sarrazin, wrote Deutschland schafft sich ab — “Germany Does Away With Itself.” This book, warning Germans about the effect on the national I.Q. level of large numbers of Muslim immigrants, became an instant bestseller. Of course, Sarrazin’s study was largely ignored by the political and cultural elite of Germany: it would not do to praise a thesis that even hinted at “racism,” and any discussion of comparative I.Q.s does not just hint at but for many people hollers “racism.” Nor should any writer be allowed to inquire into the effect on an individual’s capacity to think – his I.Q. – of his having been in thrall, his whole life, to a faith that demands mental submission, and that discourages, and even punishes, displays of skeptical inquiry. For Muslims have morphed, for defensive purposes in the West, into becoming a “race” entitled to all the protections that that entails. Sarrazin’s book got no traction; tellingly, six years after it first appeared, it has still not been translated into English. And Thilo Sarrazin himself had to endure what Wilders and Marine Le Pen, and Paul Weston, and Pat Condell, and many others have had to endure: that is, being absurdly labelled “far-right” — the main weapon used by bien-pensants against anyone who takes an informed stand against Islam. Before his own book came out, Thilo Sarrazin was always seen as being on the stolid political center in Germany – even sitting on the board of the Bundesbank – and after it was published, nothing he says or does will allow him to shake off that “far-right” label.

Angela Merkel, who in 2010 was warning about the “utter failure” of German “attempts to build a multicultural society,” has since then established the most generous immigration policy in all of Europe. She has done this despite the fact that 81% of Germans oppose Merkel’s immigration policy, plowing ahead, determinedly ignoring the will of the people, almost as if she had some kind of weird duty to allow in as many immigrants – Muslim immigrants – as she can. And since within Schengenland internal border checks have been eliminated, the other signatories to Schengen may ultimately suffer from a too-generous immigration policy in Germany. Merkel’s policy has come under attack, unsurprisingly, from France’s tough-on-Islam Prime Minister, Manuel Valls. In mid-February, he called the policy of Chancellor Angela Merkel towards asylum seekers “unsustainable in the long term” and insisted in an interview, with Merkel in mind: “We have to say this clearly: Europe cannot take in all migrants from Syria, Iraq or Africa. It has to regain control over its borders, over its migration or asylum policies.”

But none of this has had an effect on Chancellor Merkel. Not even the hundreds of sex attacks on German women in Cologne on New Year’s Day, nor the mounting evidence of aggressions by recently-arrived refugees all over Europe, have given her pause. Merkel is not weighed down psychically by some memory of Germany having been a “colonial” power in the Arab and Muslim world. That “colonial” history, the one that the French and English Left both like to invoke when insisting on their own country’s supposed duty to resettle Muslim “refugees,” is missing from the German historical records. As for German East-Africa and German West-Africa, neither included more than an insignificant number of African Muslims.

Why should Merkel be so insistent on allowing in so many of these Muslims (whether called migrants, or refugees, the distinction being that migrants move in search of a better life, while refugees are fleeing persecution and death) into Germany, far beyond the numbers taken by other European countries? She hasn’t deigned to give any justification for this policy, one that is so unpopular with the German people, and that has also antagonized and worried other European leaders such as Valls. If these Muslim migrants and refugees need to move somewhere – and it is not clear that all of them do – everyone knows that there are many fabulously rich Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, that have plenty of money, have always needed vast numbers of foreign workers, and could much more easily integrate migrants (or “refugees”) who are both fellow Arabs and fellow Muslims, than could Germany or any other European state.

The obvious explanation for Merkel’s madness is that she subliminally sees her policy — the expression of a diseased sympathy — as a way of “making amends” (as if amends could ever be made) for the Hitlerian horror of seventy years ago, one still hauntingly present in some, though not all, German psyches. But to make amends to the dead Jews of Europe by admitting live Muslims into Germany, when it is Muslims who today are the chief carriers of antisemitism all over Europe, from Malmo to Madrid, is madness. Has anything happened since 2010, when Merkel first admitted that Germany’s attempts to build a multicultural society had “utterly failed,” to make her rethink that original assessment? And how should we describe her permitting massive numbers of Muslims into Germany when the results of Muslim immigration so far in that country, and in Europe, are already there for all to see (e.g., in postings at Jihad Watch), if not as madness? There is no antidote, it seems, to this particular furor islamicus.