(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. La guerra de los perros)
The Heraldo de México is not the only outlet fascinated by the news of what they have taken to calling hobby dogging, which, according to social media and various outlets, has become fashionable in Germany and consists of taking the dog out for a walk on a lead, but without the dog. You go out with the lead and make all the usual gestures one makes when taking a dog for a walk on a leash. That newspaper says that hobby dogging “is presented as a leisure activity for animal lovers who want to avoid the nuisances and costs of having a real pet, such as veterinary bills, cleaning up faeces, drooling or aggressive behaviour”.
I do not believe it is going to be a “fashion”, nor do I believe there are animal lovers who would consider it gratifying to take out for a walk a lead with no animal on it. What I do believe is that its appearance may be a response to phenomena of greater substance than laziness. Because in many neighbourhoods in Germany and other European countries, and of course in the United Kingdom, taking a dog out for a walk around the neighbourhood has become a disquieting activity when not a risky one.
And that is because their neighbourhoods have filled up, especially over the past decade, with neighbours who hate dogs. Who consider dogs in particular an impure and repugnant animal, and their being kept close to human beings an offence to their religious ideology. Almost as much as the pig. There are more and more conflictive situations arising between members of Muslim communities and dog owners in cultivated Western societies accustomed for millennia to love of the domestic animal.
And so it happens that more and more dog walkers are warned by elements who have set themselves up as guardians of Muslim essences in cities that until very recently were clearly Christian, not to take their animals along certain streets or squares which they already consider theirs and where they have institutionalised their ever greater control over public space in European cities. This unofficial “sharia police”, or police of mere Islamic morality, will just as readily berate women for having bare arms, a short skirt or hair uncovered by a veil as for walking a poodle or a German shepherd.
In the large British cities, now almost all governed by Muslim mayors thanks to the left, these confrontations have become habitual, with the powerless phrases of the dog’s owner, who tries to defend himself by invoking his condition as a native, born in the neighbourhood, and his right to walk his dog. And the answers from that guard of Mohammedan decorum warning that if they see the dog in that area again, it is a dead dog.
Just as there are bathing areas in the lakes around Berlin which Germans have no longer been able to access because they do not comply with the dress codes of Islam. Those who tried ran into burly enforcers of Islamic morality who expelled them without ceremony.
There is already clear evidence that the most militant sectors of the Muslim communities, which it must be said are never criticised, at least publicly, by the rest of those communities, have entered a new and higher phase of activism. This goes beyond the bloody attacks and the demonstrations in support of Hamas and other Islamist terrorist groups, which have shown their will to take control and impose themselves by way of intimidation and violence in the Western societies that have taken them in. Societies that grant free housing, sustenance and services to the largely non-contributing part of this mass immigration.
In the last two years attacks on Christian symbols have intensified brutally, the smashing of crosses and images, incursions into churches, harassment of Christian masses, the burning of Christmas trees and nativity scenes. There has also been an intensification of the message from Muslim leaders who warn that they have come to Western societies not to adapt to the civilisation that receives them but to destroy it by way of conversion to a religious ideology that produces nothing but failed states.
Since they consider it incompatible with their radical will to impose Islam, which is the only religion that deserves to survive, because it is the only one that answers to the will of their pitiless, brutal and implacable god.
More and more of them, on social media and in public, warn that all those who do not end up accepting their fate under Islam will be subjugated or destroyed. But if this Islamist vanguard is worrying, no less so is the fact that there is nobody in the Muslim communities who contradicts them. And they all help to impose on the Western authorities concessions that display the weakness of the positions of the Western host society. Each concession, as in regions of Spain with the ban on pork in school menus, is followed by another demand.
The attempts to abolish every expression of Christendom such as Christmas or Holy Week follow one after another, at the same time as public demonstrations multiply with Muslim prayers that paralyse streets and squares or encircle cathedrals, as has been happening lately. Meanwhile, in a short space of time millions of Muslims have arrived, in their vast majority young men of military age, who are not fleeing any famine. They have entered without any control at all and many of them necessarily have terrorist or military experience.
Everything indicates that the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the organisation that directs the large-scale operations, from terrorism to the processes of hybrid religious and cultural war against Christianity, considers that it already has sufficient critical mass for an assault on greater power throughout the West. The massive financing and the lobbies of Qatar, of Turkey, of Morocco or Saudi Arabia, and paradoxically and regrettably also the European Union’s financing of NGOs and initiatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, accelerate this process. The only Western countries that stand up to this tragic development, with Hungary at their head, are punished, harassed and trampled on by the European authorities.
Massacres of Christians in Africa have soared, the Middle East, the cradle of Christianity, is being left without churches and faithful, while in Europe and the Americas mosques spring up like mushrooms with an aggressive and totalitarian discourse of total contempt for the host societies. Societies that possibly deserve it for their lack of will, presence of mind and muscle to defend what is their own.
And for having elites and ruling political classes that combine their insatiable greed for the money of Islam with their intentions of destroying the historic Western nations for the sake of a globalism for which they believe they hold their great trump card in the alliance of the left with Islam.
There is still hope that Western civilisation will recover its will to exist and to recover the virtues that made it the best fortune of humanity. There are very clear signs of this rebirth throughout the West. But it must be clear that the rearmament of the nations has to be as robust and firm as it is urgent, because the process of reconquest is going to be traumatic in many places, and the expulsion of the declared enemies of freedom, of compassion, of coexistence and of prosperity will have to be forceful and urgent or it will not happen at all.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
