(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Sin respeto del enemigo)
The Islamic State has announced new attacks following the one in Solingen in Germany, which cost three dead and seven wounded in a knife attack by an illegal Syrian immigrant who was under a deportation order. In a communiqué it calls on all Muslims to murder Europeans in revenge for the war in Gaza. The Islamic State wants to profit from the climate of hatred toward Israel and the West that has broken out among Muslims residing in Europe, massively supported by the left and by some European governments, as a result of Israel’s war against Hamas. This has happened before: that the Islamic State strives not to be eclipsed by Hamas or other jihadist groups.
What is indeed novel, according to German experts on jihadism, is that the communiqué, in its pages titled “Jihad in Europe,” not only displays the usual ferocious hatred but openly mocks Germany, its government and the West in general. The murderers are laughing at us. And they expound at length in their mockery of the German government’s anti-terrorist measures after this attack, which has shaken Germany like few others. And which has laid absolutely bare that the German security forces have lost control over an Islamist population that arrived in waves ever since Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the border in September 2015. Germany will one day have a government that declares Merkel one of the beings who has done the most harm to the nation and to all of Europe, surpassed only by the great Nazi and communist murderers of the 20th century. In any case, Germany then received the coup de grâce to its internal security and to its social cohesion, the two immense achievements that had brought peace and immense prosperity after 1945.
The mockery of the jihadist enemy sounds very much like the mockery of the murderer Nicolás Maduro these days, who laughs at everyone because he knows that he kills and knows how to kill and is willing to do so, and for that reason he has the upper hand over all those who, from within the democracies, are not going to do anything to him. Maduro counts on an army of accomplices among those who rule in the countries that supposedly defend those who win elections against those who lose them and torture and murder to remain in power. The jihadists too count on their accomplices: the volunteers who are aware of the interests of Iran or Qatar or so many others, and the involuntary ones, who are all those Westerners who do not understand that they are facing people who want to exterminate them.
The Islamic State communiqué openly laughs at its enemy, to whom it denies all respect and in whose fear and confusion it demonstrably delights. It alludes to the ban on carrying knives in Germany, which has been proposed after the recent attacks, and suggests to its followers that they can also use “hammers and birthday cakes.” The novelty of the communiqué lies in this mockery, which is a sort of coming out of the closet from restrained mockery into the lewd laughter of humiliation. With the following message: “We laugh at you because we are going to beat you, because we believe and you do not, because we defend what is ours and want to impose it and you no longer even know what is yours.” It should surprise no one. It marks a grave trend that has been developing for decades but is now widespread. The radicalized Muslim communities in Europe have always cultivated hatred and contempt for the decadence and immorality of their Western hosts.
But not open mockery. As the German singer and songwriter Heinz Rudolf Kunze said years ago in a song called Willkommen Ihr Mörder (Welcome, Murderers): “When they are among themselves they laugh a lot at us,” at us Westerners who are so tolerant that we do not defend what is ours. At the weak Westerners who let them take from us, little by little, everything: from space in medical consultations, to aid with the taxpayer’s money for those who never contribute anything and who spread a parasitic culture of good conscience because it weakens the enemy, to the granting of housing and even the streets they occupy to pray without anyone daring to dispute their occupation of public space.
In the communiqué they now openly laugh at the impotence of the German government to halt these attacks and say that if the authorities are going to set about measuring the length of blades, some people can resort to a birthday cake — with explosives inside, of course — or to some good hammers, which also kill. All of this reflects the untenable situation that has been created by Western governments that try to confront jihadist terrorism as if it were a Western criminal phenomenon. And on top of that they attack those who do know how to deal with these forces of criminal fanatical delirium because they know them from within — see the Israeli security forces.
Western civilization is beginning to enter its death throes in a lack of self-respect that has already crystallized into the general contempt of its worst enemies. Those who are incapable of defending their own people and what is theirs have no excuse. But on top of that they receive the deserved contempt of their enemies. To those of us who still believe there is a remedy, however hard and traumatic and perhaps by now very dramatic, I leave the phrase of Ramiro de Maeztu: “To be is to defend oneself.” If we want to go on being, let us defend ourselves from the enemies and the traitors alike.
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.
