Festival of Diversity: A Knife to the Heart of the West

Credit Image: © Imago via ZUMA Press

Subscribe to future audio versions of AmRen articles here.

The city of Solingen, Germany recently celebrated its 650th anniversary, something of almost unbelievable antiquity to Americans. However, instead of promoting the city’s history, it was a “Festival of Diversity.” The result: “[T]he evening began as a festival of diversity and ended after a bloody knife attack that left shocked and grieving residents asking why they had been singled out for such horror,” said Reuters. Who will be brave enough to tell them?

The killer — five dead, 14 wounded — was “Issa Al H.,” an Islamist from Syria. He was not caught at the scene but turned himself in, reportedly still covered in blood. Prosecutors withheld his surname to protect his privacy. Another man — a witness — was taken to a police station after a search at a refugee center. A 15-year old was arrested on suspicion that he knew about the planned attack but did not report it.

ISIS took credit for the attack and posted a video supposedly showing Issa Al H. holding a knife and swearing loyalty. The Islamic State, with no territory and with its “caliph” dead, is now more of a brand than a real organization, but for unhappy and alienated Muslims, it’s an identity that explains their failures in European society.

This Muslim underclass is growing, and many members are Syrian. The European Union Agency for Asylum reported that Syrians file more requests for asylum than any other nationality, and Germany gets the most — even though the Syrian Civil War is “frozen,” and the warring parties seem to realize they can’t topple Bashar al-Assad.

Turks filed more than 100,000 asylum applications in Europe in 2023, an annual increase of more than 82 percent, even though Turkey is not at war. Most applications were in Germany. The European Commission reports that most first-time applicants are men, many of military age (18–34). Germany deported 16,430 failed applicants in 2022, but that’s nothing compared to the 329,000 who applied. German authorities ruled on more than 260,000 asylum applications in 2023 and granted more than half.

Issa Al H. was denied asylum. In 2023, he was ordered extradited to Bulgaria, where had had first entered Europe, and which had agreed to take him back. The police lost track of him and — incredibly — the deportation order expired, and he got a spot in a refugee housing center. Many deportation orders fail because countries refuse to accept their citizens. PBS reports that Germany can’t deport Afghans because it does not recognize the Taliban. The government also thinks Syria is still too unstable, not least because the West tried to overthrow the government.

Sympathetic lawyers and bureaucrats can also delay deportation by saying the applicant has medical problems, is in school, or would be persecuted at home. If illegals avoid deportation long enough, they can get “opportunity visas” that let them stay. Or, they can vanish.

Issa Al H. vanished. When a person under deportation order can’t be found, the deportation period can be extended for a year. For some reason, this did not happen and the order expired. Issa Al H. reemerged and got “subsidiary protection” because he would supposedly be in danger in Syria — this, despite his earlier deportation order. This Rube Goldberg process is easy to exploit by NGOs, lawyers, and bureaucrats.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz now says he wants tougher laws on knives. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser proposed changing the length of knife blades allowed in public from 4.7 to 2.4 inches.

Knife crime resulting in “serious bodily harm” is up almost 10 percent from last year to nearly 9,000 cases, with an especially large increase at train stations. A criminologist noted that “non-Germans are disproportionately represented in police knife crime statistics,” but says we must look at “the circumstances of their lives.” Alternative for Germany co-founder Alice Weidel says that Germany has “exploding foreign crime, youth crime, migrant violence, because we have open borders.”

Chancellor Scholz is on the defensive. “We will have to do everything so that those who aren’t allowed to stay in Germany are sent back and deported,” he said, touting increases in deportation figures and border security. This sounds like American Democrats bragging about dedicating more money for the border even as we get more illegals than ever.

Friedrich Merz, Leader of the opposition Christian Democratic Union wrote an open letter to the chancellor calling for no more asylum for Afghans and Syrians. He also says, “Refugees are involved in the majority [of knife attacks], and Islamist motives are behind most of the attacks.”

Elections are coming up, so this may be just talk. The centrist parties fear the AfD, which looks strong, especially in Saxony and Thuringia in the East. However, Germany has an official policy of permanent shame, which is the model some leftists want for all white countries. The CDU may be saying it is against immigration, but all parties have ruled out forming a coalition with the AfD. International media run fear-mongering articles about the AfD along with adoring profiles of its opponents.

• “Minority groups in Germany warn of possible far-right success in state elections,” EuroNews, August 28, 2024
• “Being Black in Germany has never been easy. Elections in eastern states could make it harder still,” AP, August 28, 2024
• “Germany’s grandmothers take on the far-right ahead of key state elections,” NPR, August 27, 2024

“In view of the daily headlines about violence by foreigners,” said AfD candidate Bjorn Hocke, “it is no longer possible to say that such events are unpredictable and surprising. . . . But the circumstances will change only when those responsible are finally voted out of office.” The question is whether the fear campaign against the “far-right” will prevent solutions to what even the establishment now concedes is a bad problem. An article about whether Germany will “act” to prevent an AfD victory quotes extensively from the leader of a Holocaust museum who says part of his job is to preach against the AfD and repeatedly say that its leader spreads Nazi slogans.

Two days after the knife attack in Solingen, leftists gathered in front of the killer’s shelter holding signs that said “Welcome to Refugees” and “Fascism is not an opinion, but a crime.” A smaller protest of young men held a sign that read “Our People First.”

The New York Times says Germany “needs immigration to bolster its work force, but the government often finds itself on the defensive against an increasingly powerful AfD.” Statistics from 2021 found that almost two-thirds of Syrians in Germany were on welfare. Unemployment in Germany also hit its highest level in nearly a decade recently.

The AfD points out that switching to “renewable” energy and scrapping nuclear power raise energy costs, and that Germany should start importing Russian oil and gas again. Naturally, this leads to accusations that the AfD is part of Vladimir Putin’s alleged plan to destroy Western democracy. While there is more freedom to talk about economic than demographic issues, the AfD’s ideas on energy terrify the environmental and anti-Russian lobbies, and are therefore almost as unthinkable as limiting immigration.

Despite the tough talk from the Chancellor, the SPD general secretary has already rejected limits on asylum: “The answer can’t be now that we now slam the door in the face of people who are themselves fleeing from Islamists because they are being persecuted by them for their way of life.” (Their way of life?) Limiting asylum would “violate Germany’s Basic Law,” which presumably means anyone can apply. Instead, he says the process should be reformed. The killer should have been deported, so the local state was responsible. He also wants ways to prevent radicalization, though he admits Germany is “not making good progress.”

Germany does not celebrate its own history and culture, so it offers no identity to non-whites and Muslims that would make them feel like they are part of the country. ISIS at least gives them something to believe in.

Low-IQ non-whites will always be poorer than Germans. “Disaffected” foreigners will always be tempted by victim ideologies that blame others. The modern German identity built around guilt and shame only feeds resentment among non-whites, who are also least likely to cooperate with the authorities. More surveillance, weapons laws, and indoctrination will fall most heavily on Germans, the very group being attacked. The AfD is already oppressed in ways that mainstream media would call tyrannical in Russia or China.

Multiculturalism leads directly to anarcho-tyranny, just as Sam Francis predicted. Francis coined the term in 2004, after former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt admitted that multiculturalism was a bad fit for democracy and might require authoritarian government. The current German government seems to consider that a goal rather than a warning.