Last week was surely one of the grimmest in Europe in years. The day after an Afghan migrant allegedly stabbed a two-year-old boy in Germany to death, Axel Rudakubana was sentenced to 52 years in prison for murdering Alice, Bebe and Elsie, three little English girls with a combined age of 22, in Southport.
The court heard that Rudakubana told police in the immediate aftermath of the killing: ‘It’s a good thing those children are dead…I’m so glad…so happy’. What we didn’t hear enough about was the exact nature of his extremism. We know that an Al-Qaeda training manual was found in his bedroom, and that he was referred to the Prevent counter-terrorism programme twice in 2021, once for uploading images of Colonel Gaddafi, and once for researching the London Bridge atrocity of 2017 when an Islamist terror cell murdered eight people. We also know, because the BBC and other media outlets are desperate to point it out, that he was ‘obsessed’ with Adolf Hitler and had ‘an interest in Nazi Germany’.
There has been little urgency, and very little honesty, about the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe
In the coverage of the Southport attack, there are shades of the same dissimulation that characterised the reporting of an atrocity in the French town of Annecy in the summer of 2023. On that occasion, a knifeman ran amok in a playground, stabbing several toddlers, before a passerby intervened. Within hours, it was reported that the suspected perpetrator was a Christian refugee from Syria because that was what he told the police.
The truth has emerged thanks to Henri d’Anselme, the passerby who prevented more bloodshed. He is a genuine Christian – he was in Annecy on a pilgrimage of French cathedrals – and in an interview last month d’Anselme disclosed what he had been told by the magistrate in charge of the case.
Abdalmasih Hanoun apparently deserted the Syrian army to join the Islamic State, but soon fell out with them. Fearing for his life, he fled to Europe and claimed political asylum. Hanoun was reportedly informed that his claim would have more chance of success if he said he was either a Christian or a homosexual. He chose the former, entering Sweden as a Christian who was fleeing religious persecution.
Christianity was also the cover story chosen by Emad al-Swealmeen, the 32-year-old Iraqi who claimed he had converted from Islam in order to remain in the UK. He was killed by his own bomb before he could detonate it in a Liverpool maternity hospital in 2021.
The Libyan whose suicide bomb killed 22 young people at the Manchester Arena in 2017 had also duped his adopted country into believing he was proud to live in the West. In fact, Salman Abedi had been raised in a ‘strict Islamic household’ in Manchester by a father who had never renounced the Islamism that had forced him to flee Gaddafi’s Libya in 1991.
In the past decade, Europe has remained as stubborn as ever in its refusal to confront Islamic extremism. This is despite the many deadly Islamist attacks across the continent in that time: Barcelona, Brussels, Paris, London, Mannheim, Strasbourg, Reading, Nice, Marseille, Vienna, Oslo, Arras and Solingen.
There have been other incidents, attacks of the sort Europe had thought it had eradicated 80 years ago: a ‘Jew hunt’ in Amsterdam, synagogues burned in France, Jews assaulted in London and in Berlin a warning from the police for Jews to ‘hide’ their identities in some parts of the city.
The perpetrators are Europe’s new anti-Semites, as Berlin police chief Barbara Slowik explained in November. ‘There are certain neighbourhoods where the majority of people of Arab origin live, who also have sympathies for terrorist groups,’ she said. ‘Open anti-Semitism is expressed there against people of the Jewish faith.’
It is the same in France, where there has been a steady exodus of Jews since the day in 2012 when an Islamist filmed himself shooting dead three children in the playground of a Jewish school in Toulouse. In the wake of that atrocity, the EU conducted a survey into anti-Semitism on the continent and discovered that such cases had risen dramatically in the past five years. Jewish respondents in eight countries – including France, Germany and the UK – reported that those with ‘extreme views’ and people with ‘left-wing political views’ were responsible for the most serious prejudice.
The EU said that countries should work ‘urgently’ to combat the spread of anti-Semitism. That call fell on deaf ears. There has been little urgency, and very little honesty, about the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe this century.
The terrifying truth is that Europe has not the faintest idea how to combat the spread of Islamism across the continent. It is a two-pronged offensive, what the French observers of Islamism call ‘cutting the head and cutting the tongue’. Cutting the head is to physically kill your enemies; cutting the tongue is to silence them intellectually, either through death threats or career-ending accusations of ‘Islamophobia’.
Europeans are now frightened to even talk about Islam, far less criticise any aspect of the religion. After all, who wants to end up like the French schoolteacher Samuel Paty, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh or the staff of Charlie Hebdo? Slain at the hands of ‘Islamic fascists’, a term coined by President George W Bush in 2006, but which never caught on in Europe.
It is far easier to find ‘fascism’ elsewhere, like in America, where in recent days both Donald Trump and Elon Musk have been labelled as such. The latter was described by a German historian, Jens-Christian Wagner, who runs the Buchenwald memorial, as a ‘mad and right-wing extremist’. He advised Musk to ‘take a history book and withdraw for three days, read the history book and please be quiet with the poison he’s spreading’.
Europe’s progressive elite appears to believe that Musk is a Hitler-in-waiting, what with that salute. The solution of some of them is to shut down X, the social media platform he runs and through which, in their view, he is spreading his poison. But will banning X stop the synagogues being burned down? Will it stop the Jew hunts and will it put an end to the knife attacks? No. Then what will? To that question, Europe has not the answer.
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