Two seemingly unrelated events in Europe over the past 20 days point to what cannot be described other than as the slow suicide of  European civilization. On November 9, Chancellor Merkel gave a speech in Berlin commemorating the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht (lately renamed  Pogromnacht). This 1938 event, which led to the willful destruction of 1400 synagogues, thousands of Jewish stores and the deportation of more than 30,000 Jews to the concentration camps, is widely considered the beginning of the Holocaust. For those familiar with Nazi history, though, the writing had been on the wall long before that.

What Hitler had in mind for the Jews is described in detail in his Mein Kampf and put in practice at the latest by the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, which excluded Jews from German society, prohibited them from holding public office and marrying Germans and made them, in effect, stateless outcasts in their own country. As if to make sure that modern Holocaust doubters and anti-Semites, like labor leader Jeremy Corbin of the UK, have no place to hide, Hitler explained in detail his plans to annihilate the Jews to his military commanders in his Obersalzberg speech of August 22, 1939. “Who, after all,” said he, “speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians.”

The gist of Merkel’s speech was less about the commemoration of a dreadful historical event than a warning of the new wave of virulent anti-Semitism washing across Western Europe and assuming pandemic proportions in Muslim diaspora communities. For this, she should be congratulated, though she was less than candid in forgetting to mention that a good part of this explosion of anti-Semitism was caused by her in letting in two million mostly Muslim migrants, who get their anti-Semitism with their mothers milk. Nor did she mention that she had done her level best to perpetuate her awful policies by trying to force Eastern Europe to take migrants who have proven unwilling to integrate.  Though Merkel is on her way out, it won’t be long before synagogues and Jewish businesses in Germany will have to be guarded by soldiers, as they already are in France.

It is this dismal if inevitable reality that was seemingly guaranteed by an European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decision two weeks before Merkel’s speech. On Oct 25^th, the ECHR, in a ruling mandatory for 47 European countries, denied an Austrian petitioner and ruled that the imperatives of “religious peace” and “mutual tolerance” are more important than freedom of speech. In this particular case, the petitioner had asked in a seminar whether Mohammad’s marriage to a six year old  (consummated three years later), constituted a case of pedophilia. In its ruling, the court decreed that denigration of Muhammad is not protected speech, regardless of the factual evidence with the clear implication of prohibiting  criticism of Islam.

This has the effect of overturning that same court’s 2001 ruling that sharia is not compatible with democracy and making Islam exempt from any questioning, even as attacks on Christianity and Judaism are well-established and widely practiced. To understand what that means in practice, it is worthwhile to recall the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam of 1990, which was approved by all 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. It expressly denied the universally-accepted definition of human rights and subjected them (in articles 24 and 25) to the medieval obscurantism of sharia law. Sharia, a post-Quranic, man-made doctrine designed to serve the interests of Arab imperialism after Mohammad, mandates discrimination and violence against Christians and Jews, while treating women and non-Muslims as second-hand citizens at best.

It has long been the ultimate goal of Islamic supremacists to outlaw any criticism of even the most radical expressions of Islamic intolerance under the bogus guise of Islamophobia. They are now on their way to achieve that objective with the help of the European Court of “Human” Rights.

Photo credit: Arno Mikkor

Alex Alexiev is chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies (cbbss.org). He could be reached at alexievalex4@gmail.com.