Christmas in the Crosshairs
Europe Faces Rise in Terrorist Threats to Christmas Markets
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A planned terrorist attack at a Christmas market in Germany. Another foiled ISIS plot in Poland. Canceled New Year’s Eve celebrations in Paris over terrorism risks. A horrific targeted attack on Jews in Australia by a father and son inspired by the Islamic State.
These are just a few recent headlines highlighting the new normal throughout the West. They all point toward an uncomfortable but undeniable truth: decades of mass immigration from countries whose histories and cultures are fundamentally incompatible with Western values have thrust the United States and especially Europe toward a tipping point.
But rather than rising to defend its people and traditions, Europe is instead continuing its long retreat, ceding its public spaces to hostile newcomers while abandoning its traditions to those who are all too happy to see them destroyed.
In what can only be seen as a surrender, France has canceled its New Year’s Eve concert on the Champs-Elysées due to security fears amid rising violence attributed to migrants. In its place, a sterile, pre-recorded midnight fireworks show will be broadcast, featuring pre-screened extras serving as stand-ins for a real audience.
Unfortunately, given the extraordinary levels of violence on New Year’s Eve last year in France, the security concerns are warranted. Despite the deployment of more than 90,000 police officers nationwide, authorities reported 984 vehicles set ablaze and 420 arrests.
As such, the Paris police pushed Mayor Anne Hidalgo to cancel the concert this year, despite the celebration standing as a French tradition for more than 60 years.
Paris is not an outlier. It is merely the most recent example of a broader European trend in which public celebrations are curtailed, fortified, or quietly abandoned in anticipation of violence, often at the hands of migrants who are openly antagonistic toward Christians and Christian traditions.
Nowhere is this transformation more evident than in Europe’s Christmas markets, which have once again opened, drawing millions of visitors into historic town squares filled with twinkling lights, live music, food, drink, and crafts.
For centuries, these festive markets have been places of communal celebration, where Christian faith, European culture, and local identity converge each winter during the season of Advent.
Yet alongside the decorated stalls and colorful lights, a newer and far less welcome tradition has taken hold: the annual placement of anti-terror barriers, armed police patrols, and the open contempt of a growing contingent of newcomers who openly hate the Christian and European heritage these markets represent.
Recently, several videos have been shared on social media showing what appear to be Islamist activist groups protesting around or disrupting Christmas markets in various European cities.
The global liberal media, in their attempt to deflect any criticism of migrants, quickly jumped to “fact check” the videos, claiming that the clips are “missing context.”
In one case, fact-checkers noted that footage of men marching through a Christmas market while shouting “Allahu Akbar” was actually recorded a year earlier than a viral post claimed. In another, a video showing Islamists disrupting a Christmas market in Milan was allegedly filmed on New Year’s Eve, not Christmas. In that instance, gangs of men waving Palestinian flags allegedly molested six Belgian tourists near Milan’s cathedral.
But none of these “fact-checks” changes the reality of what Europe is facing. While media outlets correct the timestamps and locations, they leave the underlying troubling pattern untouched. Europe is under siege.
It is no coincidence that the most aggressive displays of force have come around Christmas – one of the holiest times of the year for Christians. The intent is clearly to strike fear into native populations and assert that Christianity is no longer welcome in the public square. Meanwhile, European governments arrest people for posting memes critical of Islamic terrorist groups.
This harrowing new reality was once again confirmed in Germany this week, where police disrupted an attack targeting a Christmas market in the Dingolfing area of Bavaria. The five men who were arrested are all foreign born: an Egyptian national, a Syrian national, and three Moroccan men.
This comes after a man from Saudi Arabia recently went on trial for carrying out a vehicle attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany last December, which killed six people and wounded more than 300.
These incidents were not anomalies but are part of a pattern that has only intensified.
In December 2014 in France, a man drove his vehicle into Christmas shoppers in the city of Dijon while shouting “Allahu Akbar,” injuring 13 people. The following day, also in France, an attacker rammed a van into a crowded Christmas market in Nantes, wounding 11 more.
Two years later, in December 2016, Germany suffered its first major terrorist attack on a Christmas market when Anis Amri, a Tunisian national, hijacked a truck and plowed into the Breitscheidplatz market in Berlin. The Islamic State later claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed 12 people and injured dozens more.
Since then, there have been four more major attacks on Christmas markets in Europe, to say nothing of the other Islamic attacks like the Bataclan theatre attack coordinated by the Islamic State (ISIS) that killed 130 people across multiple sites or the 2016 Nice truck attack that killed 86 people and injured 458 others.
And this threat is not confined to Europe. Across the broader West, Islamist extremism continues to erupt into violence, most recently in Australia, where a Pakistani national and his son attacked a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach, killing 15 people (not including the attacker) and injuring 40.
Yet despite the dramatic surge in attacks, European governments are clamoring for even more migrants from the world’s leading hotbeds of terrorism. Even in Australia, where the Muslim population is significantly smaller than in Western Europe, at roughly three percent, Islamist extremism has produced the country’s worst mass shooting in nearly 30 years.
The issue of Islamic violence is not simply a failure of integration policy or insufficient funding for assimilation programs. It is a failure of the assumption that, at scale, all cultures are compatible with Western Civilization.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller emphatically stated this position in a recent social media post:
“This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
Societies governed by Islamist fundamentalism have inherent cultural incompatibilities with Western culture. Large-scale immigration from these societies makes the kinds of violence witnessed at Christmas markets and Jewish religious events entirely predictable.
Of course, acknowledging this reality causes the mainstream media to frame these legitimate concerns as “racist” and “xenophobic.”
The “problem,” according to our liberal betters, is that the West is Islamophobic and needs to stop telling immigrants to assimilate. In fact, expecting foreigners to integrate is just another form of “racism,” we are told.
In truth, the real problem is the refusal of Western leaders to acknowledge that some cultures, when imported at scale through decades of mass immigration, are simply incompatible with the West.
That’s not to say that these cultures are all inherently bad, or that every individual raised in them is bad. But it is to say that the current status quo should be unacceptable.
Continuing down this road will not only result in a loss of national identity, social cohesion, and cultural continuity, but also in a continued loss of life.
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The tension between maintaining open public spaces and ensuring security is really challenging for democratic societies. What's interesting is how the visible securitization itself becomes part of the cultural erosion, when concrete barriers and armed patrols turn festive markets into fortified zones it changes the character of what these spaces meant. I remember visiting Christmas markets in Prague in the early 2000s and the vibe was so diferent from what I saw last year in Berlin. The assimilation vs integration debate misses the scale issue though, small diasporas integrate organically through social pressure and opportunity but at mass migration levels those incentives flip and parallel societies form instead. It's not xenophobic to notice that importing demographic concentrations from places with fundamentally different legal traditions and religious norms creates predictable frictions.