The Mannheim attacks reveal Europe’s impotence The continent's elites have built a system destined to fail

It isn’t even the first time Stürzenberger’s protests have been attacked. He has been assaulted twice before by Islamists, in 2013 and in 2022. Why? Well, according to the mainstream media, he is a far-Right extremist. As Euronews puts it: he has been “previously linked to Pegida, a xenophobic extreme-Right group with a strong neo-Nazi following, prompting an investigation by the German federal state’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution”.

And what did this investigation uncover? Little more than the fact that he’s a relatively normal man who condemns Islamic violence — and who, like many such people, including some of my friends, has now ended up being stabbed. Yet Stürzenberger’s normalcy hasn’t stopped the German legal system from persecuting him. One of his convictions was for sharing a photo on Facebook of a Nazi shaking hands with an Islamic cleric, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Not a doctored photo. Just a photo. After all, photos reveal facts — but in Germany, even sharing the government’s own statistics can get you a criminal record.

Last week’s attack prompted the standard response from the German political establishment. The Chancellor condemned it. He expressed sadness. His government promises to investigate, to defend “against Islamist terrorism with determination”. But did anyone buy it? Though there are exceptions like Hungary, these attacks seem to happen regardless of national borders, and regardless of whether the country in question has a Left-wing or a Right-wing government.

The more cynical among us are inclined to claim that they keep happening because no one really cares. But that is lazy thinking. Not all of these politicians are feckless monsters, however temporarily gratifying it may feel to say so.

So why do they seem to do nothing? Part of the answer — a significant part of the answer — lies with the cluster of policies and assumptions that all mainstream European countries have written into their rules regarding immigration.

The first concerns treaties. These governments are signatories to international treaties that inadvertently leave them with no option but to leave their borders unprotected and to allow unwanted migrants to stay put. The Geneva Convention on Refugees. The European Court of Human Rights. As long as these are in place, national governments can do little to stop Islamists from entering — even if they wanted to.

The second concerns constitutions. Western nations abide by constitutional laws that leave them with no alternative but to allow the Islamists to recruit operatives and establish networks, mosques, schools and charities devoted to the spread of political Islam. Again, there is nothing they are able to do, because Islam is not singled out in their constitution as a singular cause for concern. If it were, the lawyers for these institutions would sue, saying that it is illegal to treat Islam differently. And, infuriatingly, under the current system, they would be right.

The third concerns perceptions. Our governments assume that anyone — citizen or organisation; journalist, politician or academic — critical of the government’s way of handling Islamism is a dangerous bigot who must be shamed into silence. Maybe such attitudes were forgivable half a century ago, but it is pretty obvious now that there is nothing bigoted about fearing Islamism. Islamists make that clear with increasing regularity. Nonetheless, it is not as if any human is immune to the effects of the echo chamber. The elites swim in a pool where everyone believes that racism underlies opposition to open borders. This is particularly true of Germany’s elites, who are still so focused on stopping the re-emergence of Nazism that they see it everywhere, and are blind to any other threat.

What this means is that, without a seismic shift, there is actually very little that can easily be done about the first two problems. Even if he wanted to, the Chancellor of Germany does not have the authority to change Germany’s basic law, let alone an electoral mandate. And while the Bundestag could just about get Germany out of some of its international treaties, because those treaties underwrite Germany’s international relations, they underwrite the trade her economy needs for survival.

The constitutional problem is broadly similar. All constitutions lack perfect foresight. Of course, it’s true that, when these documents were written, states had no business treating religions differently. But that was before Islamism arrived. Once Islamic migration really began in earnest, the days of procedural neutrality should have ended. And while none of this is to say that peaceful, patriotic Muslims should be targeted, Islamism — as I well know — is plainly different.

We do not yet know whether Mannheim’s second attacker, who stabbed an AfD politician on Tuesday night, was an asylum-seeker. He may have just been an ordinary immigrant, or even a German-born citizen. But if I were a betting woman, I would bet he came in on one of the many schemes designed to help threatened people, in very small numbers, in a previous era. Most conventions around refugees were drawn up just after the Second World War or the Cold War, with those conflicts’ problems in mind. Things are different now, and the change is killing our nations.

What is the cure? It certainly doesn’t involve electing a centre-right government. As the past 14 years in the UK have shown, centre-right governments do nothing. Instead, what is needed is a shift in international and constitutional law, or events like those in Germany will just keep happening until the nations of Europe collapse.

No doubt I’ll write this article again in a year. And the year after that. But if we think big, and enough of us wake up, then one day, I’ll be able to stop. Until then.

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an UnHerd columnist. She is also the Founder of the AHA Foundation, and host of The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast. Her Substack is called Restoration.

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