The War On Christmas has gone international, and escalated considerably.
Oh, and speaking of Christmas:
German Police Arrest Islamist Teens Planning Attack on Christmas Market, Synagogue
I remember, seven years ago, writing about two young women I’d met, from opposite ends of Germany, who told me they’d decided not to sing with their caroling groups at Christmas markets any more because, as one put it, “Christmas is now a target”. And I also recall how many friends on the so-called “right” suggested I was exaggerating the threat. This was the headline on Ed West’s Spectator column the following year:
Christmas markets without armed police are now a thing of the past
And so the first sign of the holidays in Europe, and indeed in New York, is watching the Christmas bollards get installed in preparation for the season of goodwill to all men – if you can afford all those security barriers. From longtime reader Robert Strauss six years ago:
Mark,
There’s something so disheartening and depressing about the closing of the Lyons Christmas market due to the cost of security concerns that it makes a person just plain tired. Christmas markets are such wonderful traditions: fun and kitsch (in the most wonderful way) and beautiful and singularly atmospheric. I love walking through them. It’s where a kid’s face lights up and a grandparent can escape back into kid-like memories.
And now it’s going away. I can’t help but think of the hashtag-“not-going-to-let-it-affect-our-daily-lives” mantra coming from the likes of Obama, Sadiq Khan, Theresa, and soda-tax enthusiast Jim Kenney. Hey, the gift-packaged barriers really look nice and Christmasy, don’t they? Nothing abnormal there, people. Just pretend there still is a Christmas market when you look at the cute, packaged barriers and enjoy the carols in your earbuds.
What a sad, heartbreaking crock.
Bob S.
As I received the above, came news of the 2017 vehicular jihad in a thoroughly bollardized Melbourne. That last one I wrote about, but you can’t write about them all – because you’d go mad writing the same column over and over while the western world’s political class sticks its fingers in its ears and says, “Nya-nya, can’t hear you!” No amount of death or destruction will persuade them to address the issue. And so once open, shared traditions become throttled by bollards and security. And in meekly agreeing to surrender our future we lose our past, too.
How could it be otherwise? The war being half-heartedly waged against yodeling Pisslamic jihadis isn’t some small-scale “police action” or yet another far-removed brushfire conflict which effete Westerners can laconically forget about or ignore as a minor annoyance that doesn’t really affect them all that much—most especially not when we’ve permitted our so-called “leaders” to dump several divisions’ worth of enemy soldiers into our very laps, either via studiously looking the other way as they waltz across our nonexistent southern border or just importing them directly, resettling them en masse under the threadbare cover of “refugee” status.
No, this one is for all the marbles, I’m afraid, with the highest imaginable stakes for every last one of us. It’s an existential war, quite literally, and the losing side in that sort of war loses absolutely everything.
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