For European Elites, It’s Still 'See No Islamist Evil'

A day after an Islamist rampage against a British synagogue and two days after the indictment in Berlin of three suspected Hamas members for planning terror attacks in Germany, German chancellor Friedrich Merz and French president Emanuel Macron met in Saarbrücken, Germany, and warned of . . . right-wing threats to European democracies. Neither said a word about the Manchester assault or the Berlin indictment.

Instead, Merz announced to the European potentates commemorating the 35th anniversary of German reunification that “our liberal way of life is under attack, from both outside and within.” German broadcaster Deutsche Welle decoded for the clueless: Merz’s enemy “within” was the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s voice for immigration restrictionism.

Macron connected those external and internal threats: “authoritarian countries” outside Europe are “aligned with the extreme parties” inside Europe, he said. Europe’s “extreme parties” embrace a “new nationalism,” based on “hate of the other,” according to Macron. Unless European democrats fend off the “dark Enlightenment,” the European continent would become “like many others,” filled with “conspiracy theorists, extremes, noise, and fury.”

It required no decoding to pick up the reference to the North American continent.