Berlin, the city where Mohammed is the most common name among newborns and Islam has already overtaken Christianity.
A taxpayer-funded event in Charlottenburg. Title: “Decolonizing Christmas.” The organizers, Muslims and Christians, “unmask the colonial and discriminatory imaginary” in the history of Christmas, paid for by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion of Berlin. We are at the Friedenskirche, a stronghold of the Lutheran Church that seems to have mistaken its pulpit for a postcolonial and pro-Hamas seminar room at Columbia University.
“A stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” according to Trump’s White House.
Seyran Ates, a Turkish lawyer under police protection and an unyielding feminist who has challenged Islamic orthodoxy with an audacity that would make Voltaire blush, tells Welt: “In practice, I am speechless and I don’t even know how to describe the developments of the past years. There are countless invitations to break the fast, Ramadan month sees traditional Christmas lights displayed, while here they try to ‘decolonize’ Christianity. I am speechless.”
This is how it works:
The Christmas tree as a metaphor for European imperialism, Santa Claus as an avatar of capitalism and the Nativity as a Eurocentric narrative that hides the “real” Jesus who, if he were here today, would join a “from the river to the sea” demonstration.
Decolonized Christmas was born from a student’s question about the need to do something against “anti-Muslim racism.”
They have moved from “decolonizing Israel” as well as Isaac Newton, mathematics, Mozart and Beethoven to “decolonizing Christmas.”
Multiculturalism, in the name of decolonization, is colonizing itself to the point of self-dissolution. Meanwhile, Christmas markets in Germany are being cancelled due to threats from Islamic terrorism.
On the other hand, Islamic traditions - which are not exactly an homage to universal tolerance, with their Umayyad conquests from Morocco to Indonesia and a Quran that, in numerous verses, sounds more like a war manual than a peace treaty - are celebrated with Ramadan lights hung on municipal buildings and public iftars sponsored by mayors.
Remember Frantz Fanon? In The Wretched of the Earth, the Arab psychiatrist called for violence to free the colonized from their inferiority complex. Well: today the descendants of the colonizers - or rather their masochistic heirs - invoke symbolic violence against themselves, transforming the Nativity into a trial for crimes against humanity.
Baby Jesus, that Jew born in a stable under Roman occupation, suddenly becomes a colonizer!
We have reached Western self-devouring.
If we still had real intellectuals, they would see a great ontological paradox at work. Europe, heir of the religion that made nihilism possible (because it made the “death of God” possible), is self-destructing in the name of an abstract universalism; Islam, which has never accepted the death of God, survives as a non-relativizable presence within Europe’s ruins.
Imagine applying the same standard to Ramadan: a “Decolonizing Ramadan” that unmasks Muhammad’s military campaigns, the colonization of Arabia that reduced Jews and Christians to dhimmi, second-class citizens with jizya as a tax on breathing. But no: that would be Islamophobic, and Islamophobia is the new antisemitism (which as opposed to the old one, must be avoided at all costs) - just trendier and more profitable.
Whenever the West applies the decolonial grid to Islam, it always stops one step before the abyss: our relativism stalls, political correctness becomes taboo, and the woke deconstruction backs off.
And it was the Deutsche Oper in Berlin that cancelled Mozart’s Idomeneo from the season program out of fear of reactions from the Islamic community.
The production by German director Hans Neuenfels featured a finale where King Idomeneus appears on stage with a basket of severed heads: Poseidon’s, Jesus’, Buddha’s, and Muhammad’s.
Islam doesn’t need to decolonize anything: it is already the religion of the Victor in Europe.