Giulio Meotti is an Italian journalist with Il Foglio,member of the Middle East Forum and writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author, in English, of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books, in addition to books in Italian. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Gatestone, Frontpage and Commentary.
Iran sends to the gallows the first woman guilty of having demonstrated against the Islamic regime, Bita Hemmati.
Meanwhile, in the soft underbelly of Berlin, in that Alexanderplatz which was the stage for Hitlerian parades, DDR marches and today tourist selfies, an incredible pantomime has taken place. Anti-Western and anti-Israel hatred becomes a macabre staging.
Four idiots in white tracksuits and Palestinian keffiyehs, tied up like salamis, sacks on their heads, dangle from a makeshift gallows. Arab music at full volume, children in the audience watching open-mouthed, fanatics with green-red-black flags shouting “Solidarity with Palestine" while mimicking the hanging. One holds a woman on a leash like a dog.
And the German police? The police observe, film, take notes and then go home. Official reason: “There was no real violence." One shouts into the microphone: “There is only one state, Palestine 48."
This is not a demonstration. It is an imported tribal rite, a butchers’ recital disguised as artistic performance, celebrated in the heart of the nation that, more than any other, should know what a gallows and a sack on the head mean.
In Gaza, the darling of these absurd and violent crowds, executions take place as public and summary trials: the condemned are killed in the middle of the street while people watch and film with their phones. Berlin, the city that gave birth to the 20th century and its monstrosities, today becomes the stage of a theater of horror in which the executioners are transformed into victims and their imitators into street heroes.
Barbarism that does not come from the desert, but from our own comfortable living room. Because these clowns with the noose did not fall from the sky; they were invited, tolerated, coddled by decades of suicidal multiculturalism, by that cultural relativism that has turned Europe into a brothel without rules where anyone can bring their bloodthirsty god and demand that it be respected.
Hamas, which raped, burned people alive, beheaded and filmed everything to enjoy it in streaming, is now mimicked in a European square as if it were the Carnival of Venice. And we, with our snobbish “progressive" superiority, pretend that it is “legitimate protest".
And the German State - the same State that has spent billions to remember the Holocaust - now allows executions to be mimed in the name of an ideology that denies that very Holocaust. Why? Because it is afraid. Afraid of accusations of Islamophobia, afraid of social media, afraid of losing the votes of the peripheries that are no longer German.
In less than one generation, 20 percent of Germany will be Islamic. Perhaps by that date we will really see hangings in the square?
Europe is not dying of old age, but of cowardice. It has imported millions of people who do not share its values - they not only do not share them, they despise them - and instead of demanding integration it has encouraged them to remain themselves.
Result? Neighborhoods where sharia is more alive than Kant, where veiled women look with disgust at European women who dare to show their ankles, where the boys dream of the caliphate while we pay their benefits. And when these same boys go down to the square to simulate hangings, the cultured left - the one that until yesterday screamed against every cross in the classroom - stays silent or applauds. Because for them the West is always guilty, Israel is always the colonialist and Hamas is only “resistance".
Remember Orwell? “Whoever controls the past controls the future." Well, these activists are rewriting the present: they turn the executioners into martyrs and the martyrs into oppressors. And Europe, with its short drunkard’s memory, lets them do it.
The gallows of Alexanderplatz is therefore the terminal symptom. It is the proof that Europe has lost its survival instinct. That it prefers to be “inclusive" to the point of death rather than “intolerant" - yes, intolerant - toward those who hate it. And while our intellectuals sign appeals for a “ceasefire" (always only from one side), the barbarians laugh, film and upload their symbolic victory to TikTok.
The barbarism is in the heart of Europe, it is inside us, in the cowardly refusal to call things by their name, it is in the suicidal multiculturalism that turns hospitality into surrender, tolerance into masochism, respect for differences into an abdication of reason.
But the noose, once lowered, will not distinguish between designated victims and silent accomplices.