Now, in the first days of the new year, most people tend to take stock of how the previous year went, what it has brought them, their family and their country. And a moment later, we start looking ahead to the future. It would be nice to know what lies ahead for us and our loved ones. We find that it is getting increasingly more difficult to navigate our way in the growing amount of uncertainties and fear all around us. Moreover, it is no longer merely the professional fearmongers and those envisioning evil and conspiracies behind everything who fuel this feeling, but the actual news and events affecting our lives.
In the last week closing the year, the cities of Western Europe looked like fortresses under siege. According to leaked reports, Islamist terror cells were planning an attack on New Year's Eve. Among the suspected targets were Cologne Cathedral, St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna and sites in Spain. Tens and hundreds of thousands of police, gendarmes, soldiers and firefighters were deployed on the streets in the lead up to and New Year's Eve.
It turned out that the European network of the Islamic State (ISIS) was preparing an attack, which thanks to the effective work of the intelligence agencies was located and dismantled in time. Thank God! - we could sigh in relief. Unfortunately, the situation is far from being that simple as these eight alleged ISIS terrorists are not who the West should be worried about the most.
New Year's Eve 2022 proved this, when gangs of migrant background individuals and their sympathizers turned big cities into battlefields.
The Western leftist-liberal elite and their ardently supportive media have even this year not dared name the real reasons for the warlike readiness. It is easier to blame fewer than a dozen terrorists than to admit the truth: that by accepting and in fact enthusiastically ideologizing support for illegal migration, they themselves have brought about this unfortunate state of affairs.
Moreover, in the last days of the year, Brussels adopted a migration pact that will only make everyday life in the western half of Europe worse, more dangerous and increasingly unlivable. Last year, nearly a million mostly young soldiers of Muslim faith, joined this occupying army.
They showed their strength in France last summer, when major cities were in flames for days. Now, on New Year's Eve, French, German, Belgian - the list is long - politicians feared their cities would be set ablaze again - for fun, out of anger, contempt or simply because the perpetrators can. These occupiers are increasingly often openly saying that they consider Western Europe as their own property and they see the indigenous people living there as prey, whose daughters and wives can be gang-raped with impunity as independent, sensitized courts will acquit them anyway.
The wave of protests in the West following Hamas's brutal attack on Israel showed what the Islamic radicals living there really think about the law and order, culture and historical traditions of the countries and people - Jews, Christians and quite simply the people of Europe - that took them in and support them.
The Western leftist-liberal elite still thinks that deploying tens of thousands of armed officers out onto the streets for a few days will solve the problem. 2023 has shown that this has long been untrue. Yet, they are ramping up their migration frenzy and want to impose it on Central Europe by force. "May the neighbor's cow die, too" the desperate farmer wishes [reference to a Hungarian expression of wishing suffering on others if I am suffering - ed] . That's how they act.
Furthermore, on top of the situation they created with their misguided policies, they are even playing with the fire of war. These politicians, who see themselves as educated, sophisticated and truly European, are angrily shaking their fists at Russia. They have depleted their armies' stores, as well as their countries' wallets. They are giving everything to Ukraine in a war that is completely antithetical to Europe's interests and utterly pointless for us, while deluding their citizens into believing that it is all in their interests.
That it is Ukrainian soldiers who are stopping the Russian army, that is already mobilizing against the West. True, they are also claiming that Russia has been weakened under the weight of purportedly tough Western sanctions packages. In their deceptive, politically motivated predictions to their secret services, Russia is constantly falling apart, its people are rebelling against Putin, who is terminally ill and dies at least once a month. But, at the same time, Moscow must be feared, because it will inundate Europe. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers are allegedly dying on the front lines and their weapons are running out.
In a word, this infinitely sophisticated Western elite acts as if they had never let in the actual enemy.
This radical Islamist mass of millions is no longer outside our walls, but has already set up its positions inside our cities. They are in the left-wing political parties, in education, in the economy and even within the armed forces. And their numbers are practically inexhaustible, as they keep arriving by land and sea. This is the real danger in Europe in the new year.
Substantive negotiations with the Russians should start as soon as possible to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible. Otherwise, we can fear that millions of migrants from Africa and Asia will be released onto our continent through a few destabilization operations acquired from America. That would have truly tragic consequences.
Unfortunately, I can't predict what will happen in 2024, but I do know that whatever difficult times come, we have to persevere and protect ourselves. It was so nice to see how peacefully and joyfully we celebrated New Year's in Budapest and in the countryside, without the need for deploying tens of thousands of police and soldiers. This is our value; if we preserve it, there can be no great harm. That I can predict.
The author is a security policy adviser at the Center for Fundamental Rights
Cover photo: Police officers during the New Year's Eve riots in Berlin (Photo: DPA/AFP/Paul Zinken)
