Jihadists from the Middle East and South Asia have killed and injured an alarming number of Germans in recent months. But for some reason, German politicians can’t muster the will to protect the country’s borders and expel jihadists. U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a scathing assessment of the problem during his February 14, 2025, speech at the Munich Security Conference.
The door to hell, we can still close together.
“The greatest threat in Europe, and I’d say the greatest threat in the U.S. until about 30 days ago, is that you’ve had the leaders of the West decide that they should send millions and millions of unvetted foreign migrants into their countries,” Vance said.
During his talk, he cited an attack that took place the previous day when a 24-year-old asylum-seeker and radical Islamist from Afghanistan plowed his car into a group of labor union demonstrators from the United Services Union (VERDI) in the Bavarian capital. A woman and her two-year-old daughter died of their injuries, and at least 36 people were wounded in the attack perpetrated by a jihadist shouting “Allahu Akbar!”
“How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction?” Vance asked. “No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.”
Days after Vance spoke at the Munich Security Conference, another jihadist attack took place when Syrian refugee named Wassim al M. went to Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial to stab Jews. The attacker, 19-year-old Syrian, who joined the Islamic State after arriving in Germany, seriously wounded a Spanish tourist. Both of these attacks hearkened back to another one perpetrated in January 2025, when an Afghan migrant stabbed two people—including a two-year old boy—to death in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg.
Failure to Respond
The Aschaffenburg attack prompted Germany’s expected new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, from the conservative Christian Democratic Union party, to submit a symbolic nonbinding resolution and a binding bill to limit immigration before the February 23 election. Before to the vote on the enforceable bill called “Influx Limitation Act,“ Merz told lawmakers “The door to hell, we can still close together.“
While the non-binding motion—which urged that more migrants be stopped at Germany’s borders—passed, the draft legislation aimed at reducing immigration numbers failed to secure enough votes.
Former Chancellor Merkel rebuked Merz for working with the AfD to pass the resolution and some of the MPs from the CDU broke ranks with Merz to oppose the anti-immigration legislation.
The failure of German officials and politicians to act outraged one of the few outspoken German columnists, Gunnar Schupelius, who avoids euphemisms when covering immigration and Islamism. Writing about the second February attack in the Berlin-based newspaper, B.Z. in early March, he declared, “The government lets people into the country whom it cannot integrate, and again and again, some of them turn out to be terrorists. It cannot protect the population from terrorism, yet uncontrolled immigration continues and Afghans are even being flown in. This is the catastrophic situation we are in.”
A week earlier, Schupelius wrote of the Syrian terrorist’s attempt to kill Jews in the heart of Berlin: “Yet his actions did not generate much public reaction. How can that be?”
The Cause: Guilt and Fear
Germany is paying the price for the excess of compassion shown by former Chancellor Angela Merkel when she allowed a million immigrants fleeing the upheaval caused by the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa in 2015, explains Richard Landes, a prominent American historian and the author of Can The Whole World” be Wrong: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad.
But while guilt prompted Merkel to allow immigrants in, fear is preventing Germans from expelling them, Landes warns. German elites, Landes said, “are afraid to confront this monster they have imported. If they vigorously try to resist them, they will draw the wrath of jihadism on them.”
Landes warned of the problem in an essay published in the Tablet in 2016, a year after Merkel opened her country’s borders to Muslims steeped in the of ideologies antisemitism, Islamism, and misogyny.“While westerners think they’re being generous,” Landes wrote, “triumphalist Muslims see them complying with their demands, behaving as proleptic dhimmi, who submit without even being conquered.” (Dhimmi is the Arabic word used to describe non-Muslims, Christians and Jews especially, who submit to Muslim rule in exchange for the privilege of practicing their natal religion.)
The Irony of History
The irony is that by allowing guilt over the destruction of Jews during the Holocaust in the 20th century to prompt a failure to protect the country’s borders in the 21st century puts Jews—and ultimately society itself at risk—Landes warns.
“Every democracy that allows its Muslim population to drive out the Jews” will end up with jihadism and the destruction of its democracy, he said, adding that the “elites are imposing a prohibition on confronting and criticizing Islam.” He termed this “the first duty of the dhimmi.”
For his part, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance has doubled down on his critique of Europe’s failure to protect its borders, telling Fox News that Europe is on the brink of “civilizational suicide” if it does not get its act together.
“If you have a country like Germany, where you have another few million immigrants come in from countries that are totally culturally incompatible … Germany will have killed itself,” he said. “I hope they don’t do that because I love Germany.”
