A Cataclysmic Europe

Just before Shabbos, on the 18th of March, a perpetrator of the Paris terror, Salah Abdeslam, was captured in Brussels. To quote one of the Belgian daily newspapers, Le Soir, “This spectacular arrest allows Belgium to dust off its pride.”

Not four days later, on Tuesday morning, a shock wave passed through Belgium as three bombs exploded: two at the airport and one in the subway in the center of town. Initial reports listed at least 32 dead and hundreds wounded in grisly scenes of chaos and disbelief.

We know whose world it really is. How do you explain to a non-believer that a young Jewish girl scheduled to depart from Brussels couldn’t get to the airport on time because her mother’s car had a flat tire, and when her suitcases were transferred to her father’s car, it also had a flat? How do you explain a healthy yungerman’s sudden, unprecedented, early-morning dizzy spell resulting in a 10-minute delay in crossing the street and entering the terminal to the American Airlines counter — where the bomb had just exploded?

A believing Jew needs no explanation.

On the other hand, a Belgian citizen, fleeing the ravages at the airport, saw some bearded Yidden in a car. He banged on the hood and screamed, “It’s all you Jews’ fault!”

It’s always the Jew.

I’m sure Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of the U.N. will have something similar to say: It’s all about Israel and Palestine. Give the poor people of Palestine back their land (meaning, give them our land).

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu delivered a speech in a live broadcast to the AIPAC conference in Washington, DC, on Tuesday. Responding to the horrific attacks in Brussels earlier in the day, he said, “Terrorists have no resolvable grievances. It’s not as if we could offer them Brussels, or Istanbul, or the West Bank. That won’t resolve their grievances … Their basic demand is that we simply should disappear,” he said, emphasizing, “Well, my friends, that’s not going to happen.”

On Friday, when Abdeslam was caught, Belgium and the rest of Europe (along with most of European Jewry) breathed a sigh of relief — and stuck its head back in the sand.

I believe we are slipping toward a precipice — and I believe we should all leave. My husband calls me Chicken Little and I call him The Ostrich; we have become the “Foigel Family” — two birds, neither of which can fly away.

I never imagined that so many Belgian Jews read the English Hamodia. I am constantly being stopped by people who have read my previous article, “Eye of the Storm” [Nov. 25, 2015], an exposé on the plight of European Jewry. Their questions and tones vary:

“So, when are you packing up and leaving?” (a tinge of sarcasm).

“Do you really believe it’s as bad as all that?”(slightly worried).

“Where do you suggest we go?”(seriously asking for my opinion!).

“You wrote exactly what I was thinking, but I wasn’t able to put it into words” (in approval!).

Living in Europe, I follow the European news religiously and I think that much as they are terrified to admit it, the governments of Europe’s greatest powers — England, France and Germany — are at a loss as to how to deal with the Muslim wolf growling at the door. But the wolf has already battered the door down and is in the house! What now? The demographic is overwhelming and terrifying, influencing and then determining each country’s politics.

The dust has settled in France since those terrible November attacks in Paris. The dead have been laid to rest, and Paris is trying to regain its spirit and continue on as La Ville Lumière, the City of Light. But French Jews are slowly and silently leaving for Israel. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, in an attempt to stem the exodus, insists that France won’t be a country if its Jews are not there.

I won’t even touch the statistic of how many ­Muslim-French marriages there are, and how this statistic will, in the very near future, influence French politics and demographics. As a frequent visitor to Paris, I can personally attest to the fact that the Muslim population has an overwhelming presence in the capital. I usually visit the “Pletzel,” the Jewish quarter, and you can feel the tension up and down the street. What was once the nucleus of Parisian Jewish life is just a sad memory. The streets are quiet and deserted; very few Jews are out shopping or just “shmoozing.”

The latest French headlines are terrifying. A leaked memo from the Department of Public Security details how there has been ­radicalization within the national police force itself.

Germany is led by a kind, gentle, yet very capable Mrs. Merkel. Her country has been overrun by Syrian migrant “refugees,” Muslims who have been raised since infancy to hate Jews, all Jews. Even before the tsunami of Syrian refugees, Germany was home in mid-2015 to 4,770,000 Muslims and 247,000 Jews. Not only is the German government finding it difficult to deal with the masses of migrants with respect to food and shelter, but following 500 gang attacks over a holiday in Cologne, the Germans are finding it impossible to catch and punish the perpetrators. Had anyone in Germany bothered to check how many terrorists infiltrated among the “innocent” refugees? What horrors still wait to be unleashed?

Recently, a German court ruled that the Arab terrorists who ­firebombed a shul should be released because “the act wasn’t anti-Semitic, just anti-Zionist.” (And that’s okay?) May their actions come back to bite them! Hitler had a dream of an Aryan race; I am an eyewitness to the collapse of that dream. I can personally attest to the mixed citizenry of today’s Germany.

Great Britain has a slightly better track record where its Jews are concerned, and Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to stamp out anti-Semitism; but again, the numbers are not in his favor. Neither is the clout the Muslims wield in the commercial and financial centers of Britain. There are 2,869,000 Muslims and 310,000 Jews, and in 2015 alone there have been more than 1,000 “incidents” in Great Britain. I call them “incidents” because that is how they are referred to by the BBC when the victims are Jews, unlike the “brutality” of the IDF against the “poor” Palestinians.

Besides these three major players — England, France and Germany — there are the smaller and less significant countries which are just as infected with anti-Semitic venom. Sweden, whose half a million Muslims greatly outnumber its 9,680 Jews, has come alive with Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism. At the head of the mob is Sweden’s foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom, whose hatred of the Jewish state and the Jews knows no bounds.

While paratroopers continue to guard train stations, airports and public venues all over Europe and the public is subjected to the insults of pat-downs and long delays, heads of state are telling the public not to panic, everything is under control, we’ve captured the terrorist.

Are we supposed to laugh or cry? Everything is not under control. Since the Paris attacks, nothing has improved in the attitudes toward Europe’s Jews. The attacks continue. In France, one Jew has since been murdered, another attacked with a machete, and the Jewish public is being asked not to wear their kippot.

A survey was taken in France: “What is the cause of rising anti-Semitism?” Forty-four percent of the population said “the Jews” — as if we are the cause of this scourge, not its victims.

In Germany, there are daily reports of Jew-hating graffiti, desecration of Jewish cemeteries, Jews being attacked as a result of incitement and rabble-rousing. How do you explain the reissue of Mein Kampf?

In Great Britain, the BBC allowed anti-Semitic ranting on air for 13 minutes, reaching millions. Jews are accosted while doing their shopping, pelted with gas canisters and cries of “Heil Hitler!”

Some weeks ago a Jewish student was attacked at a pro-Israel university event. Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Israeli Secret Service, was giving a lecture on safe spaces in the universities. His conclusion after the attack was that there are no safe spaces for Israeli Jews at British universities.

Europe and its governments have no power; the moderates are outnumbered. The “normal” minority has lost the battle to radicals and terrorists. They may have captured one terrorist — but there are nests of them all over Europe, waiting to strike again as they did on Tuesday. The governments continue to pretend that everything has calmed down. So why am I still being protected by my government’s Paracommandos?

How is everything “under control” when green army convoys are still a daily sight on the streets of Antwerp? They have become a fixture, mainly in the Jewish ghetto, and the community’s appreciation is very visible in the way the paras are greeted and addressed by the community at large. It is heartwarming to see the camaraderie they have with the young schoolboys as they arrive and leave the school buildings. What a pity that they are there as a safety precaution; perhaps, chas v’shalom, even to use their weapons to protect our innocent children.

This year Purim in Antwerp was more subdued than it has been in a long, long time — probably since World War II. The Jewish circular, “Shabbos B’Shabbato,” distributed every Erev Shabbos by the Machzike Hadas’s Rabbi Pinchas Kornfeld, has drawn the boundaries on just what was acceptable as far as Purim costumes are concerned. No guns, no firecrackers, no masks; this according to the State Council, because it would only cause tension and aggravate the “situation.”

Europe is one great festering wound, covered in the dust of camouflage and evasion, but that dust is turning to mud, and that mud will become a landslide, burying everyone and everything. What surprises me is that America thinks it is immune to the malaise that is spreading like wildfire in Europe.

This is history repeating itself, the same old story from the eighth century being revived in the 21st. Forty-four million Muslims are living in Europe today, with the ultimate Islamic goal of turning Europe into a caliphate, beginning with their commandment of the Hegira, the Invasion.

Who is safe in Europe?

Did I ask who is safe in Europe? Who is safe the world over? No one! Not Catholic, not Protestant, not agnostic and certainly not the Jew. The Jew is the canary in the coal mine; the Jew is everyone’s scapegoat.

Toby Orlander Thaler is the author of Who by Fire Who by Sword — available in bookstores worldwide. She is currently completing her next book.