What Can Be Done About the Arson Attacks on Churches in Europe?

I wrote earlier today about how churches are burning in Germany. In that article, I quoted a 2018 article I wrote here about similar church burnings in France. And in the years since then, the attacks in France, as in Germany, have only grown in number: the urine and excrement in the baptismal fonts, or smeared on the walls, the broken crucifixes, the decapitated and smashed statues of Jesus, Mary, and the saints; the looting of silver, the smashing of altarpieces, the breaking of altars, the ripped up hymn books, and so much more destruction of every kind. Devout Christians have not been spared. 85-year-old Jacques Hamel was a French priest murdered in July 2016 during a terrorist attack at his church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Normandy. Two jihadists pledging allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS) attacked the church during morning Mass, took several hostages, and slit the 85-year-old priest’s throat while he was conducting the morning mass.

What can be done? First, massive publicity should be given to those attacks on the churches of Europe, so that the indigenous French, Germans, British, and other peoples now living with millions of Muslims in their midst are fully aware of what damage is being done by those Muslims to the religious, artistic, and cultural heritage of the people of Europe. Political leaders should visit churches that have been attacked, with film crews recording every kind of profanation, including that excrement in the baptismal fonts, and the broken crucifixes, and the decapitated statues of Jesus, Mary, and the saints, and the torn prayer books, and the smashed altars. This destruction ought to be talked about in parliamentary sessions devoted to the theme of “our vanishing heritage,” on news programs, in addresses by political leaders to the public who need and deserve to know just how extensive these assaults on Christian sites have become. Let the indigenous peoples of Europe rouse themselves, in the manner that John Milton described in Areopagitica: “Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks.”

The governments of Europe must do much more to preserve their churches and their contents: They should increase security, with CCTV cameras placed inside and outside all the churches, no matter how small; alarm systems should be connected from every church to the local police stations, and armed gendarmes, or polizei or police or polizia standing guard on the parvis of every cathedral and church, during the hours when they are unlocked, should certainly be a start. The punishment for attacks on churches should be made more severe, with crippling fines and multi-year sentences.

But in the end, the best way to preserve these Christian sites that Muslims target for destruction is to call a halt to any further Muslim immigration, and to discourage Muslim economic migrants already inEurope from staying. This can be done in several ways. All welfare benefits can be withheld from these economic migrants for a certain period — say, during the first five years of their presence in the country. Instead, these migrants would have a work requirement imposed. If they are unhappy with this new arrangement, and wish to leave, the government will supply them with tickets so that they can return to their countries of origin. Governments would also deport any foreign national convicted of a crime above the level of a misdemeanor. We know from the data provided by governments that the Muslim migrants have rates of criminality, depending on the country, from five to ten times that of non-Muslims. Across Europe, tens or even hundreds of thousands of convicted criminals — migrants, almost all of whom will be Muslims — could be deported under this arrangement. Every European government should have a group of people dedicated to one task: decreasing the presence of Muslim migrants in the country, whether through carrots (payment of a small sum, plus a ticket home, to those who self-deport) or through sticks (deportation of those convicted of crimes, ending all welfare payments to migrants during the first five years of their presence in the country, deporting those who originally claimed to be asylum-seekers but, given a change in regime, that claim is no longer valid). Think of millions who fled Syria because of the civil war, or because they were persecuted by Bashar Assad’s regime; now they have no good reason not to return to Syria.

Europe, to modify a famous phrase from Angela Merkel, “you can do this.”