In this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler explore the troubling phenomenon of immigrants attacking the cultures they chose to join, including attacks on Christmas markets in Europe.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. 

Jack Fowler: Victor, let me get right to this story. All over Europe, Muslims are desecrating churches and holy places and disrupting seasonal Christmas markets. So, last night—we’re recording on Sunday the 30th. So, this was Saturday, Nov. 29. I’m reading from an X post in Brussels:

“In a terrifying sight, Muslims stormed the opening night of the Christmas market in Brussels, waving Palestinian flags, setting off smoke bombs and scaring families. Coming to your town if Islam is not exiled from the West.”

Victor, I’ve seen numerous other videos. Germany, particularly, has these Christmas seasonal things in their plazas, and now many places they’re surrounded by these massive concrete blocks to prevent any car bombings, etc. I don’t know that German citizens are going to be car bombing their Christmas seasonal markets. It’s all because of the growing and intensifying local Muslim outrage at these kind of institutions. Also, we see many signs of church masses being disrupted, priests being smacked, urinating at St. Peter’s, etc. This is getting more prevalent. Your thoughts? 

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I’ll just enumerate them. There are many. No. 1, there’s no reciprocity. Thank God. I mean, do you really believe that if you were a Christian, and there’s a few left in the West Bank, but if you were in the West Bank and you decided to go to the feast of Ramadan, go desecrate a mosque, I don’t think you’d be alive.

No. 2, what is the reaction of the authorities to this, the government? Well, the reaction of the government is, we are left-wing secularists, maybe agnostics or even atheists. So, we look at our Christians as deviant people. So, if you want to go torment them, we’re not going to get involved. In fact, DEI postulates that we should favor the non-white, non-European, non-Christian movement over its antithesis here in Europe or the United States. 

So, these people who desecrate Christmas ornaments, festivities, shrines do so on the prompt basically, implicit though it is, that they can get away with it because the authorities either are so guilt-ridden and ashamed of their own culture and civilization and inheritance or, as secular leftists, they feel that they despise Christians too. And then, when you confront them, like Greta Thunberg, she was on a ship with a bunch of radical Islamists, and they were not very sympathetic to the trans movement or the gay movement. So, there’s all these contradictions between the Left and radical Islam, but compared to their mutual antipathy toward Christians, it’s not much.

Then there’s the question, not just of reciprocity and the inaction of authorities, but what is the purpose of it, Jack? Why do people come from the failed states of the Middle East or Turkey and come over here, here in the West, I’m speaking broadly of the United States and Europe, and then no sooner they get here, they create a chauvinist, rah-rah superiority of Islamic countries and Arab countries over their homeland in Europe. Is it, we’re going to take over and that Europe belongs to us and our demographics are 3.5 to 4.0 children per family in Europe’s 1.4? So, they’re vanishing at 20 million a year and we’re increasing by 5 million and we’re going catch them.

Is that the plan or is it just a complex of inferiority? Well, I came over here and everything works and it’s so much nicer. Who do these people think they are? There must be something they did to us in Syria or Iraq or Egypt or Jordan or the West Bank. It’s not like this. Maybe it was the Crusades. I don’t know. But it’s a very strange mentality for them to come to United States or to Europe and then so boldly to attack an icon of the civilization that you wanted to join.

I don’t mean you have to go to church. I don’t mean you have to know anything about the Bible. I’m just saying just don’t desecrate it. But they think they can and will be rewarded in some ways by the exemptions they’re given. It’s going to get worse because the demographics are on their side and the immigration policies are on their side. And there’s going to be one great pushback. 

And we’ll see what happens. Whether it will be centrist, organized and political, or it will be violent and hard, hardcore right wing. But there will be a pushback. And all of those governments in Western Europe are threatened. The Macron government has no popular support. [British Prime Minister Keir] Starmer is the least popular prime minister in the last … 12% [approval], I think. The Dutch government is a coalition of conservative governments. [Italian Prime Minister Giorgia] Meloni is still solid. She’s conservative.

The Spanish socialist government, we’ll see how long that lasts. But there is a pushback in Europe against it. And it’ll be the last hurrah because demographically this will be about the last chance, really, if the immigration policies proceed that you’ll see an organized effective saying, “No more, not here. We’re not going to do it anymore. I’m sorry.” 

Fowler: What if there are more mosques than operating cathedrals in Europe? 

Hanson: See, it’s very different than here in the United States because we do have a melting pot. Until recently, it worked. When I talk to, let’s say, Mexican American couples or families that are 45, and I’m in the local supermarket, and the person ahead of me cannot speak a word of English and basically speaks an indigenous language from Chiapas or Michoacan and has four or five different EBT cards, and the person who is the clerk and the person ahead of me in line are Mexican American citizens and they’re very patriotic and proud. They look at that in the same way I would look at it if a bunch of Swedish illegal aliens came over and abused the system, and I had a member of my family depended on dialysis or something and couldn’t get service.

Because we acculturate people, at least we used to when they came in diverse numbers and they were manageable and we believed in our civilization. They don’t have that tradition of the melting pot. They were pretty much like the Japanese. They were uniformly French. The decolonization started it. Enoch Powell, “Rivers of Blood” and all that. They were aware of what was going on in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, but not like now. 

And they have no mechanism to acculturate. 

Fowler: Can you imagine, though, in 75 years, if the demographics proved the destiny of Europe, what Europe would be like? Germany is now essentially Jordan and in all its ways and operation and economy. 

Hanson: I think it would be historically sort of like around 900 BC, when you were in the Greek Dark Ages and you walked around and you looked at these Mycenaean palaces that were crumbling and what was that Lion’s Gate? Hmm. My brother fell into a Tholos tomb. Who built these? They were gods. Somebody did it. Or maybe the sixth century in Western Europe in the beginnings of the Dark Ages and you’d go by and say, wow, the Roman Forum. 

What’s beneath all that brush? All that overgrowth. What was this harbor at Ostia that now is all clogged? Who were these people who built this stuff? We use this aqueduct, but we don’t know how to fix it. Who built it? Wow, there’s a sewer here in Lyon. I don’t know how it came here. So, that’s going to be the attitude. They’re going to come in there, and they’re going to be living in an infrastructure that somebody built, but they have no interest in knowing who that was. And we get in the news of the violence they have no interest in assimilating into the body politic and enhancing European culture in the sense of its economy, military, politics. 

Fowler: Right. There’s no Protestant work ethic in the Syrian refugees. 

Hanson: No. So, they’re just going to be bizarre. Who was Leonardo da Vinci? What was the Duomo? Who did this? Perseus? Saulini? I don’t know what this statue is. Who did this? I could care less. The bridge still works. I’ll use it till it collapses. That’s the attitude. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Victor Davis Hanson: Targeting Christians at Christmas, Attacking the Culture They Chose to Join appeared first on The Daily Signal.