Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am very excited to be here in Israel, and I thank former MK Eliezer Cohen for inviting me.
The State of Israel is a modern incarnation of one of the ancient sources of today’s civilization. Our civilization — Western Civilization — traces its origins to the confluence of Judaic, Hellenic, and Roman cultures in what eventually became Christian Europe.
This civilization is now under siege, both from without, and especially from within. I am here today to represent two defenders of our civilization, the Citizens’ Movement Pax Europa — in German, Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa and ACT! for America.
Let me tell you more about each one.
Pax Europa is a European civil rights movement and a human rights organization. Our objectives are to protect not only the democratic, free, and secular rule of law in our country, but also to struggle for European culture based on the Judeo-Christian traditions and — especially — on the values of the Enlightenment. These are the values that are currently under threat throughout the nations of the West.
In order to achieve our objectives, we offer lectures, panel discussions, and conferences. In addition, Pax Europa also participates in the OSCE human dimension. We are an independent, non-partisan movement. We clearly distance ourselves from all right-wing or left-wing extremists and all xenophobic movements. Our sole purpose is to champion the values and freedoms that form the cornerstone of our civilization. Pax Europa is the enemy of anyone who threatens those values and freedoms, and the friend of anyone who defends them.
ACT! for America is the largest national security movement in the United States. It is an issues advocacy organization dedicated to effectively organizing and mobilizing the most powerful grassroots citizen action network in America. We are committed to informed and coordinated civic action that will lead to public policies that promote America’s national security and the defense of American democratic values against the assault of radical Islam.
As an ACT! for America international chapter leader from Austria, I wanted you to know just how much a safe and secure Israel means to me and to Brigitte Gabriel, our organization’s Founder and President who was able to save her life by escaping into northern Israel from war torn Lebanon in 1982.
We value you immensely! We work and fight and pray for you. We support Israeli-made products. We are constantly promoting pro-Israel rallies in the West. We are in your corner and at your side every step of the way.
Thank God for Israel. Know that we will do anything in our power to love, respect and defend you. May God bless you!
Ladies and gentlemen,
No civilization is eternal. Because Western Civilization has been in the ascendant for the last few centuries, there is a tendency to think that what we have built is the final state at which mankind has arrived — that we have reached, as Francis Fukuyama put it, “The End of History”.
This is hubris of the highest order, especially given all the indicators of the dangers currently faced by our civilization, both from without and from within. The signs may not always be obvious, but they are there, and they are growing in number.
The death of a civilization does not come only when sand dunes drift in over the rubble of a once-proud city. The end is not necessarily marked by an invasion of barbarian hordes, or the burning and looting of our homes and businesses.
A civilization can also die from within, when it forgets the core values that once made it great, when it stops believing in its own fundamental tenets.
The disappearance of civilizational self-confidence in Europe can perhaps be traced back to the unimaginable and pointless slaughter of the First World War, or to the Holocaust and other horrors of the Second World War, or to the ravages of seventy years of Communism, or to a societal enervation imposed on the continent by the socialist welfare state — or some combination of all of these.
Whatever the reason, European civilizational self-confidence is all but gone. This is why Multiculturalism has become the dominant ideology in Europe. This is why Europeans have imported millions of unassimilable foreigners. This is why we abase ourselves to the newcomers and accede to their every demand.
Islam is a threat to Europe because the heart of European civilization has already gone cold. If it were still beating, Islam would be of no more concern than it was a century ago, and millions of Muslim immigrants would not be among us.
Those of us who still love our civilization and what it stands for are on the front lines of a new war. People such as Geert Wilders and myself are on trial for speaking out in defense of our liberties and our democracy. Others have been silenced through intimidation, ostracism, and the threat of destitution.
The oligarchs who control the European Union are determined that there shall be no dissenting with their program of abolishing the peoples of Europe and replacing them with another.
This war is a quiet one. It does not involve guns and bombs and tanks and fighter jets. No corpses litter the battlefield.
But it is just as real, and at least as important as any previous war fought on European soil. On its success or failure depends the nature of the civilization that will reside in Europe over the next century — if, indeed, there will be any successor civilization at all.
And Israel is on the front lines of the very same war. Israel is surrounded by the barbarism and backwardness and destitution that awaits us all if we continue to surrender to the evil forces that would destroy Western Civilization. We have only to look at what has happened to Lebanon over the last fifty years to see the future that awaits a modern “multicultural” Europe.
And we only have to look a few kilometers to the south of this spot to see what Israel would be like if it were not inhabited by the Jews. A satellite photograph of the Gaza Strip reveals something telling: when you move a bit south from Ashkelon, or a bit west from Sderot, the rich and productive landscape of Israel abruptly ends and the vast wasteland of Gaza begins. This wasteland extends further south into Egypt, east into Jordan, and north into Lebanon.
Israel is an oasis of civilization in a desert of barbarism.
This is why Israel is so important to the struggle against the Great Jihad. Anyone who is committed to resisting Islamization will find in Israel a natural ally.
This is not a matter of Left and Right. Sharia has no respect for any of our political parties. It does not recognize the very foundation on which our diverse political structures rest.
Make no mistake about it: the fight against sharia is a fight to save civilization itself.
To discover the future of Europe and Israel if the door is not closed against expansionist Islam, examine what remains of Zoroastrian Persia, or Buddhist Afghanistan, or Christian Syria.
This is what awaits us if we do not act now. Our great civilization will be replaced by poverty and despotism and degradation.
Our civilization is ours to reclaim if we only have the will to do it.
Our moment has come.
Thank you.
Previous posts about the hate speech case against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff:
9 comments:
"Our civilization — Western Civilization — traces its origins to the confluence of Judaic, Hellenic, and Roman cultures in what eventually became Christian Europe."
ESW did not include Germanic, Celtic, or Baltic culture and DNA in her list. These are the backbone of Western civilization.
The Slavs probably feel a bit left out, too. And the Etruscans.
ESW's Muttersprache (mother-tongue) in her native Austria, is German. That wasn't a gift from the Romans, Greeks or Jews.
A lot of those Israeli surnames look awfully Germanic, thanks to the Germanic influence on Yiddish and Ashkenazi Jewish culture.
The Germanic languages and Germanic law are at the heart of much of Western civilization.
Runic, the early writing system of much of Europe, has some runes that resemble Etruscan characters. Latin probably wouldn't have been laid down as easily as it did, during the Christianization of Europe, had there not been some similarity between Germanic runes and Roman characters.
The Anglo-Saxon parliamentary system of government owes its roots to the same Germanic customs that gave rise to the Icelandic Althing.
Europe remembers the old Germanic Norse gods in the names of the days of the week: "Tiwaz" or "Tyr" (Tuesday), "Woden" or "Odin" (Wednesday), "Thor" (Thursday) or "Donar" (Donnerstag), and "Frigga" or "Freyja" (Friday or Freitag).
We still hear the racket of Thor's hammer, when we hear Donar's "thunar" (thunder) in the air.
"Donner" and "Blitzen" (Thunder and Lightning) are the amongst the eight tiny reindeer that guide Santa's sleigh through the night, over the candled Christmas trees of Europe-based Western civilization.
(Unfortunately, the European Jews opted not to bring this charming Heathen custom with them to Israel. Had they assimilated this much into their German Jewish culture throughout their centuries in Europe, perhaps atheism would not have gained such a hold on the Western world, along with the "communist" and "multiculti" (Marxist Jewish-at-its-core) strategy to suppress traditional Yuletide Christmas in public places. Then Islam would be having a harder time gaining footholds in the West, and Jews wouldn't be fleeing Malmö.)
If you are in Chicago, you can stop to admire the columns inside the awesome German catholic St. Alphonsus church. Look up at the top of them, and you will see that the capitals are acorns and oak leaves -- another ode to Heathen sacred traditions.
ESW delivered her speech in English, which is a Germanic language, another Germanic language utilized by at least half of world Jewry.
Perhaps ESW will consider bringing along a set of Jakob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (Teutonic mythology), and a few photos of ancient runestones, on her next trip to Israel.
I encourage ESW to not limit herself to a "Judeo-Christian" characterization of Western civilization. There is much more to European identity than Greeks, Romans and Jews. To strengthen Europe against Islamic incursion, we need to draw on the gifts of our Heathen ancestors, and bless our children with the gifts of the history behind these reminders of our powerful and splendid European heritage.
The lack of European civizilatoinal self confidence can be traced to the far lefts attacks on Western Civilization so they could take over the West. Now with the left in tatters because of the fall of communism and the economic crisis we are seeing the Moslems reap the benefits of the far lefts treason.
Richard, they can be traced to the Enlightenment, actually.
I have to agree with rebelliousvanilla who concluded that "the lack of European civilizational self-confidence . . . " " . . . can be traced to the Enlightenment." For it is a fact that Enlightenment thinkers reasoned that human effort and intellect were sufficient to address the perplexities of human existence and that therefore there was no need to appeal to supernatural revelation, i.e. the Bible and Christian orthodoxy, in order to make sense of our world and to progress in it.
So what remains in Europe is a hollowed-out culture, bereft of its moorings, and susceptible to “any wind of doctrine,” the prevailing secular mindset and the machinations of, on the one hand, Marxist globalists and on the other, a resurgent Islam. Empty people are easy prey to Marxism and to Islam. Empty people, fed a life-long diet of relativism, pluralism, and multiculturalism have zero rational weapons with which to fend off the armies of Islam or their precursors, Marxist-Socialists. For to them Islam or Communism are merely just alternate flavors in the panoply of human philosophies, one as good as any other.
RV and darcy --
Yes, I agree. The Enlightenment was the beginning of the process in which the West abandoned God and deified Reason in His place.
We are now experiencing the devastating endgame of that tragic error.
"This war is a quiet one. It does not involve guns and bombs and tanks and fighter jets. No corpses litter the battlefield."
Elisabeth's speech is generally well-done, BUT I disagree with Elisabeth's statement above. In my opinion, this war has two distinct fronts: one front is "quiet" but the other is "noisy" with "guns and bombs and tanks and fighter jets." Indeed, it is the continuing threat of an escalated noisy war conducted by jihadis that enables the quiet war to proceed apace as a form of treasonous appeasement - a false trade of present uneasy "peace" against future civilizational war - or demise.
Also, I agree with Freyja's acts above that the contributions of Germanic, Celtic, Baltic cultures as well as the Anglo-Saxons are significant to the development of Western civilization.
It's ironic to see Sabbaditsch-Wulff so welcome in the country protected by Europe's anti-Holocaust-denial laws, the chief breach of freedom of expression to be found in the West today.
These are the same laws being used by the same countries to persecute Elisabeth.
Baron wrote,
"Yes, I agree. The Enlightenment was the beginning of the process in which the West abandoned God and deified Reason in His place.
We are now experiencing the devastating endgame of that tragic error."
Spot on, Baron. The Enlightenment thinkers deified Empiricism, declaring they believed only in what they could see, hear, feel, smell or taste, while forgetting that that very belief failed its own test.
Seraphim Rose does an excellent job showing the logical consequences of their nihilism here
I too wondered, though, why Sabaditsch left out the Germanics. It's hard to imagine Northern Europe without, well, Northern Europeans.
I suspect that Mme. Sabaditsch omitted a homage to the German roots of Western civilization out of respect to the audience to whom her speech was made.
Contrary to what Fooled Once would undoubtedly tell us (at length and with ever-more spittle flecking his beard), in living memory Germans touting the under-appreciated superiority of Germanic culture have laid waste to European Jewry. Although the association of the culture of Goethe, Beethoven, Kepler, Sturluson, and Alfred the Great (to name but a random few) with genocidal antisemitism is undeserved, such is one of the many tragic consequences of Nazi rule.
Israeli society is not yet ready to embrace a German touting the virtues of German culture, I believe. May both nations survive to see the time when such is not the case.
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