The right-wing Alternativ für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) German populist political party 1in the years since the “migrant crisis” began in Europe has rocketed to fame after its open and at the time, not yet seen criticism of Islam and Muslims. However, a “scandal” has shocked the party after Arthur Wagner, who is also one of the party’s leading members, has resigned upon having recently converted to Islam to “private” reasons:
Arthur Wagner, a politician in the eastern state of Brandenburg, has become a Muslim. His Alternative for Germany (AfD) party entered the Bundestag last year following a populist, anti-Islam campaign.
The far-right, anti-Islam Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on Tuesday confirmed reports in the German media that one of its politicians, Arthur Wagner, has converted to Islam.
Wagner, a leading AfD member in the eastern German state of Brandenburg, resigned his position on the party’s national executive committee on January 11 for personal reasons, AfD spokesman Daniel Friese said.
“The party has no problem with that,” added Friese.
He insisted the AfD’s national party included groups representing the interests of Muslims, as well as Christians and homosexuals.
Wagner, a German of Russian origin, had been a representative of the AfD since 2015. He was a member of the state committee with responsibility for churches and religious communities.
Before joining the anti-Islam, anti-immigration party, he was a member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU).
Wagner refused to answer questions from the German daily newspaper Tagesspiegel, who first reported his conversion to the Islamic faith.
“That’s my private business,” he told the newspaper. But he said there had been no attempt by the party to force him to resign.
The AfD entered Germany’s national parliament, the Bundestag, for the first time following September’s national election — becoming the third largest party.
Support for the party surged after Germany admitted more than 1.5 million refugees and migrants in 2015 and 2016 at the height of the European migration crisis.
The AfD argued that the country was under threat of “Islamization” and demanded stricter border controls to stem the number of newcomers arriving from war-torn and poverty-stricken countries in Africa and the Middle East. (source)
In addition to the German media accounts, AfD Chairman Andreas Kalbitz, who is one of AfD’ representatives the German state of Brandenburg, said on Facebook in language with a definitive similarity to that which is articulated by the “counter-jihad” movement in the USA, that Islam is a political-religious doctrine that does not belong in Germany:
The AfD is of the opinion that Islam does not belong to Germany, because in this world view we see a great danger for our state, our society and our value system. An Islam that does not respect or even fight our legal order and raises a claim to sovereignty as the sole religion is simply incompatible with our legal system and Christian-Western culture.
In the context of freedom of expression, it must be allowed to express factual criticism of a religion that embodies all this. This has nothing to do with alleged Islam or even xenophobia, as we are often accused by the political opponent. Therefore, the Federal Association had published shortly before the election a paper entitled “Islam as a political challenge”. From this it follows that we regard Islam as a religious-political doctrine, which runs counter to our German Leitkultur, although not every Muslim places his religion above our free-democratic basic order.
Many Muslims live lawfully, integrated and are an accepted part of our society. However, it is decidedly to prevent Islamic parallel societies from forming and increasingly isolating themselves with Sharia judges. Therefore, as the only democratic party in Germany, we will continue to take the clear and non-negotiable position: Islam does not belong to Germany (source, source)
Arnoud van Doorn and his son, Iskander
This is also not the first time that a major politician from an openly “anti-Islam” party has converted to Islam either. In 2012, Geert Wilders’ Partij voor de Vrijheid, or “Dutch Freedom Party,” and is now the second largest political party in the Netherlands, had a similar scandal where as a member of the party, Arnoud van Doorn, converted to Islam and two years later, his son. He has since moved on to endorse the growth of Islam in Holland as well as to support certain Islamic funds, charities, and groups that have been tied to terrorism.
Now two people who happen to be poiticians and convert to Islam over the course of five years is not terribly much in the greater plan of social life. People leave religions and embrace others, people have weddings and divorces, and some people completely change their political views for others. US Senator Bernie Sanders famously has moved between the Democratic party and being an Independent throughout his political career. According to the US Senate, approximately 21 politicians have switched parties while they were in office, often to the shock of their constituents. Even in positions of major religious leadership there are scandals, such as when former Russian Orthodox archpriest Vyacheslav Polosin converted to Islam in 199 and now runs the Russian Muslim website Islam.ru. Scandals are what they are and they do happen.
However, there is something deeper here than needs to be discussed, which is the phenomenon of the adopting of Islam by the people’s of Europe and the connection with the rise in nationalism that is taking place today.
As we have noted many times, Christendom is dead in Europe. It once was something real and it really did exist, and it died formally with the fracturing of Europe and the subsequent rise of Protestantism. When Luther nailed his “theses” onto the door at the Church in Wittenberg, it was the nailing of the coffin of Christendom shut, first by Germany and then by subsequent nations with the ensuing wars of religion and later, philosophical-political conflicts that turned into the nationalist conflicts leading up to the First and Second World War. This is not to say that Christianity died among the people, for there were many Christians in Europe who did genuinely believe and practice the Faith for many centuries, and still are those who do such. However, any sense of union, of brotherhood between Christians that existed in the the fluid and organic way it did centuries ago has ceased to exist. Even among the nations with the greatest populations of Christians who actually believe and practice their faith in Europe, the highest is the tiny island nation of Malta at 57%. Ireland and Poland follow at 57% and 48% each, who are then trailed by Italy at 37% and an even lower Greece at 27%. All of the rest of Europe’s nations are well below 25%, with nations such as Denmark reaching an approximate 3% attendance rate. As a result, many churches are being closed forever and in some cases, being converted into mosques and mosque construction across Europe has exploded both in terms because of the immigration from the Muslim world as well as from the fact that Muslims are reproducing, such as in London where 500 churches closed but 423 mosques opened in 2017.
Now in fairness to the statistics about church closures versus the often repeated and real fact that many new mosques are opening, there are no clear statistics about the practice of Islam in Europe, and it is also known that Muslims infamously lie when it comes to said statistics about their own numbers. While the numbers are unclear, there seems to be according to WikiIslam a trend that the practice of Islam is actually declining across Europe and American among Muslims, and that the decline corresponds with the length of time that a particular generation has resided in Europe.
But as many thinkers have noted about Islam, the issue of practice among the people is not so much an indication of the decline of Islam in a society does not mean that Islam itself is actually going to disappear, for as Hilaire Belloc, a lauded Catholic writer of the 20th century who wrote in his 1938 book “The Great Heresies,” that the spirit of Islam never actually died in Muslim lands save those who were re-conquered and re-Christianized, such as with Spain and Portugal, so that while the practice of Islam among the Muslim people or the poiltical power held by Muslims can decline, as it did for centuries, it does not necessarily mean that the vitality of Islam has disappeared too:
Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it- we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today. The bad work begun at the Reformation is bearing its final fruit in the dissolution of our ancestral doctrines_the very structure of our society is dissolving.
In the place of the old Christian enthusiasms of Europe there came, for a time, the enthusiasm for nationality, the religion of patriotism. But self-worship is not enough, and the forces which are making for the destruction of our culture, notably the Jewish Communist propaganda from Moscow, have a likelier future before them than our old-fashioned patriotism.
In Islam there has been no such dissolution of ancestral doctrine_or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal break-up of religion in Europe. The whole spiritual strength of Islam is still present in the masses of Syria and Anatolia, of the East Asian mountains, of Arabia, Egypt and North Africa.
The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed- but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed. (source)
Belloc goes into his description of Islam as a heresy and its ability to surivive through the centuries whereas other heresies have disappeared or been forced to reappear in different forms. This characteristic of Islam has been noted by many other great thinkers, who emphasize that Islam the culimination of all heresies in that all heresies eventually lead to Islamization because much of the heretical teachings which exist are already present in Islam. Therefore, Islam is simply the fruit of bad teaching allowed to grow unchecked to its logical ends.
The death of Christendom was preceded by many conflicts before, the two most notable being that of the issue of usury and that of the presence of nationalism vis-a-vis the Faith. When the Protestant Revolution dug the grave and put Christendom to its death, it allowed the monster of ethnic nationalism to, like a zombie digging its way out of a graveyard to, rise from its coffin and return. This return was exemplified by Luther’s idea that in “casting off Rome,” he was “reclaiming Christianity for the German people, and as such created a “German God for a German people” in so much that one ethnic identity was reflected in the spiritual practices of the people instead of the other way around, an idea which Peter Wiener discussed in his book, Hitler: Luther’s Spiritual Ancestor:
“The war has steeled our religion”, he tells the Germans. The explanation of this curious statement is simple: “We Germans can’t believe in anything but a German God”. He continues to elaborate the thesis that war is so very beneficial for Lutherans, because especially during the present war (i.e., of 1914-1918) Luther’s ideal has become true. “Our present religion is national and German, and we preach a German God! A German, a national God!” “Christianity is the religion of war,” says the leader of the German Church, repeating what Luther had said four centuries before him. He opposes in the strongest conceivable terms this Lutheran German Christianity to “the sweet-sentimental, and sentimental-weak Christianity” of Germany’s opponents. (source)
The danger of all forms of ethnic nationalism is that it takes the idea of a people or race and make them the central focus through which the world is understood. Now in all fairness, a man perceives and understands his world through his senses, and he is inherently inclined to bias because he can only describe the world in terms of that which he knows. For example, if a man has never seen a chicken, how can he be expected to know what a chicken is? If he sees one for the first time, he will most likely give it a name based off of something that he sees in its behavior, and depending on how he sees people interact with that chicken, he may even draw conclusions based on the animal or the people using it to formulate his view about both. Some of these asessments may be correct, some of them may be incorrect, but all of them will be based off the perception he gets from what he sees filtered against what he already knows.
St. Thomas Aquinas describes this as the “tabula rasa” phenomenon, as a man is “blank slate” onto which is written his experiences that shapes his idea and how he understands his world. St. Thomas Aquinas’ answer to this question also connects to his writing about the nature and simplicity of God. As he answers in the Summa Theologica, God is all that there is, which he describes using the Aristotalean term of actuality, as all that there is is in God because He is all that is and nothing is outside of Him. God cannot “improve” because he is the end of all that is. If he were able to be “improved,” then he would be in a state of potentiality, because there would be a potential that he could improve and as such would not be all that is, and if He is not all that He is He would not be God.
St. Thomas Aquinas
The proof that any man is not God and cannot be God is found in his potentiality, because a man cannot become all that is and he never can become all that is. No man is or can become omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent because he is not. He will always be in a state of potentiality because he always can improve. Therefore, any man who says that a man, or a group of people, or an identity can become all knowing is wrong because even if the all the knowledge, experience, and power entire human race were put together into one person/race/people/object, it would still be incomparably small to all that which is in God.
While it is good for a person to take pride in his identity, his people, and that which he loves and cares for, no one person, race, or group is superior to other men as far as their dignity is concerned. The Bible clearly states that man is made in the image and likeness of God, and that while there are real differences between men, the genders, and cultures, all men reflect the nature of God by their creation, and this is something that cannot be taken away from them. While one can be a person who stands for his culture and identity and acknowledge this teaching, the two are not conditional upon each other. It is possible for a man to simply say, as many pagan peoples have said throughout history, that a man’s identity only is worth the value which he or his group gives it because “they” are the “master race/tribe/group” and the purpose of the other group is to serve his group.
Adam and Eve in the garden, about to commit sin that lead us to the situation today
What the Bible teaches comes from divine revelation- we know it because God has revealed it, and people believe it because of this reason. However, owing to original sin, if a man is left to himself without possessing such knowledge, then he will naturally being to embrace ethnonationalism because it gives him a window through which to identify himself against other people and objects in his world and a filter through which to sort his experiences, and from this will naturally grown biases, likes, and dislikes. This is the seriousness of Original Sin, for it was not a metaphor for some ancient story or bad tendencies found in people, but the sin penetrated into the very hearts of all men so that without divine revelation that culminates in Christ and His perfection of the Divine Law, all men will embrace error without intending to just by the mere process of trying to figure out what is around them. If this were not the case and Original Sin did not exist, or as Islam will sometimes call it, “original goodness,” then this would not happen, but the fact that it takes place in all cultures and people except for Jesus and with St. Mary who God intentionally preserved from Original Sin for the purpose of the Messiah, is proof that it does as much as it did in Eden.
Ethnic Nationalism is a quest for power at its ultimate end using race and culture as a means to leverage support towards the specific cause. However, this is now per se how the majority of people see it, especially those who give their support to such power-desiring leaders. They see ethnic nationalism as an attempt to assert their identity, and this becomes more pronounced if that people is feeling they are somehow “under attack.” Ethnic nationalism is a quick, easy, and practical way to rally a large number of people with different opinions about life but who are united by their bloodlines, their geographic location, and their cultural practices and shared language or history to identify and assert themselves. Many times these people even share the same religion, which adds to the sense of “freiheit” they have with each other.
Notice I said that religion “adds” to the sense of brotherhood (freiheit), but is not the defining point of unity between them. This is the danger of ethnic nationalism, for it equivocates adherence to a religion with the other aspects of that define unity between the group. This means that religion does not play the defining role of a people, but is one role that is or could be subject or subjugated to other roles, and even discarded if it is deemed not necessary any more. It makes the worship of God into a reflection of the desires of the people, and will naturally lead to a worship of the self or the people because the religion becomes a reflection of its members collective understanding of each other instead of a standard to which that group as well as other groups are held because it is something which exists outside of the group as well and can survive beyond it.
What has happened in Europe is that Christianity has become synonymous with ethnic and cultural nationalism. This is not a process that happened “overnight,” but took place over centuries due to the struggles between different peoples in the years following the Revolution up through the present time. For example, in Germany to be a “Lutheran” was to be a Germanic man or to support Germanic ideas, Germanic culture, and the Germanic language just as to be a “good Englishman” was to be a member of the Anglican church and to support English culture. The religion was simply a mouthpiece for echoing the cultural desires of the people which were imposed/enforced by the government in question. Over time, this naturally would lead and has in practice lead to the decline of religion, for if a religion is simply meant to reflect one aspect of a culture, and as cultures grow and change over time, if it is decided that is something which is “antiquated”, then it can simply be removed with no issue. However, it is a major issue because the purpose of religion is to give God his due honor, and this would be a concern, but for a people who identify religion with the support of the culture and by extension the worship of themselves and their identity, its only purpose is to reinforce that which they already believe.
However, the worship of the self does not and cannot, when honestly examined, answer the problems about God and man’s existence, and the purpose of his creation. A serious person, even a serious man who is a genuine believer in his culture or society, will admit upon reflection that he clearly cannot be God, or sense that “something else is out there” because the proof is in nature herself and human nature. Man did not make the sky, the earth, or the water, he still cannot make it, and he cannot answer the majority of questions around him about his world. He can manipulate and re-shape his world as a man shapes clay with his hands, yet he did not create either the clay or his hands. He knows there must be something greater. If he pursues this far enough, he will eventually reach a crisis point where he will either have to admit that there is a God Who he must seek, or ignore what he sees and return to embrace ignorance of self-worship. This is one of many of the “red-pill, blue-pill” moments that was so exemplified by the Matrix film with Lawrence Fishburne and Keanu Reeves:
Now while I cannot be sure, I wonder if this is what one is seeing in the case of the conversions to Islam of both these formerly anti-Islam politicians.
Islam has many negative characteristics, and the religion of Islam itself is, in the words of St. Juan de Ribera, a sure path into the fires of hell. However, just as a clock is right twice a day, Islam also provides real answers to the questions of human existence. According to Islam a man exists to serve Allah, and blessing is found in submission to Allah and his will. The Muslim umma, or family of Islam, is universal and encompasses all peoples in all places, for it teaches that Islam is the religion for the human race. Such was what fascinated the American thinker Malcolm X, for while he was converted to Islam on the basis of racialism and black nationalism, he eventually embraced orthodox Sunni Islam because upon making the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, he saw “real Islam”:
“Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this ancient Holy Land, the home of Abraham, Muhammad and all the other Prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors.
“I have been blessed to visit the Holy City of Mecca, I have made my seven circuits around the Ka’ba, led by a young Mutawaf named Muhammad, I drank water from the well of the Zam Zam. I ran seven times back and forth between the hills of Mt. Al-Safa and Al Marwah. I have prayed in the ancient city of Mina, and I have prayed on Mt. Arafat.”
“There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blondes to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white.”
“America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white – but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color.”
“You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.”
“During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept on the same rug – while praying to the same God – with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the deeds of the white Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan and Ghana.”
“We were truly all the same (brothers) – because their belief in one God had removed the white from their minds, the white from their behavior, and the white from their attitude.”
“I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man – and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their ‘differences’ in color.”
“With racism plaguing America like an incurable cancer, the so-called ‘Christian’ white American heart should be more receptive to a proven solution to such a destructive problem. Perhaps it could be in time to save America from imminent disaster – the same destruction brought upon Germany by racism that eventually destroyed the Germans themselves.” (source, quoted here)
But be not deceived, Islam is still very evil, for Islam takes many of the good teachings of Christianity and strips them of their moral imperatives. Thus it allows for a man to continue in vice without repentance and yet receive the blessings of eternal happiness. Its moral vigor it but mundane ritual, and the seriousness of vice is all but ignored if the vice is done in accordance with the principles of Islam, for in Islam every vice has a corresponding loophole. This was one of the “selling points” Mohammed used to attract so many people to his cult in ancient times and is still a reason why criminals, scoundrels, and other legitimate social rejects take an interest in Islam, for it allows them to legitimize and continue in their current way of life, albeit with minor changes.
Malcolm’s letter is of particular relevance due to his later statement about Germany, for the same problem of Germany in the past owing to ethnonationalism is the same problem today. However, unlike a century ago, there are now large numbers of Muslims living within Germany that for the greater part practice and believe in Islam. This is contrasted with the German people, who while have been “Christian” for well over a thousand years, they do not believe for the most part, as Lutheranism for them is simply an extension of “Germanness.” Many have stopped going to church all together. While she by numbers has a large Catholic population at 28% of the population, they are essentially no different than the rest of Protestant Germany, with a mass attendance rate of 10.5%, which compares to the national Church attendance rate of 13.5% (the Evangelical Lutheran Church comprises 26% of Germans). By comparison, the largest bloc in Germany is the “no religion,” which comes out at 35% of the population.
Keep in mind that all of the number for religious practice vary by age. Older people are more religious, whereas the younger ones are not. With Islam being 5% of the total population, or approximately 4 million people and growing, and as Muslims practice Islam at a much higher rate than Germans go to church, the future of Germany is leaning towards Islam. I do not per se mean that FOREIGNERS ARE GOING TO TAKE OVER GERMANY, but rather that what we are viewing are the rumblings of a potentially massive cultural change as seen in the politicians and the people.
Most Germans have no religion, and the “Christians” of Germany are basically baptized pagans. Let’s now assume that all of them consider themselves “good Germans” and want the best for Germany- they want the promotion of German culture, the protection of the German language, and the promotion of all things German. They see Islam as a “foreign power,” which it is, who wants to subvert their societies, and they are right to say this. Therefore, they support parties such as AfD and others whose superficial position is to stand for all of these things, just in the same way that Democrats say they are “for the poor/immigrants/LGBT” or how the Republicans say they are “for Americans/patriotism/the military.” They go to marches after returning from their well-paying German job at Deutsche Bank or BASF, they eat bratwurst for dinner and strudel for dessert and wash it down with a Krug of Weizenbier, and then sing Deutschland über Alles while bowing to a photo of the Kaiser and Otto von Bismarck in a photo frame in the shape of Thor’s hammer before retiring to bed. Everything about them is a German as one can be German.
But all of the culture, identity, identity politics, and obsession with identity does not answer the problems of human existence. Anything that a man can create is puny in comparison to God, for man can only manipulate that which God has given him. Since these people are, we will assume very thoughtful too, they will eventually wonder “What is the meaning of this?,” and it is from this that the questions of human existence that can be found in all cultures will eventually be asked, forcing them either to deny what they see and know to be problematic and just accept it and persist in willing ignorance, or to ask if there is something greater to believe in that has a purpose outside of themselves.
Then these people will see the Muslims. They don’t like the Muslims, they don’t like what they do in terms of riots, crime, etc., but they also know that not all Muslims are criminals or bad people, as there are good and bad in every society. They will see that the Muslims have families, that they are growing, and that their religion seems to play a major role in their lives that they for the most part care about. This naturally prompts more investigation, and as many of the people from these nations are actually friendly and encourage people to convert to Islam, they will be more than happy to evangelize the baptized pagans or in other cases, outright pagans of Germany today. They will share Islam, and while many may not convert, given the emptiness of any human culture devoid of divine meaning and that Islam is not the “political system” that the “counter-jihad” movement so emphasizes it is, but a religion that is a complete way of life including a political system, they will find meaning in the system of Islam for their lives as opposed to the current emptiness that they possess and call supreme.
What one sees taking place here is the fruition of heresy in its final form. While Germany was always a land where heresy blossomed and was reluctant to accept Christianity (the Arian Heresy had already been adopted by many Germans even during the 2nd century AD, let alone paganism and other heresies), the formal heresy from her embraced in the form of Luther’s revolution and which has continued since was never stopped. Germany today is a corpse of a former Christian civilization, and in true Islamic fashion, the Muslim vultures have now appeared and have began to feast on her remains, as Islam historically spreads into formerly Christian societies where the Faith is no longer practiced.
Arnoud van Doorn admitted this was the reason why he converted to Islam, as well as his son. They were anti-Islam because they were “good Dutchmen” standing for “Holland,” as their opposition was based upon nationalism but without knowing what Islam really is or why it teaches what it does, let alone Christianity. Therefore, when he found that Islam gave him meaning and purpose, he embraced it to fill the vacuum in his soul.
One might think that given the Christian history of Europe, such Europeans upon seeing the Muslims would be interested in investigating their own history with Christianity and consider going to church. Some do this, but many do not for two reasons. First, it is that Christianity has been associated with nationalism owing to the political alliances and sometimes, even positions of members of the Church taken over the course of centuries. For them, being a Christian does not set oneself apart from the world, but is simply an embrace of the status quo. This is not what Christianity teaches, but it matters less what it actually says as opposed to the perception, as most people make their decisions about whether they like or dislike something based on what they think it is as opposed to what it really says.
The second problem is that of the actual teachings. Christianity is not a religion for people who are spiritually lazy because to be a Christian is to make war on the self and the powers of evil. It means to recognize that all men are inherently fallen, and having believed in and received the truth by Faith due to the mercy of God, it is to go against one’s natural inclinations in the pursuit of mercy and justice, to rectify as one can a fallen world and save oneself from the evils that envelop him. It is to renounce sin in all forms, and to fight and even die for the sake of God because there is no other way to him than with this one. It is a hard struggle, and one that many people do not want to embrace because of the difficulty. It becomes even more difficult when contrasted against Islam, because Islam invites people to vice and to embrace their vices in the name of morality.
Look at Germany today, and one can see a nation steeped in vice in ways that are unable to be compared from her past. The same can be said about almost all Western nations as well. She has embraced the LGBT, abortion, euthanasia, bestiality as a form of accepted prostitution, does not practice Christianity but uses it for selective political advantages, and is now attempting to reassert herself via the same ethnic nationalism that lead to the horrors of the last century. Steeped in so much vice, Christianity would call Germany to step out of her vices, to cease her current ways, and return to God.
Hitler meeting with Grand Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini. There is far more in common between Islam and National Socialism than what one may believe.
Islam, on the other hand, will call out certain practices found in Germany as “wrong”- such as eating pork or drinking alcohol- as well as other sins. However, Islam as a whole does not call for war against vice, but will find ways to make excuses for it. This includes the vice of ethnic nationalism, for the National Socialists themselves even admitted during the Second World War that Islam was “better suited” to the German temperament than Christianity as Der Führer himself said:
Hitler had been much impressed by a scrap of history he had learned from a delegation of distinguished Arabs. When the Mohammedans attempted to penetrate beyond France into Central Europe during the eighth century, his visitors had told him, they had been driven back at the Battle of Tours. Had the Arabs won this battle, the world would be Mohammedan today. For theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that faith. The Germanic peoples would have become heirs to that religion. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.
Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire.
Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking: “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” (source, quoted here)
So looking at the conversion to Islam of this German man, one should not find it an oddity, but something expected. The nationalists have nothing to offer in the way of sublime meaning, but simply the superiority of the self over the other with the divine being found in the self. Islam, owing to its “divine” message but allowing for the legitimizing of many vices would simply allow a person with ethnonationalist tendencies to keep their beliefs but to do so under the guise of internationalism that is promoted by Islam. In this sense, it would allow for the promotion of German supremacy by the spread of Islam, allowing for the creation of a “German Caliphate” in Europe controlled by Germans but with a Muslim flavor.
I am not saying that the AfD or the German nationalists of today per se want for the spread of Islam. What I am saying is that this is the reason why Turkey has always been German’s biggest ally, and why the Nazis never had a problem with the Muslims and worked with them, and why even today there is a growing collusion between these nationalists and the Muslims in spite of the rhetoric between them. It is because just like Merkel and Erdogan, the two are allies of each other, they are both heretics whose enemy is the Church and whose focus is on the promotion of the self, and both who will take part in the coming Third World War.
Whether AfD wins or Islam wins, from the ethnonationalist view it matters less because they are allies of each other just as they were 500 years ago with Luther, were through the centuries, and will likely be again.