The End of Wokeism
In July 2016, I participated in a multi-day event organized by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. During this event, I befriended contractors and high-ranking European defense officials. By the end of the session, the informal conversations had become more engaging than the event itself. Discussing the naivety and drift of leadership in Europe, their revelations were both overwhelming and eye-opening. They expressed decades of frustration within the security forces at all levels, due to the European political leadership and lawmakers’ failure to address control border management and illegal immigration.
During that conversation, I learned a great deal. Unlike those who apply through legal channels, illegal migrants commit a double crime upon setting foot on European soil. First, they knowingly violate an internationally recognized border. Second, they engage in human trafficking. No one can simply swim across the Mediterranean; such journeys are made possible by human trafficking cartels, which charge thousands of euros for boat crossings. And that anyone who has the means to pay such sums to bypass legal processes and violate a recognized border cannot reasonably be presumed innocent.
I also learned that political leaders, both national and European, systematically ignore requests for increased budgets to manage and address the migration crisis. Overwhelmed border personnel have, for years, encountered daily groups of military-aged men arriving without identification, speaking unrecognizable languages or dialects. On hundreds, if not thousands of occasions, undocumented individuals claiming certain names and fleeing certain conflict in certain country—upon being later arrested for criminal acts already in Europe—turned out to be someone entirely different, with another nationality and escaping from no conflict.
When asked for my opinion on the matter, my response evolved into an uncomfortable prediction. In 2016, long before COVID-19, I suggested that if Western leadership continued on its path of incompetence, Eastern Europe would become the safe haven for white-Christian Europeans.
In the years since, I have witnessed astonishing developments. Western European universities have invited Palestinian terrorists to speak on Zionism, Al Jazeera journalists to lecture on Israel, and Russia Today correspondents to opine on the West.
While working for the Spanish diplomatic corps in Germany in 2019, I remember legitimately integrated German Muslims protesting a mosque’s call to public prayer over loudspeakers in the city of Cologne. Outraged to see German leaders naively embrace the repressive practices they had fled, as if they were a manifestation of equality and indigenous wisdom.
In 2022, in Berlin, I found myself standing among thousands of Iranian emigrants marching against the murder of Mahsa Amini by the morality police for the “abominable” act of uploading a video on social media without wearing a veil.
I wondered why the voices of these people who had done everything to leave the ideological, theocratic and totalitarian madness of the realities where they came from to embrace Western ways, were not only being ignored about the migration crisis, the theoretical confusion and the cultural collapse in the West; but they were being scorned in favor of those who did and do everything to break the established norms, the social pacts and import tyrannical forms incompatible with democratic life. Thus, tarnishing the good name of those who are here because of their conviction to adapt and contribute.
Meanwhile, West’s institutions and media largely disregard the Abraham Accords, arguably the decade’s most significant diplomatic achievements, solely because they were brokered by controversial figures like Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu. For decades, the West has dismissed the warnings of our Gulf partners, who, eager to reform or modernize their societies, have signed up to the accords and know better than anyone radical Islam’s nature. At the same time, figures like Jeremy Corbyn in England and Pablo Iglesias in Spain posed for photos with members of Hamas and Hezbollah.
Flash forward to today: I fear seeing my own prophecy come true. 2024 began with leaders of questionable democratic credentials, such as Vladimir Putin, having momentum alongside Western commentators like Tucker Carlson. In August last year, while on an academic assignment at Oxford University, our group was warned to avoid certain areas of the city due to the street riots—events etched bitterly in recent British memory.
As we enter the year 2025, allow me to make another uncomfortable prophecy: October 7 marks the beginning of the end of “wokeism.”
The Holocaust survivor, writer and Nobel laurate Elie Wiesel once said, “What begins with the Jews, never ends with the Jews.” If October 7 taught us anything, it is the dire consequences of a lack of leadership in the West. European and Western citizens grow increasingly weary of seeing their universities overtaken, monuments defaced, founding fathers insulted, and their values undermined. What begins as attacks on Jews soon decants in all directions.
Having reached this state of affairs, what do Western leaders expect now? Do they believe that average Europeans will continue tolerating the exponential deterioration of their public safety, with no-go-areas, massacres in Christmas markets, explosions at train stations, stabbings at festivals, and an economy strained by supporting those unwilling to integrate or contribute? History has shown Europe facing similar crises before, ending invariably badly. Are we perhaps sitting idly on our way to a Reconquista 2.0, this time on a continental scale?
If there is no reality check soon and no renewed leadership, what lies ahead is a painful reckoning for people of all religions, nationalities, ethnicities, ideologies and socioeconomic strata.
Uncomfortable predictions. But one thing is certain: October 7 is the beginning of the end of wokeism.
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