The Author is former Chief of Staff of a frontline Corps in the North East and a former helicopter pilot. He earlier headed the China & neighbourhood desk at the Defence Intelligence Agency. He retired in July 2020 and held the appointment of Addl DG Information Systems at Army HQ.

Over a thousand individuals descended on the streets of Hamburg, Germany on the last Sunday of April 2024, driven by a call for the establishment of a caliphate, and asserted their presence with banners proclaiming "Caliphate is the solution." The protests were ostensibly in response to Germany's unequivocal support to Israel in its war in Gaza.

A Stark Irony with Glaring Consequences

The situation couldn't have been more paradoxical and the irony shouldn't be missed. These protests are being staged by the very people who entered Germany amongst a host of other EU nations ostensibly trying to flee strife torn Islamic countries where competing strains of radical Islamists are at war with each other. They didn't seek asylum in other Islamic countries in Asia or Africa, some 57 of them, where they could have assimilated with ease but sought sanctuary in the developed and mainly Christian Europe, only to demand the same lawlessness and chaos that they chose to escape in the first place.

Over a thousand individuals descended on the streets of Hamburg, Germany on the last Sunday of April 2024, driven by a call for the establishment of a caliphate, and asserted their presence with banners proclaiming 'Caliphate is the solution.'

In 2015/16, over one million asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere arrived in Germany. Around that time, in vast stretches covering parts of Iraq and Syria, a Caliphate was established on June 29, 2014 under Abu Bakr al Baghdadi with the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, as its nominal capital. Women were treated as chattels, forbidden to leave the house unless they were accompanied by a male relative. People deemed to be pagans, like the Yazidis, were bought and sold as slaves. Christians, Shabak and Shia were persecuted as heretics or idolaters and most fled or were killed. Punishments such as beheadings, amputations and flogging were the norm. The Baghdadi era of ISIS ended on October 26, 2019, when the leader was killed in a US raid in northern Syria. Do these demonstrators seriously wish to recreate and live in such Caliphates?

ISIS made the revival of the caliphate a keystone of its project for Islamic renewal, and the response this has generated shows the potency of the idea almost 14 centuries since it first emerged. Should Germany be worried? Well, it has felt the consequences of its rather liberal open-arm policy to absorb asylum seekers almost immediately after their arrival. The terror attack at the Berlin Christmas Market, which killed 12 and seriously injured 48 people in December of 2016, was carried out by a Tunisian man who had entered the country as an asylum seeker. The Hamburg demonstrations are but the latest, albeit under a different pretext.

The Facade of Islamophobia and the Refugees

Of even greater significance is the series of anti-Gaza war protests that continue to roil university campuses in the US, UK, Canada, France and Australia. In the latest waves across American universities, police and state troopers have been called in to evacuate tent camps, and have arrested over 2,000 demonstrators. On May Day itself, the police moved in to quash the occupation at Columbia University in New York. Not surprisingly, the US police has admitted that about 48 per cent of those demonstrators don't belong to the campuses. This only vindicates what has long been suspected, that these are being staged by deep-pocket sponsors with a sinister agenda.

These protests are being staged by the very people who entered Germany amongst a host of other EU nations ostensibly trying to flee strife torn Islamic countries where competing strains of radical Islamists are at war with each other

The fuss about Islamophobia is a ruse cunningly used by these marauding mobs who trudged by foot from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan or sailed in rickety boats across the Mediterranean from North Africa in search of safety and prospects of a better life. Once bathed, housed and fed, they have turned on their host states and their unsuspecting populace, demanding imposition of their way of life, Sharia laws, dress codes, halal compliant meat and now Caliphate. In the past decade or so, there have been bomb blasts, knife attacks, arson and torching of cars, riots and violent clashes in capitals across Europe in Paris, London, Berlin, Brussels, Stockholm and Amsterdam. The new pretext is the war in Gaza.

Historical Context - Palestine and Gaza

Without doubt or debate, the war in Gaza is taking a heavy human toll. Last reported, it had crossed 35,000, turned residential and hospital compounds into mounds of concrete. But what exactly did the Hamas leadership expect when their fighters raided sleepy kibbutz in Southern Israel, raping, decapitating, killing over 1,200 and taking some 250 hostages on October 7, 2023? How was the Israeli IDF expected to fight in order to eliminate Hamas when the latter has weaponised schools, hospitals, and refugee camps by constructing a labyrinth of tunnels and command shelters and rocket firing posts?

The largest massacre of Palestinians has been by the Jordanian army then led by Pakistani Brig Zia ul Haq butchering an estimated 20,000 Palestinians in the bloody Black September events in 1970

Palestine's claim as a historical entity is nebulous. The east bank of River Jordan was first carved out of the British Mandate Palestine in 1946 to create the Kingdom of Jordan which has 94 per cent Arabs or technically Palestinians. The November 1947 UN Resolution 191 (ii) plan to carve out two states of Israel and Palestine from the remaining was accepted by the newly created state of Israel but rejected by the Arabs. The Arab state was to have a territory of 11,100 square kilometres or 42 per cent, the Jewish state a territory of 14,100 square kilometres or 56 per cent, while the remaining two per cent—comprising the cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the adjoining area would become an international zone. Instead, they attacked Israel and lost. The West Bank was annexed and held by Jordan between 1948 and 1967 as was Gaza by Egypt till they were comprehensively defeated in the 1967 war.

The Gaza demonstrations have a sinister agenda which is explicitly anti-Semitic, chanting 'From the River to the Sea'

The largest massacre of Palestinians has not been by Israel save the current conflict but by the Jordanian army then led by Pakistani Brig Zia ul Haq butchering an estimated 20,000 Palestinians in the bloody Black September events in 1970. As regards Islamophobia, there is selective amnesia where it involves Muslims butchering fellow Muslims, be it in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 when an estimated three million were killed by the Pakistan Army or in Syria where roughly half a million Muslims have been eliminated. Hamas itself eliminated all Fatah officials of the Palestinian Authority and their families after winning the 2005 elections.

The Gaza demonstrations have a sinister agenda which is explicitly anti-Semitic, chanting 'From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.' Arabs have 22 states between them. Where do the Jews of Israel go?