What Is There to Celebrate in Europe on New Year's Eve?

This article first appeared in New English Review.

Here in the US, it seems as I get older, it makes more and more sense to stay home on New Year’s Eve. It’s not just that in most of the country, it’s cold outside, but with drunks driving around and police looking for drunk drivers, it’s just better to stay at home and watch people like Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon get plastered and make fools of themselves on TV for the enjoyment of a million other fools gathered on Times Square freezing their asses off.

It’s a lot worse in Europe.

Thanks to the lunacy of Western European leaders and their masters in the Brussels-based EU, New Year’s Eve in European cities is starting to bring back images of World War 2. Millions of immigrants, migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, and fortune seekers, from mostly Muslim countries, have ensured that once safe European cities are now becoming more like Chicago, Portland, or Minneapolis. Or should I say, like Damascus, Mogadishu, or Kabul?

But that’s just warming up for New Year’s Eve.

In recent years, thousands of French people can look forward to having their cars set on fire. It’s now a tradition, sort of like the barricades of French Revolution lore.

In other countries, the clock strikes 12 to the sound of fireworks going off, not vertically, but horizontally-aimed at other people- as the young rascals riot and set things on fire.

But it gets much worse.

On New Year’s Eve 2015-2016 in Cologne, Germany, hundreds of the aforementioned newcomers stormed the square next to the famed Dom cathedral and sexually attacked some hundred or so German women. Police were unable or unwilling to intervene. This in the country that had led the way in admitting asylum-seekers from Syria and other hell-holes as then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, infamously predicted, “Wir schaffen dass” (We can do this.)

They couldn’t then, and they can’t now. Germany has a mess on its hands. Its citizens fear going out at night, riding trains, and Jews are once again subject to attack on the streets if they wear Jewish garb. Similarly, Jews in France and Sweden are leaving for safer continents. I could go right down the list of Western European countries.

But let’s get back to New Year’s Eve.

This year-just last week- in Milan’s famed Piazza del Duomo, site of the glorious Duomo cathedral, dozens of young men-speaking Arabic- sexually groped several women, Italian and German, according to the latest reports, until police could intervene. There are no reports of arrests just yet. They scattered in all directions as police responded. The cops are still trying to identify and locate the perpetrators.

How ironic that Milan and Cologne boast of what are arguably, Europe’s two most spectacular and iconic cathedrals. While not on the same scale of the Cologne attacks, the Milan attacks are bringing back memories of what occurred in Germany 6 years ago. Most Italian news reports of the attacks make specific mention of what happened in Cologne.

Ironically, due to the Covid restrictions in effect in Italy, Piazza del Duomo should have been deserted New Year’s Eve, but silly me. The rules only apply to the natives.

One might think or hope that for Italy and Western Europe, this would be the last straw, and that they would close their borders and send the miscreants back. Don’t count on it. Riots, rapes, murders, car attacks, knife attacks, physical attacks on Jews, synagogues, churches, even terror attacks resulting in mass loss of life have not deterred the leftists running Western Europe (the Eastern European leaders refuse to go along with the madness.) In spite of Covid and the aforementioned problems, the flow continues uninterrupted. Germany has just accepted 11,000 of the nice folks passing through Belarus into Poland, while the ships continue to arrive at Lampedusa from across the Mediterranean, and hundreds at a time storm the fences of the Spanish North African enclaves at Ceuta and Melilla.

And it all comes together in one big celebration on New Year’s Eve. But Europeans won’t have to wait 355 days for the fun to start again. It’s becoming a daily event. As they might say in Munich: “Every day is the Oktoberfest!”