Europe is divided, rending itself at its bloody sutures. There are many lines along which our culture’s mother continent is in tension, but in the cold light of day — say the icy, eye-stinging dawn of New Year’s Day in the city of Cologne, outside the train station where Muslim “refugee” rape mobs targeted innocent Western women, as they did in cities across Europe that night — the divide really does come down to Us and Them.

Europe’s elites, who engineered and are still enabling Europe’s Islamic invasion, have a customized version of Us. “We” are the sophisticated and self- congratulatory, the abstractly compassionate, the fashionably blasé. We are post-national, post-Christian, and post-reproductive. We have risen above the base instinct to align with those who share our history, culture, bloodline or faith. Instead we proudly identify with anyone on earth who has an advanced academic degree. We are “citizens” of the world — or at least, of international business class. We traded our grandparent’s liturgies for lurid “Love Parades,” and dour Christian sermons for witty TED talks. We cashed in crass “American values” like free speech and the free market, and got in return the freedom to be sexually jaded and sterile.

We aren’t like those grubby, xenophobic proles who were herded off to vocational schools in early grades, and never seen again, except when we call a plumber or the police. We welcome the stranger, especially if he’s likely to open an exotic restaurant. It’s a bonus that his presence unsettles the vulgar horde, reinforcing what we knew about them: that they’re ignorant and inferior. We look down at them — and back at our sepia-colored ancestors, always busy praying, fighting, or breeding — and their hulking forms seem to be of another species, the missing link between a modern EU citizen and Australopithecus.

It is people with views like these who dominate politics in Western Europe, including the mainstream “conservative” parties. The “respectable” political spectrum in Europe would extend, in American terms, from Bernie Sanders and #Blacklivesmatter on the left, all the way to Chuck Schumer on the right. Anything past that point falls into “extremism,” and must be restricted by any means — including criminal sentences in several European countries that punish critics of immigration or Islam. It is these post-Europeans who control without dissent every major college and university, and fill most of the pulpits and bishop’s thrones. They run the newspapers and TV stations, and they censor Europe’s Internet. They are using the European Union’s bloated powers to punish countries like Hungary, Poland and Slovakia for electing “unacceptable” (e.g., patriotic) governments.

In the name of saving “war refugees,” these leaders admitted more than a million economic migrants, overwhelmingly young men of military age, who disdained “refuge” in Muslim countries which they passed through such as Turkey, but insisted on coming to Europe — where the welfare taps are gushing, the culture is cringing with white Christian guilt, and the mosques are thronging with proud Islamists who welcomed them as soldiers of jihad. These “refugees” were sold to Europe’s public as fleeing women and children, but they are more like an army.

And what do conquering armies often do? They rape local women, as more than a million German women were raped by Russians in 1945. Muslim armies are even more prone than most conquerors to this practice, since Islam’s armies from the very beginning operated as rape gangs: Muhammad rewarded his soldiers with captured “concubines,” Christian and Jewish sex slaves who were taken after their husbands were killed. These concubines did not even count against the four-wife limit imposed on Muslim men. They were human gratuities — like the Yezidi and Christian women who are traded like cattle among the soldiers of ISIS today, whose imams find solid justification for this sex trade in the example set by Muhammad.

As former elite Islamic attorney Daniel Akbari explains in legal and theological detail in his grim study Honor Killing, Muslim men view women less as human equals than as patches of fertile territory where future sons can be planted. It’s the job of each Muslim man to control the sexuality of the women in his family, and he is deeply disgraced if she “acts out” by showing any romantic independence. Hence Muslim men feel justified in — and by countries like Pakistan are often acquitted for — murdering their sisters, daughters, granddaughters, or nieces for “immodesty,” which can include such “crimes” as being the victim of a rape. When Muslim armies arrive in Western countries and see independent women “shamelessly” flaunting their calves and arms and hair, in these soldiers’ eyes these are patches of unclaimed territory, free for the taking.

The “Them” in this scenario is composed of ordinary citizens of Germany and other countries, having normal human reactions to the unprecedented catastrophe to which their leaders have delivered them. They are outraged. When they learn that the helpless “refugees” are seeded with terrorists, Islamists, and rape gangs, that the police have colluded in covering up the Muslim identities of the rapists — as authorities covered up for more than a decade the Islamic child rape gangs of Great Britain — these normal people have normal reactions. They take to the streets and protest, as the patriotic citizens of the German group PEGIDA did on Saturday.

The German elites swung into action. The same Cologne police force who sent 143 officers to stand idly by as Islamic rape gangs attacked local women now turned out more than 1,500 gendarmes. They watched as leftist mobs hurled stones and bottles at PEGIDA’s peaceful marchers, and then the cops took out the water cannon — to turn them on PEGIDA. See Breitbart’s photo essay of this appalling attack on liberty, which elites cast as a necessary reaction against “extremism.” Remember that these same elites will seize the children of Christians and home-schoolers and place them in mental hospitals or farm them out for adoption. That too is fighting “extremism.”

The world has seen all this before. Back in 1978, we saw the Polish Communist Party unleash its police against the hulking, superstitious proles of Solidarity, whose slogans of faith and patriotism repulsed that nation’s ruling elite — and embarrassed supporters of “detente” throughout the West with their “primitive anti-Communism.” Perhaps it is no accident that countries which suffered Soviet-sponsored repression for so many decades are refusing this new wave of colonists, and thumbing their nose at the EU’s mounting threats. They remember how irresponsible, even treasonous elites can be.

We hope with Ross Douthat of the New York Times that Angela Merkel falls from power, and that Germany starts an orderly deportation of these colonizing “refugees.” Send them safely to any of a dozen Sunni Muslim countries, where their views of women are mainstream and accepted. Failing that, we wish we could go to Germany and march alongside the patriots. John F. Kennedy once said to Germans of West Berlin who were besieged by the last century’s great ideology of evil, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Today each of us should stand alongside the victims, and face the water cannons to say: “Ich bin ein PEGIDA.”