04.11.2026
Is the wealthy, well-known, Western Europe any good? We know how it always looks so charming and cultured. As someone who’s been working and living on a budget here, long enough that the façades aren’t new anymore and Schnitzel is just Wednesday’s food, I have something to say on that.
Although the very cloud of bias that follows me everywhere isn’t easy to put on paper, one piece of evidence might make it clearer. Over a few months, in several rounds, I hunted for apartments in Vienna, in the more central parts and sometimes the quieter ones (one was literally south of a graveyard, so that’s at least quiet). Every offer I made was not just refused but flat-out ghosted. The only place where I managed to land a home was in Floridsdorf, also known as Immigration Central. What a surprise. The bigger surprise is that it had the same price as the places that ghosted me, and I was the same applicant.
Being born in a wealthier country is, of course, a matter of merit. Because of course the birth lottery is run entirely on talent. So if your hair is not blond and you have some body hair, you are automatically a lesser person, because of course, why not? And to prove that point we get language gate-keeping. Vienna (and the bigger German world) is not the international hub it pretends to be, the moment you need to make an appointment, go to a supermarket, or do anything else that’s mundane and necessary for a long stay. A shopkeeper once mocked me because I needed a moment to follow his accent, which was as thick as a winter coat. I called the shop later and gave them my clear and colorful opinion, all in plain English, while the other side was searching for words. My poor and “lesser” country taught me better English than this place teaches its inhabitants. Of course, you’re still a burden to the place if you don’t know “Deutsch”.
There is just one odd corner to the superiority enforcement. Throughout history, the Persian people never committed atrocities as awful as the Nazis, and the war Germany started did not spare Iran either: the famine of 1942 took Iranian lives, in 7-digit figures. I wonder where those Nazis were from, and what language they were native of. The IR is a different kind of monster, and after January 2026, it’s become clear that it does not represent the Persian people; in fact, the people are its primary prey.
A study commissioned by the city of Vienna asked 1,200 young people about their values. Among the Muslim respondents, 41% put the rules of their religion above Austrian law, against 21% of the Christian respondents (still rather troubling in a “secular” country). Religion above the law: sounds terribly like what caused the 1979 revolution.
The Middle East saw this coming. In 2017, at a forum in Riyadh, the UAE foreign minister Abdullah bin Zayed predicted, in clear English, “far more radical extremists and terrorists coming out of Europe.” Noor Dahri, who runs a UK counter-terrorism group, puts the difference in simple terms: in the Middle East people know who the extremists are, while in Europe they hide in plain sight in the society and spread their beliefs as they please.
And when they act, the state shows up late. In Vienna, in November 2020, a gunman killed four people. He had been convicted of trying to join ISIS and released early, and Austria’s own officials admitted afterwards that they had made mistakes in tracking him. In Berlin, in 2016, a truck drove into a Christmas market. The attacker was already known to the authorities, and an official report later found that their failures made the attack possible. Scale that to a large minority who sees its own values above the law and decides to cause trouble, and no façades or Schnitzels in all of Europe could handle them.