This is a story about an awakening to truth.

It is easy to believe in something so strongly that you are certain it is true—when in fact it is an illusion, a deceit.

This happened to a German human rights activist, United Nations adviser, artist and filmmaker named Rebecca Sommer.

Her story gives insight into a crucial transformation taking place in Germany today.

Like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Rebecca strongly supported immigration. This wasn’t just a political view she posted about on social media. She devoted much of her time to doing the dirty work of helping immigrants. She founded an organization to help immigrants assimilate and guided them through bureaucracy to get them housing, furniture, clothing, jobs, education.

Then came New Year’s Eve of 2015. That night in Cologne, a mob of around a thousand migrants gathered outside the central train station and began molesting, robbing and even raping passersby. Hundreds of crimes were reported to Cologne police, the majority being sexual offenses. A leaked police report stated, “Women literally had to run the gauntlet through the mass of drunk men, in a way you can’t describe.” Similar incidents happened that night in other German cities.

That’s when I said to myself: “Rebecca, now is the time to pull the emergency brake, simply because as a women’s rights advocate you bear collective responsibility as a woman.”

These were Rebecca’s own words, in an interview last month, posted on the website of her humanitarian organization. Here is what Rebecca recalled about the Cologne incident:

Until then I had tried somehow to justify to myself these constantly recurring attitudes and patterns of behavior shown by most refugees, their way of perceiving the world, based on their religion—Islam—and their culture. For example, I would tell myself that they behaved that way just because they were newcomers. I thought that their medieval views would gradually change over time. … But after looking back at years of recurring experiences of this kind in my work as a volunteer, I had to admit to myself that as far as Muslim refugees go, they grew up with completely different values from ours, that ever since childhood they have been brainwashed and indoctrinated with Islam, and most of them have no intention of adopting our values. Worse, they look down on us unbelievers with disdain and contempt. I call it the “headscarf inside their heads.”

After the mass assaults of New Year’s Eve, the German government responded, but not the way you would think. Chancellor Merkel’s government was deeply invested in a pro-immigration policy, and rather than siding with the victims and promoting policies to prevent future barbarity, it tried to cover up the assaults. The police and even the media remained silent for several days, fearing a backlash against immigrants. But before long, the lie collapsed. The truth reached the public: The molesters, robbers and rapists were mostly asylum seekers from North African countries.

In the time since, similar reports of Muslim migrants engaging in dangerous criminal conduct have emerged. The immigrant problem has brought severe criticism on Chancellor Merkel, who is still trying to maintain fairly lenient immigration policies. It also contributed substantially to last September’s election earthquake, in which pro-immigration mainstream parties like Merkel’s received record-low support, while the anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland party won its best-ever election result. When it was founded in April 2013, Alternative für Deutschland was considered a far-right fringe group. Five years later, some polls have found it to be the second-most popular political party in Germany.

Listening to the formerly pro-migrant idealist Rebecca Sommer helps you to see why.

Not long after the New Year’s incident, Rebecca had yet another disillusioning experience. She had invested substantial work to help one group of Muslim refugees, and they had been very friendly to her. But one day she learned that while these individuals willingly accepted her charity with a smile, behind her back they were calling her “a stupid German tart.”

Rebecca was deeply hurt. The friendliness, gratitude and companionship of the people she was trying to help was simply a deception.

Rebecca reexamined the individual cases she had worked on, now looking at them with a more discerning eye. She soon saw abundant evidence that the migrants she assisted and trusted were treacherously taking advantage of her naivety.

Many still have no job, and many still speak only broken German. What’s more, they keep to themselves, they have few German friends or none at all. Others even turned to crime, or became radicalized. Or for example I find out later that they had been al-Nusra or isis fighters who still admire those organizations.

Of course there are exceptions—people who have a job and speak proper German—but most of them keep the so-called headscarf in their heads, their feeling [of] superiority because they are Muslims, that excruciating contempt for us.

Rebecca says she “can count on one hand” the number of immigrants she has worked with who are “in my opinion, completely and successfully integrated,” meaning that even if they have retained their own culture, they have accepted German culture rather than living in a separate, parallel, Muslim society within Germany. And presumably meaning that they do not view their benefactors as “stupid German tarts.”

Her testimony reveals that the problem is worse than reported—not only because of government efforts to downplay it, but also because of self-censorship by Germans concerned about appearing culturally insensitive.

Volunteers are constantly here and there being subjected to sexual harassment, but none of us has ever reported it to the police because we didn’t want to be seen as enemies of refugees, or make trouble for the refugee shelters. In these cases, the volunteers’ behavior is dictated by the same mechanism that drove mine—constant rationalization: He’s new here; he’s clueless; he does not understand our culture.

Rebecca has stopped such rationalizing. She still wants to help those who genuinely need help, “who want to stay here forever and have very good reasons—those who are persecuted in their homeland, often because they have a different faith: Christians, Yazidis, ex-Muslims.” But she has determined she will no longer help Muslims who retain fundamental religious beliefs, such as the traditional Muslim abasement of women.

Now I understand how they think. Now I have become very cautious and extremely distrustful. I think that the ones who don’t fit in with us should go to a Muslim country and seek asylum or employment and a better life there, instead of trying to impose their misogynistic, medieval values on us, which in the long run will simply harm us all.

Once an outspoken defender of immigrant rights, Rebecca has become a frank critic of inhumane Muslim practices. One of these is the doctrine of taqiyya, which the migrants used to justify deceiving her and routinely employ in order to game Germany’s immigration system. Rebecca explained:

Most Europeans are unfamiliar with the word taqiyya. People who try to warn you against this form of religiously justified dishonesty are routinely stigmatized as racists …. Taqiyya means “deceit.” Taqiyya permits Muslims to be extremely devious toward us non-Muslims, if it helps protect Islam and Muslims. … There is only one condition: A liar must firmly believe in the Koran and in Allah. Taqiyya even allows a Muslim to pretend that he’s not a Muslim. He’s allowed to say and do anything to deceive, as long as it helps, for example, in gaining somebody’s trust. Or the trust of a country. Now think about what kind of religious ideology we are dealing with! … Consequently, trusting German volunteers encounter a culture that they simply cannot grasp.

Yes, Islam has a religious doctrine that promotes lying. Rebecca has routinely seen immigrants lie about their educational background, lie about their skills, lie about their love for Western values. They lie about the poverty or danger their relatives face back home to convince officials to let them bring their family to Germany.

Suddenly, aunts, uncles and parents show up in Germany, and suddenly the whole deceased family numbers 15 people and owns three apartments. The younger brother arrives and, unlike what they told you, he’s not defenseless at all, but was actually a fighter with al-Nusra in Syria.

Rebecca is also speaking out about the toxic effect Muslims are having on refugee shelters. They treat all non-Muslim refugees and workers as inferior, they regard all forms of charity as a sign of weakness (even as they continue to soak up the money and benefits), and they view all Western women as sluts.

The fact is, in this Islam-dominated culture, what counts is the law of the strongest, and if you help someone simply out of compassion, that doesn’t jibe with their worldview. For them that makes you a nincompoop, a weakling. And that is how they see us: as idiots, as a fallen society of weaklings.

Rebecca is also fiercely critical of the German government’s refusal to acknowledge these realities. She says officials practice a “false tolerance,” excusing and permitting criminal behavior because “This is part of their [the immigrants’] culture.” She says the tolerance extended to Muslims has effectively given rise to a parallel legal system, in which people are held to a decidedly different standard. The effect is plain: Among Muslim communities, it is enabling more crime, including drug trade, polygamy, sex slavery and rape.

Many of these crimes are unspeakably barbaric—girls as young as 12 being sold to men for marriage; men selling child pornography from raping and then blackmailing young girls. Rebecca learned of this happening to a 14-year-old girl she took care of. “I sent hundreds of letters to the media, but nothing happened,” she said. “The police were stymied.”

Parallel laws have developed, where our legal system does not reach anymore. It seems that everyone is afraid of them: judges, lawyers, the police. The state has lost all the control. …

Above all, political Islam in Germany is trying hard, as they say, to get the foot in the door even deeper. Muslims are constantly trying to portray themselves as victims, complaining that they are being insulted and discriminated against, that the West is to blame for everything …. This is a mistake and a wrong understanding of tolerance, born of the desire that no one should feel oppressed in Germany. But no one seems to realize that this is where our own values begin to be discriminated against, and we are discriminated against by Muslims. It makes me furious.

Rebecca is concerned about Muslim cultural incursion eroding Germany’s liberal mores. When describing the values she wants to preserve, she specifically names eating pork and sunbathing nude at the beach. “This freedom is very precious and very vulnerable,” she says. So hers is hardly a defense of the pillar virtues of Western civilization. Nevertheless, even a libertine activist can see reality when it’s staring her in the face—and betraying her behind her back.

The national polls and the federal election reveal that Rebecca is not alone: Many Germans are furious. Like Rebecca, they have come to acknowledge the illusion that accommodating political Islam is possible. They now recognize the fundamentally antagonistic nature of a major Muslim contingent within their midst. And they are agitating for drastic measures to confront the problem.

This month Germany’s new minister of the interior, Horst Seehofer, said in an interview with Bild that “Islam does not belong to Germany.” Chancellor Merkel publicly contradicted him to try to pacify Muslims, but polls say three quarters of Germans agree with Seehofer. Quite a few one-time idealists like Rebecca Sommer are facing reality and growing extremely intolerant of deceptive, rapacious immigrants and the politicians who cover up the truth about them.

And their resolve portends a dramatic, even violent change we are about to witness in the German government.

Enmity between Catholic Europe and Islam—particularly Germany and Islam—is one of the most prophetically significant trends in the world today. The shift in the German mindset is already measurable. The Bible foretells that an opportunistic leader will seize the moment and put himself forward as the solution to repel this threat to the nation.

The prophecies also suggest that this very issue could help unite several other European nations behind Germany, to demonstrate a united front of resistance. A unified German-led European empire is coming! Today’s headlines show the groundwork in advanced stages of preparation for this crucial biblical prophecy to be fulfilled.

And the prophecies show that the first major action taken by this emerging superpower will be a swift action aimed at confronting the problem at its source—by launching a spectacular blitzkrieg war.

For more information about how the Cologne New Year’s Eve crimes set these events in motion, read “Germany, Migrants and the Big Lie” from our March 2016 Trumpet issue. And to learn about the Bible’s prophecies of this coming war, read Gerald Flurry’s booklet The King of the South.