First a teenager on board a train in Würzburg who slashed people with an axe, tried to escape and was shot dead by the police. Then another teen armed with a gun and rucksack full of ammunition, who killed 10 people — mostly teenagers — in Munich and committed suicide. Next, a 21-year-old jilted lover in Reutlingen who slaughtered a woman with a machete and grievously injured two others before being overpowered. Finally, a 27-year-old, who blew himself up after being refused entry to a music concert in Arnsberg. All perpetrators were refugees — from Afghanistan, Iran and Syria, recipients of the huge generosity Germany has displayed towards millions fleeing war and political persecution in the nearly seven decades since its Constitution was framed on the heels of the Holocaust and World War II.
Over the past two years, France and Belgium were the key sites of mass bloodbaths, mostly at the hands of their own citizens of North African origin. Through the use of the potentially most dangerous invention since the atomic bomb, the Internet, and other tactics, those local men were systematically radicalised by Islamic State. The IS’ diabolical task is easier in these countries. Citizens of former colonies have for decades been marginalised and treated indifferently by both French society and the government. All IS had to do was to build on old, simmering resentments. France taking the lead in the war on IS — intensifying carpet bombing after each terrorist strike on its soil — only exacerbated the deadly fervour with which the French-African criminals executed their bloody strikes. Unsurprisingly, 10,000 French citizens have left Europe to join IS.
But Germany has no comparable colonial history in Muslim North Africa. Germany’s Muslims are predominantly from “secular” Turkey and have, since their arrival in the 1960s, been greeted with better integration policies. Also, Germany’s role in the war against IS is limited to non-combative support to Nato. So why the recent killings? “We are committed to human rights and our constitutional promise to admit those fleeing wars,” says veteran German political analyst Hermann Denecke, himself a “war child” born in 1941. “Come what may, that will never change.”
This opinion isn’t restricted to the World War II generation. For decades, the top-note of German public opinion — even that of conservative voters — has been a brand of left-liberal thought that stems primarily from the self-flagellation Germans believe is the cross they must bear after the horrific genocide of six million Jews by the Nazis. It is this, coupled with considerable cluelessness on faraway conflicts, that has marked the acceptance of refugees from across the world. Thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils were given asylum by Germany and the EU in the name of “human rights”.
Many used their newfound affluence to arm and finance the LTTE in Sri Lanka, an outfit that invented the suicide bomb, recruited child soldiers and used civilians as human shields. Yet both the EU and Germany doggedly continued to see the LTTE as “freedom fighters” till 9/11 pricked the bubble. By the time the EU proscribed the LTTE, the damage was done. The war entered its final and fiercest phase, and the LTTE were defeated by Sri Lanka’s armed forces.
But even after it ended, fleeing LTTE cadres managed to slip into Europe, regroup and recommence a campaign for a separate Tamil state in faraway Sri Lanka. Since 2014 and though Berlin has knowledge of the confounding chaos in Syria where the lines between warring parties are more blurred than in wartime Sri Lanka, Germany has generously admitted 600,000 refugees. Official estimates show Germany’s 6.5 million Muslim population will rise to 20 million within five years.
Till the past week, Germany was spared violence on its own soil. But the perpetrators in the recent attacks were all Muslim refugees. Admittedly, in some of the four attacks, no clear link was established between the murderous act and Islamist terror. Two attackers were tragically suicidal, psychologically disturbed boys. So have Germans learned to distinguish the wheat from the chaff? Apparently not. Left-liberals immediately declared these were cases of youth running “amok” and it was up to Germany to “reflect on how we treat refugee children”. A Green politician tweeted, soon after the police killed the fleeing axe-wielder: “Why couldn’t the police have just stunned him?”
But there’s a glimmer of hope. For the first time in this writer’s long association with Germany, there is a new flank of centrist thought, one that raised a storm over the Green politician’s tweet. “Terrorism is a political term, running amok is a psychological one,” wrote Jakob Augstein, editor of Der Freitag. Politicians, predictably, circumvented such directness. “The attack by the boy armed with an axe on the local train lay somewhere between terrorism and amok”, said interior minister Thomas Maiziere. Police spokesman Marcus da Gloria Martins, riding an unprecedented wave of popularity after the impressive police action in Munich on Friday, used weapons to refine the analogy. “When someone storms into a shopping centre with weapons, it is perfectly justified to treat it as an act of terror,” he said.”One only needs to remember all that has happened across Europe in the past weeks.”
After being shaken by bloodshed in ordinary places — a McDonald’s, a music festival, a local train — Germans are asking themselves some hard questions. Whether “amok” or IS terror: to those who lost their loved ones or were grievously injured, does it even matter? Are there “good” and “bad” terrorists? For now there are thousands of fatigued Syrian families straining at the borders. Some among them may be shams. Germany won’t stop taking in refugees. But whether the screening will be intensified, or numbers restricted, remains to be seen.
