Islamist terrorism is staging a barbaric comeback

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Islamist terror has returned to Europe. But in truth, it never really went away.

On 23 August, the German city of Solingen was the scene of an all too familiar and barbaric crime.

Issa Al H, a suspected member of Islamic State, slashed at the necks of people in a crowd, as they gathered to celebrate the city’s 650th anniversary.

He killed three people and injured eight more.

Islamic State swiftly took responsibility, calling this murderer a ‘soldier’, and hailing the attack as an act of ‘revenge for the Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere’.

The killer is a Syrian asylum seeker, who was slated for deportation last year to Bulgaria – the place where he had first registered for asylum.

He only managed to stay in Germany because he was not at his asylum accommodation when immigration officials showed up to collect him.

In Germany, this kind of Islamist nihilism is, disturbingly, becoming the new normal.

In May, in the city of Mannheim, a suspected Islamist extremist stabbed six people at an anti-Islam rally. A police officer later succumbed to his injuries.

What’s more, the number of foiled plots in Germany, even over the past few months, is staggering.

In June, during the European Football Championship, an Iraqi ISIS ‘sleeper agent’ was arrested in a town close to Stuttgart.

In July, another ISIS plot was foiled after a string of raids ahead of the Euros final between England and Spain.

In April, three teenagers – aged 15, 15 and 16 – were arrested, on suspicion of glorifying the Islamic State and planning attacks on churches.

In March, two Afghan nationals were arrested on suspicion of plotting an attack on the Swedish parliament. They reportedly had the backing of ISIS-K, the Islamic State offshoot in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Last December, German police arrested four suspected Hamas members, planning to store weapons in Berlin so as to attack Jewish sites.

In November, two boys, 15 and 16, were arrested after they were caught discussing a potential attack on a synagogue or a Christmas market.

Incredibly, I could go on…

For every Islamist attack that comes to fruition, many more are disrupted or foiled.

The story is the same across Europe.

Last month, were it not for a CIA tip-off, Austria might have suffered one of the worst ever Islamist atrocities on European soil.

A 19-year-old, an Austrian with North Macedonian roots, and a 17-year-old Austrian of Turkish and Croatian descent, had planned to kill as many people as they possibly could, using knives and homemade bombs, at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna.

The authorities believe the attack was inspired by Islamic State.

Mercifully, the would-be terrorists were apprehended before they could carry out their plans.

Time and again, the response from the elites to Islamist terror follows a depressingly similar pattern.

We Europeans are exhorted to mourn, to express shock at attacks carried out or relief at attacks foiled, before briskly moving on.

Politicians will crack down on certain types of weapons, or pledge to close asylum loopholes exploited by terror groups and sympathisers, before getting back to what they see as the proper business of politics.

Thus, we have come to treat acts of Islamist barbarism almost as if they were natural disasters – awful, awful things that just happen from time to time.

Islamist killings also now seem to disappear from media discussion remarkably quickly.

Brits could be forgiven for not remembering that there was an Islamist terror attack in Hartlepool back in October. A Moroccan asylum seeker, inspired by Hamas’s pogrom in Israel, stabbed his Iranian housemate, who had converted to Christianity, before killing a 70-year-old man in the street.

Due to reporting restrictions, the attack couldn’t be properly discussed at the time. And it has completely faded from the public consciousness since.

In recent years, Europe has been spared the kind of mass-casualty attacks we saw when Islamic State was at its height. When it was calling for cold-blooded murder from its vicious ‘Caliphate’ in Syria and Iraq.

Atrocities like the Paris Attacks, which claimed 130 lives, have in large part given way to smaller-scale knife and car attacks – often called for, though not always organised by, Islamist terror groups.

But this will be of no comfort to the families of those who have lost their lives to Islamist killers in recent years. Plus, there is reason to fear – following the near-miss in Vienna – that more large-scale attacks might be coming.

ISIS-K, having gained a bloody foothold in South and Central Asia, has also begun to make its presence felt beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In March, four terrorists associated with ISIS-K killed a horrifying 145 people at the Crocus City Hall music venue in Moscow. Another unspeakable horror, perpetrated within Europe, that many in Western capitals seem to have already forgotten about.

That this terroristic, fascistic threat is not at the centre of political discussion across Europe is mind-boggling.

There are an alarming number of people, born and raised in Western societies, who are turning guns and knives and bombs on their fellow citizens.

There are foreign-born extremists exploiting lax border enforcement, presided over by inept, politically correct politicians, to inflict harm on innocent people.

And this is as much a threat to newcomers as it is to born-and-bred Europeans.

In Solingen, just as in Hartlepool, one of those who narrowly survived the attack was an Iranian refugee.

But in the UK, as in many other European countries, the elites seem desperate to change the subject. Often to the question of the far right.

Following the UK’s recent spate of race riots, our Labour government has talked about little else.

To the extent the commentariat is concerned about Islamist terrorism, they only seem concerned that it will fuel a supposedly burgeoning far-right backlash.

Those riots, egged on by hard-right influencers, should horrify anyone who loathes racism and bigotry.

Still, it is grotesque to use the real – but mercifully small – threat posed by the far right to deflect attention away from Islamist extremism.

Not least because Islamist extremism accounts for the vast, vast majority of the terror threat that we face.

Since 2005, 95 people have been killed in Britain in Islamist terror attacks. During that same period, the far right have killed three people.

Islamist extremism also accounts for three-quarters of MI5’s terrorism caseload.

But you wouldn’t get that impression from the mainstream media.

Worse still, these skewed priorities seem to be shared among some of those charged with keeping us safe.

According to recent figures, just 11 per cent of referrals to Prevent – the UK’s programme aimed at stopping people being drawn into terrorism – are for Islamist extremism, while 18 per cent are for right-wing extremism.

An independent review of Prevent, published by William Shawcross in 2023, concluded that the boundaries around what is considered to be Islamist extremism in the programme are ‘drawn too narrowly’, while those drawn around right-wing extremism are ‘too broad’.

So much so that what is considered to be right-wing extremism within Prevent now includes airing ‘mildly controversial or provocative forms of mainstream, right-wing-leaning commentary’, says Shawcross.

The German government has taken a similarly warped approach to this threat. When Nancy Faeser became interior minister in 2022, one of her first acts was to abolish an expert government working group on Islamism. She set up one on ‘Islamophobia’ instead.

Politicians, pundits and even some anti-extremism experts seem gripped by the same genuinely bigoted belief. That to confront Islamist terror too forcefully risks alienating Muslims and fuelling far-right violence.

This treats both Muslims and non-Muslims with contempt. It conflates Muslims with extremists and everyone else with violent racists.

All the while, our elites are turning a blind eye to a poisonous, truly fascistic ideology that is claiming life after life in Europe – that has no truck with our values of freedom, democracy and tolerance.

The silence of the elites on Islamist terrorism reflects a deadly cowardice. One we cannot indulge any longer.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater

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