The Munich attack reveals a terrorised Germany

No nation should be expected to put up with this. The Munich attack yesterday, in which a Mini Cooper ploughed into a trade-union march, injuring nearly 40 people, was the fifth time in nine months that Germans flicked open social media or turned on the TV to learn that some disturbed or terroristic scumbag had slashed or rammed his way through their fellow citizens.

Before Munich, there was Aschaffenburg, only a few weeks ago, where an Afghan asylum seeker – with a history of violence and mental illness – stabbed at a group of children in a park, killing a two-year-old boy of Moroccan heritage and a 41-year-old man who tried to intervene. The killer had agreed to leave Germany, but was still living in asylum accommodation at the time.

Before Aschaffenburg, there was Magdeburg, in December, where a Saudi refugee and ex-Muslim sped into a crowd at a Christmas market, killing six, in a deranged stand against the ‘Islamification’ of Germany. While he had been a long-time resident of Germany, and was hardly straight out of central casting, it beggars belief that the security services had not already caught up with him, given his erratic behaviour and violent social-media rantings.

Before Magdeburg, there was Solingen, last summer, where a failed Syrian asylum seeker and suspected Islamic State member took a knife to a crowd gathered to celebrate the city’s 650th anniversary, killing three and injuring eight. He had also been slated for deportation, but evaded capture through the genius ruse of briefly disappearing from his assigned accommodation.

And before Solingen, there was Mannheim, last May, where a suspected Islamist extremist stabbed six people at an anti-Islam rally, killing a police officer. Other than the chosen weapon, the parallels with Munich are striking. Both alleged attackers were Afghan asylum seekers who came to Germany alone as minors. Both had their asylum applications rejected but were eventually allowed to stay on, before being granted residency.

They may share an Islamist motivation, too. Security sources, Der Spiegel reports, have said the Munich suspect, named only as Farhad N due to German privacy rules, posted Islamist messages online before the attack. The authorities say they believe he had ‘religious motives’ and an ‘Islamist orientation’.

Given the age at which ‘N’ came to Germany, and his unusually normal online footprint (posting about his bodybuilding gains and enjoying life in Europe), there is speculation that, if he was indeed ‘radicalised’, it would have happened in Germany. There were certainly hints. A few days ago, he posted on social media, posing in a forest with two other men, calling on God to guide ‘Muslims all over the world’, before signing off with: ‘Eradicate all those who are bad for Islam.’

It’s too early to speak definitively about the Munich attack and its motivations. But what we can say definitively is that Islamist terrorism is staging a barbaric comeback across Europe – and in Germany in particular. Just look at the attacks that were foiled of late. The combination of Hamas’s pogrom in Israel, which warmed the cockles of Islamist sadists the world over, and the tumorous resurgence of ISIS, particularly in South and Central Asia, appears to have inspired one plot after another in Germany.

The list is chilling. A group of suspected Hamas members were arrested by German police in December 2023 for plotting to target Jewish sites. Last March, two Afghans, reportedly backed by ISIS, were arrested in Germany for planning to attack the Swedish parliament. A month later, a group of teenagers were arrested on suspicion of glorifying ISIS and a plan to throw Molotovs at churches. A suspected Iraqi ISIS member was arrested near Stuttgart in June. That same month, a 15-year-old was sent to youth custody for four years for his plan to attack a Christmas market in Leverkusen. During the Euros, an ISIS plot was foiled hours before the final in Berlin. In October, a Libyan citizen was arrested on suspicion of preparing an ISIS-inspired assault on Israel’s Berlin embassy. In December, a 37-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker was arrested for allegedly planning to attack a Christmas market in Augsburg. Within a few days, three young suspected Islamists were also arrested, over a plot to attack a market in Frankfurt or Mannheim. And breathe.

This is not normal. At least, it shouldn’t be. This past year or so, Germans could be forgiven for thinking they were experiencing the first blushes of a sustained insurgency, so relentless has the onslaught been. Armed police are once again patrolling markets. Going about everyday life requires overcoming a nagging fear of what might happen. Indeed, even the trade-union demo hit in Munich was actually under police watch. How darkly ironic that the attack took place on the eve of the annual Munich Security Conference, bringing together world leaders to discuss the ‘most pressing challenges to international security’, just as Germany’s internal security had been found wanting yet again.

The reason for these failures are legion – and will be grimly familiar even to those outside Germany.

For one, Islamist terrorism has somehow become Europe’s primary terror threat by a country kilometer and the one politicians struggle most to talk about. When the SPD’s Nancy Faeser became interior minister in 2022, one of the first things she did was abolish a government working group on Islamism. Naturally, she set up one on ‘Islamophobia’ instead. While the security services have continued to do their best, as the plots have piled up around them, this top-down queasiness about confronting Islamism, born of a bigoted fear that doing so might in some way alienate ordinary German Muslims or activate the Nazi lizard brains of the white German masses, matters. Without sufficient will, courage and focus, how can political leaders possibly hope to assail this threat?

Then there is migration and asylum. Then chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to chaotically throw open Germany’s borders amid the 2015 migration crisis looks, with each passing year, like a reckless virtue-signal for which ordinary people have had to pay the price. More than a million claimed asylum in Germany in a single year, while responsibility for vetting, accommodating and integrating the arrivals was shunted over to punchdrunk local officials. Since then, Germany – like so many other European countries, hamstrung by human-rights rules and an inept and cowardly political class – has struggled to deport people even after it has become clear they have no right to stay, or have committed serious crimes. You do not have to be some xenophobic lunatic to recognise that such an unmanaged, sclerotic system is fraught with peril from a purely security standpoint, even before you even get into other crucial questions of integration, housing and resources.

It should go without saying that most of the newcomers to Europe this past decade will be decent human beings looking for a better life – free of war, poverty or both. Hardships which were, in many cases, fuelled by the West’s feckless foreign wars. But it should also go without saying that an insufficiently guarded border can be crossed by bad people as well as good – including by those who are fleeing not war and persecution, but murder and even terror charges in other countries. On top of that, a system which essentially incentivises young men to get themselves to Europe by any illicit means necessary, leaves even the best of them alone in a new land, abandoned to crime and radicalisation. In all this, women and children also barely get a look in.

Across Europe, nations have ended up with asylum systems that aren’t so much generous as they are insane and irrational – that fail many of the people we should help while rolling out the red carpet to those who pose a threat to innocent people, both European citizens and newcomers alike. Take Britain, where our courts have granted asylum to Afghan sex offenders who managed to make it here, while Afghans who served with British forces during the Western occupation were left to rot at home, living in fear of a knock at the door and a Taliban bullet in the forehead. Meanwhile, from the Iranian refugee who narrowly escaped being stabbed in Solingen to the Moroccan toddler killed in Aschaffenburg, migrants and their children are among those having to suffer and die because of the cowardice of the German establishment.

Wir schaffen das. We’ll manage. Those were the words that defined Angela Merkel’s response to the 2015 migration crisis. But it also defined a haughty, technocratic mode of politics that was then firmly in control, marked by phoney virtue and wilful blindness to the threats emerging – from Islamism to soaring energy prices and an all-out war looming in the east. Almost a decade on, and Germany isn’t managing well at all. Merkel’s CDU is odds on to retake power at this month’s elections, but only by repudiating much of what she stood for. Meanwhile, the obnoxious AfD, second-place in the polls, continues to benefit from the unholy mess the elites have made of Germany. The Munich attack feels like a bloody full stop to a political era that has failed Europeans so miserably.

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