Austria and the normalisation of Islamist terror

The debris had barely been cleared from last Thursday’s Munich car attack – indeed, the two slain hadn’t yet succumbed to their injuries – when another suspected Islamist unleashed horror in another European city.

Two days later, in the city of Villach in the south of neighbouring Austria, a 23-year-old Syrian asylum seeker slashed at passersby with a knife. A 14-year-old boy was killed and five others were hurt, two of them seriously. Among those wounded are two 15-year-olds.

A photograph of the grinning alleged killer doing a one-finger salute, a gesture co-opted by ISIS, as he was apprehended fuelled speculation about his motives, now confirmed. Austrian officials say the suspect was radicalised by ISIS propaganda. He had an ISIS flag in his apartment and filmed a pledge of allegiance.

This follows not only last week’s Munich attack, but also last year’s foiled attempt on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna – an ISIS-inspired plot by two Austrian teenagers. Were it not for a tip-off by the US security services, Vienna could have faced its own Manchester Arena. In 2020, also in Vienna, another ISIS sympathiser gunned down four people and injured 23.

Moreover, there’s the torrent of Islamist plots – many foiled, some not – that have rocked much of Europe over the past few years. The list is long and dizzying. The combination of Hamas’s pogrom in Israel and the rise of ISIS’s South and Central Asian franchise, ISIS-K, has inspired a new wave of Islamist barbarism here.

On spiked, we’ve often lamented the way in which our elites have come to talk about acts of Islamist terrorism as if they are natural disasters: awful, dreadful things that just happen occasionally; senseless deaths that we should mourn, of course, before moving on.

So paralysed are many politicians by the Islamist threat – so convinced are they of the despicable notion that taking an excessive interest in tackling Islamist terrorism somehow makes you ‘Islamophobic’, or risks pricking the prejudices of the non-Muslim majority – they’d rather mouth some platitudes before changing the subject.

But it’s almost worse than that now. Islamist attacks can now come and go without causing much commotion at all, beyond a day or so of limp commentary. Many mainstream journalists and politicians can only get exercised about these killings in terms of how they may boost the prospects of right-wing populists – as if that’s the real horror in all of this, rather than the bloodied bodies scattered in the street.

In Britain, a kind of collective, Islamist-specific amnesia has set in. There was a Hamas-inspired terrorist attack in Hartlepool a little more than a year ago, in which a Moroccan asylum seeker stabbed his Iranian housemate before killing a pensioner in the street. But you’d be forgiven for not knowing about it, given how little coverage, let alone political outrage, it produced.

Hardly ever has a threat so big been ignored by so many. But this cannot hold for much longer. For those commentators’ nightmares are indeed coming true. The right-wing AfD is polling second in Germany, ahead of next week’s federal elections, in no small part because of the recent spate of attacks in Germany and the government’s inability to deal with them. The right-wing Freedom Party won last year’s legislative elections in Austria, even if it has failed to form a government.

In the absence of any alternatives, restive voters are increasingly willing to take a chance on insurgent parties of the right; increasingly willing to look past these parties’ far-right antecedents and dodgy leaders, to make their presence felt. The establishment may want to hide away from Islamism – to dodge the tough questions about integration, multiculturalism and asylum. But they can’t hide away from the voters for much longer.

Europe’s elites may be willing to allow Islamist terror to become the new normal, but ordinary people are not.

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