The wisdom of the late Norm Macdonald has rarely felt so prescient. ‘What terrifies me’, the Canadian comic once tweeted, ‘is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims.’ It was a perfectly aimed jab at those who fear the public reaction to terrorism more than terrorism itself. At those leftish talking heads and phoney liberals who see people in Manchester, Paris or Brussels being blown limb from limb by radical Islamists and instantly think: ‘Oh no, the Islamophobia is going to be terrible.’ These cowards and fainthearts have been out in force once more following the ISIS knife atrocity in Solingen.
The bodies of the people slain by the Islamist fanatic were barely cold before sections of the media were fretting over how the ‘far right’ might react. It was on Friday evening, at a festival celebrating the 650th anniversary of the founding of the west German city, that a man went on a knifing frenzy. Three people were killed and eight wounded, four seriously. The suspect is a 26-year-old from Syria who, according to German prosecutors, shares the ideology of the Islamic State and was acting on those tyrannical extremist beliefs when he wielded his knife. He arrived in Germany as an asylum seeker in 2022, but although his claim was rejected, the authorities failed to deport him. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the slaughter, describing it as an intentional slaying of European Christians ‘to avenge Muslims in Palestine and everywhere’.
So this was an act of war. A low-level, lone-wolf act of war, but an act of war nonetheless. It was a violent assault not only on the citizens of Solingen but also on Germany itself, and in particular on its Christian heritage. And it was sanctioned by those sworn foes of Western civilisation: the bigoted religious hysterics of ISIS. It ought to be a wake-up call, a reminder that while ISIS may have lost its caliphate, it retains its zealous lust for murdering ‘infidels’. It seems we are ‘seeing the first signs of a new wave of terrorist attacks’, says Peter Neumann of King’s College London. He suspects ISIS is trying to ‘capitalise on the huge mobilisation resulting from Hamas’s terror offensive on 7 October’ and wants to ‘inspire’ its admirers to ‘attack unbelievers’. Shorter version: this is serious.
Will it be treated with the seriousness it deserves? Will the barbarism in Solingen finally give rise to the frank discussion of radical Islam that’s been so sorely lacking in European society these past few years? The signs are not good. Already public grief seems to be giving way to an instinct to ‘move on’. The post-terror script is being followed. Flowers have been laid for the dead, prayer emojis have been posted on social media, and now we can get on with our lives. Germans haven’t quite chanted that craven slogan, ‘Don’t look back in anger’, as some Brits did following the Islamist massacre of 22 pop fans at the Manchester Arena in 2017. But it does feel like there’s a reluctance, in some circles at least, to take a hard look at the Solingen slaughter and the tough questions it raises about the migrant crisis, the failure of integration and the poison of Islamism.
Is it possible the terror-amnesia industry is kicking in already? This is when open discussion of Islamist terror is so ruthlessly discouraged by the elites that acts of Islamist terror end up being forgotten. Who now recalls the Brussels bombings of 2016 in which 32 were massacred? Or the Reading stabbings in England in 2020 in which three gay men were murdered by an extremist Libyan refugee? Or the Barcelona van ramming of 2017 in which 13 were mown down by Islamists on La Ramblas? That occurred just days after the far-right rally in Charlottesville in the US at which a neo-fascist drove a car into a crowd of protesters, killing one young woman. It is telling that the latter fascistic car attack is fresher in the heads of the left than the far bloodier fascistic car attack carried out by ISIS in Barcelona not a week later.
The bodies of the people slain by the Islamist fanatic were barely cold before sections of the media were fretting over how the ‘far right’ might react. It was on Friday evening, at a festival celebrating the 650th anniversary of the founding of the west German city, that a man went on a knifing frenzy. Three people were killed and eight wounded, four seriously. The suspect is a 26-year-old from Syria who, according to German prosecutors, shares the ideology of the Islamic State and was acting on those tyrannical extremist beliefs when he wielded his knife. He arrived in Germany as an asylum seeker in 2022, but although his claim was rejected, the authorities failed to deport him. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the slaughter, describing it as an intentional slaying of European Christians ‘to avenge Muslims in Palestine and everywhere’.
So this was an act of war. A low-level, lone-wolf act of war, but an act of war nonetheless. It was a violent assault not only on the citizens of Solingen but also on Germany itself, and in particular on its Christian heritage. And it was sanctioned by those sworn foes of Western civilisation: the bigoted religious hysterics of ISIS. It ought to be a wake-up call, a reminder that while ISIS may have lost its caliphate, it retains its zealous lust for murdering ‘infidels’. It seems we are ‘seeing the first signs of a new wave of terrorist attacks’, says Peter Neumann of King’s College London. He suspects ISIS is trying to ‘capitalise on the huge mobilisation resulting from Hamas’s terror offensive on 7 October’ and wants to ‘inspire’ its admirers to ‘attack unbelievers’. Shorter version: this is serious.
Will it be treated with the seriousness it deserves? Will the barbarism in Solingen finally give rise to the frank discussion of radical Islam that’s been so sorely lacking in European society these past few years? The signs are not good. Already public grief seems to be giving way to an instinct to ‘move on’. The post-terror script is being followed. Flowers have been laid for the dead, prayer emojis have been posted on social media, and now we can get on with our lives. Germans haven’t quite chanted that craven slogan, ‘Don’t look back in anger’, as some Brits did following the Islamist massacre of 22 pop fans at the Manchester Arena in 2017. But it does feel like there’s a reluctance, in some circles at least, to take a hard look at the Solingen slaughter and the tough questions it raises about the migrant crisis, the failure of integration and the poison of Islamism.
Is it possible the terror-amnesia industry is kicking in already? This is when open discussion of Islamist terror is so ruthlessly discouraged by the elites that acts of Islamist terror end up being forgotten. Who now recalls the Brussels bombings of 2016 in which 32 were massacred? Or the Reading stabbings in England in 2020 in which three gay men were murdered by an extremist Libyan refugee? Or the Barcelona van ramming of 2017 in which 13 were mown down by Islamists on La Ramblas? That occurred just days after the far-right rally in Charlottesville in the US at which a neo-fascist drove a car into a crowd of protesters, killing one young woman. It is telling that the latter fascistic car attack is fresher in the heads of the left than the far bloodier fascistic car attack carried out by ISIS in Barcelona not a week later.
