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October 26, 2023 - 10:30am
According to various German reports, domestic intelligence was tipped off earlier this week by a foreign source about a possible terrorist attack on a pro-Israel rally in a major German city. The suspect, “Tarek S”, is a former member of Isis who became infamous in Germany for posing with the victims of beheadings and featuring in propaganda videos for the Islamist group. Once returned to Germany in 2017, he was convicted to five years of juvenile detention.
His alleged plans included driving a truck into a group of demonstrators, echoing the terrorist attack that occurred in December 2016 when a Tunisian Islamist drove a vehicle into a crowded Christmas market, killing 13 people. Although the perpetrator of that attack was well known to the authorities, a lack of inter-agency communication — as well as a failure to deport those who are illegally in the country — made it all but impossible to prevent what became the first major Islamic terror attack in Germany. A special commission examining the case concluded that proper procedures by the German security apparatus could have thwarted the attack.
The pre-emptive arrest of Tarek S. reveals a nervousness among the German intelligence community not to repeat the mistakes of the past. After the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas and a significant increase of antisemitic incidents in Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised “massive deportations” of the perpetrators, with a new law currently under consideration that would ban antisemites from gaining German citizenship. It is unclear how the government plans to recognise said antisemites, especially given its track record of deliberately muddying the waters when it comes to identifying antisemitic offenders.
That is in part due to a flaw in the Germany system that counts incidents of antisemitism as Right-wing if the perpetrators are unknown. For example, if a synagogue is defaced with antisemitic graffiti by anonymous vandals, it is statistically counted as neo-Nazi activity, even if the perpetrators are more likely to have an Islamist background. This means that in the past a significant number of antisemitic incidents motivated by Islamism were counted as Right-wing, leading to a statistical undercounting of the Islamist threat to Germany’s Jewish community.
What’s more, the federal government has pursued policies which have done nothing to mitigate potential security risks. The Left-wing Die Linke party issued a parliamentary inquiry in 2016 to find out how many people had been convicted and ordered to leave the country, and how many of those had actually done so. Out of 285,073 convictions, only 2030 left. In many cases, being a criminal provided protection from deportation, since those affected claimed fear of inhumane punishment in their country of origin. Consequently, the German authorities developed a habit of deporting well-integrated migrants while turning a blind eye to criminal ones.
The open hatred of Jews among certain portions of Germany's growing Muslim community has simply been ignored. It is an encouraging sign that the current government finally wants to address these shortcomings, but the effectiveness of their approach remains to be seen.
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SubscribeThat figure of 0.7% of people sentenced to deportation actually leaving Germany is very shocking.
Every discussion like this needs to address how the deportation would work and where would the deportee go.
First off, we need to change the law to have ZERO exceptions for deporting foreign criminals. The Spiegel article referenced here suggests that anyone who claims they cannot get required medical care in their home country will not be deported. This sort of thing needs to change. A foreigner committing a crime in the host country needs to lose all rights to remain.
Secondly we need to work out what we do with foreign criminals where the deportee’s native country refuses repatriation. I suggest we at the very least cut off all aid and trade with such countries.
Maybe a foreign criminal with an expulsion order that is not considered a danger to others but who cannot be deported to their home country for some reason should be handed over to the nearest UNHCR camp to the home country. Given that Germany and the other western countries are funding these camps, that should be feasible.
Perhaps in extremis we need to consider offshore detention facilities for dangerous foreign criminals that it is impossible to deport where they can be interned indefinitely. The Spiegel article (half) jokingly suggests Penal Colonies on Heligoland. Perhaps this is the correct approach – let a thousand Guantanamo Bays bloom!
It is a very thorny issue but given the ridiculous number of criminals with expulsion orders living freely within Germany, it needs to be grasped.
Obviously the other area for action is to stamp out illegal immigration entirely (easier said than done I know!) and stop all legal immigration from any country which won’t or can’t repatriate their citizens who break our laws.
All good points in your post. I would add one more. If a citizen is harmed by a foreign crominal or failed asylum seeker whom the government has failed to deport then the relevant agencies should be held liable. This must be categorised as civil negligence.
Good idea Peter. Should also be true when any violent convict is released early from prison and goes on to harm someone before their full sentence is spent. The Parole Board should be liable.
With regard to deportation, nothing fundamental can be done until there is the collective will in Europe to rip up the present, anachronistic of asylum and human rights laws and leave it to individual, sovereign governments, subject to democratic control. to determine their own system.
Membership of the EU necessitates membership of the ECHR, and under the 2009 Treaty of Lisbon the EU itself is legally committed to accede to the ECHR – though it has not yet done so. EU member states cannot leave the ECHR unless there is a change to the EU treaties, which is notoriously difficult.
European countries, then, face not just the obstacle of getting collective agreement among the 27 on changing the system, they face institutional EU barriers. As such, any hardening of the system is going to be faced with lengthy appeals to Strasbourg, leaving restricted options for restoring sanity in Europe.
But outside the EU Britain could strike out alone. We could pull out of the ECHR and other agreements and devise our own system for asylum and human rights, that puts our democratically elected parliament in control. The most important principle should then be that asylum seekers are obliged to go to the nearest safe country and, once there, they cease to be asylum seekers. Asylum shopping in Europe and economic migrants abusing its asylum system should cease entirely.
Could not agree more, Marcus.
So many things in this piece are almost unbelievable and in some parts I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Imagine deporting well intigrated immigrants while keeping those convicted of crimes! It just baggars belief. And atributing anonymous anti-Semitic crimes to right-wing groups as a matter of course, as though this were still 1933 rather than 2023, when most of us know that such crimes are much more likely to be committed by Islamists. Germans seem determined to blame themselves, even for things they haven’t done.
I gotta say that the Gemans make zero sense to me.
Is it woke capture? The woke mind virus having taken over their government?
God almighty, a great nation like Germany slowly, maybe not so slowly, destroying itself socially and economically. Go all in on Net Zero foolishness and giver up their national energy security and with it their industrial base. Hand over their car making to China. Then undermine their culture, the culture that made them great, to a bunch of uneducated Muslims from the underclass of the Middle East.
What the hell is Germany thinking? Why has the rest of Europe gone along with this insanity?
Caring for the rest of humanity does not mean you have to commit social suicide.
It does appear that a greater power is at hand. Hard to accept that the West, in general, is fervently trying to commit cultural suicide.
I don’t suppose many on this site will agree Warren but there is a greater power at hand today and it’s the Anti Christ aka Satan. We forfeited God’s protection when we decided to live by our own rules, determined by our own ‘truth’, rather than His commandments given in love and which regulated national behaviour for centuries. You know : don’t, murder, lie, steal, betray one’s spouse, worship idols etc. Now we have shop lifting with impunity, murder of the unborn, soaring deaths by stabbing, more broken homes than ever before, lying and cheating in all aspects of public life. We need to develop some humility, ask for Gods pardon and His strength to live by His rules not our own.
I fully agree with you, Maureen. Christianity provided a social glue which is now coming apart as we replace it with cowardly cultural relativism i.e. beating ourselves up for being marginally more successful than other cultures and therefore allowing bad people to get away with crime because of who they are and whatever cause they are pushing forward.
I’m hoping that with all the anti-semitism coming from the left, that the pendulum swings back to the center again.
The speed of decline has been spectacular and looks likely to accelerate as they don’t appear to have learnt anything from the past decade. De industrialisation is a major problem in Germany (more so than the UK due to its significance to the German economy) largely due to the impact of its energy policy and its previous reliance on China as a primary export market.China is very likely to eat Germany’s lunch (and breakfast and supper) and whatever is left is likely to relocate to either Sleepy Joes subsidy land or to Poland where they have a chance of preserving their industries.
In the meantime the rapid decline in economic well being will result naturally in a significant reduction in its carbon emissions and the Green neo Marxists will be able to triumphantly shout about being world leaders in saving the planet and insist they double down on existing policies.
Ya know, the heart of the EU, France and Germany, are both in big big trouble. Both are dealing with social instability and weakening economies which are then impacting politics.
But I suspect that these two countries are going to keep doing exactly what they have been and are going continue to lose clout and economic power and their societies are going to grow increasingly unstable and turbulent and THAT ultimately will lead to a complete fraying of the EU and collapse of the Euro.
Seems to me, that countries like Greece and Italy, maybe Spain, should start thinking about pulling their own version of Brexit. Do it before they get dragged down with a drowning Germany and a floundering France that start acting out as things get increasingly desperate and they cannot cover it up anymore. When they run out of lipstick to slap on the pig it is gonna be really ugly.
Read Douglas Murray’s “The Strange Death of Europe.”
Not just social suicide. Suicide.
Germany is waking up? Not at all. The problem for Germany is that now it is more difficult to lie and obfuscate the obvious problem that anyone with quarter of a brain could have seen for years. Does not mean they will stop lying, the talking classes are desperately looking for some narrative that would allow them to to blame it on …islamophobia.
It is hardly surprising that right-wing hate attacks were such a growing problem in Germany in the past decade, when said hate attacks were defaulted to being right-wing.
Every time foreign nationals commit crimes, it strengthens the far right just a little bit. There are so many white people who fear targeted racist attacks from non-white people, that their hatred and disgust of the far right lessens because in the end self preservation wins out. Hopefully we can relearn to protect ourselves without having to go that far into the abyss of the far right
An article in Unherd a while back put its finger on the problem with deporting foreign criminals.
We are still in thrall to a conception of refugees and asylum forged in WW2 and its aftermath. If an immigration system cannot deport criminals who are gaming the system, then it is worthless.
There has been massive dereliction of duty towards citizens across Europe – I include the UK.
For how many decades have those who dared to speak out been demonised? Their reputations and lives destroyed.
We only need to look at how the makers of the 2009 Despatches program Undercover Mosques were treated by the police and how the police, and the political class and press allies stubbornly ignored its finding of anti-semitism and anti-Christian teachings and literature to know this problem has been around for sometime now. It is not new. How could it be with the Rotherham scandal – replicated across numerous UK cities, the various terrorist atrocities that occurred. No, the most pressing problem was islamophobia. Didn’t anyone in government wonder at the teachings found within the Koran and the hadiths? This was an intractable issue and sweeping it under the carpet was not going to make it go away. The flagrant persecution of religious minorities in the very countries that many immigrants left behind should have been a warning but no one wanted to know. No. Nothing was done. Instead other fronts opened up against our culture that appear tailor made to oppress. Today I heard the website of the BBC news program for children, Newsround, had pages devoted to White Privilege. Yes, that’s right. Let’s ensure that white children are made to feel guilt simply for the colour of their skin.
It all can only have been done on purpose. What is the aim?
Subjugation. If you tell children that they are guilty of historical crimes they will be more accepting of future injustices.
If you are going to make public policy decisions based on statistics then you need that data to be as accurate as possible, otherwise you grossly increase the chances of making bad decisions. Recording anonymous antisemitism as “Right wing extremism” is in that sense simply terrible statistical practice because it assumes the very thing the data is purportedly trying to measure.
But it is consistent with the progressive/social justice/post-colonial/critical intellectual position (and I use the term “intellectual” advisedly). When your fundamental assumption is that everything bad in the world is caused in some way or another by “colonialism”, then you automatically default to right wing extremists – by which you mean everyone who disagrees with you – being to blame for everything.
It would be nice to be able to exclaim “Why oh why didn’t German statisticians point out the problems with this!” But of course we’ve seen in the UK how obsequiousness to wokery led to worthless census data on the number of trans people. And in other places where recording trans-identifying male sex offenders as female has led to an impossible increase in the number of sexual assaults recorded as committed by women.
Good news for a change. I wonder if Western German security services got up to speed taking on the Marxist-Leninist gangs in the 1970s (Palestinian connection there).
The attack on the kids´ pop concert in Manchester showed that we are woeful in the UK in comparison. The same for the Nottingham terrorist killings last year.
And the biggest problem? The antisemites have lots of children: the Germans don’t. Bye bye Gemany (and France, Holland, Belgium etc)