Angela Merkel’s open-door immigration policy has been blamed for the recent upsurge in murder and violence carried out in Germany by young men linked to the Middle East.
Some have even accused the German Chancellor of making Germany a target for terrorists. But this rush to judgment masks a much more complex problem facing Germany and the rest of Europe.
Only two of the four widely reported incidents of the last week can be directly linked to Islamist terrorism and none of the attacks are of the kind of recent terror atrocity witnessed in Paris or Belgium – nor is there any evidence of a wider terrorist network at play.
The first of the four German attacks was carried out by a teenage asylum seeker from Afghanistan, who was shot dead after injuring five people in an axe and knife assault on a train near Wuerzburg. Islamic State has since published a film of Muhammad Riyad pledging allegiance to the terror group:
The most deadly of the attacks was the massacre of nine people at a Munich shopping centre by dual Iranian/German teenager Ali David Sonboly. Yet rather than associations with Islamic State, Sonboly has been linked to the far-right mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik.
In Sunday night’s attack, rejected Syrian asylum seeker Mohammad Daleel made a film pledging allegiance to Islamic State before blowing himself up outside a music festival in the small Bavarian town of Ansbach. Twelve bystanders were injured.
And police investigating the Syrian asylum seeker who killed a Polish woman with a machete and injured two other people in the town of Reutlingen, Baden-Wuerttemberg, on Monday have now discounted terrorism as a motive and believe the murder was probably a ‘crime of passion’.
In 2015 Angela Merkel announced her government’s decision to accept over one million refugees from war zones in the Middle East. German government figures show that last year 162,510 Syrians, a third of all claims in Germany for 2015, lodged applications for asylum.
But none of the three asylum seekers who carried out attacks in Germany this past week was among them. They had arrived in Germany before Merkel set out her open door policy. And Sonboly, who was not an asylum seeker at all, proudly claimed to have been born in Germany.
Mohammad Daleel who carried out the suicide bombing on Sunday night and Afghan teenager Muhammad Riyad who took part in the train attack the week before were not trained in terror camps abroad or sent to Germany by the Islamic State.
They appear to have been recently radicalised on the internet. Their terror acts were quickly adopted by a cynical and opportunistic Islamic State. But friends of the two men say they were both struggling with mental health issues.
So while it might be convenient to blame Merkel’s immigration policy for all of Germany’s recent troubles, in the case of these four attacks there is not currently enough evidence to support such a charge.
It could even be argued that by showing compassion to hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees, Merkel has in fact reduced the risk of Germany being targeted by Middle East terror groups. More importantly, the vast majority of Muslims now living in Germany will have every reason to cooperate with their own Government in the fight against terrorism.
This is not something that can be said of the marginalised and radicalised Muslim communities of the run-down suburbs of Brussels or Paris.