A foiled terror attack in Vienna targeting Taylor Swift’s concert tour has been met with an all-too predictable response in the German-speaking world. The tone was immediately set by Germany’s state broadcaster last week: ‘Right-wing populists are exploiting this to stir up anger, as elections will be held in Austria at the end of September’, it warned.
Yes, in the eyes of the political and media class, we have less to fear from Islamist terrorism than we do from the rise of populism. It’s not just the Austrian elections that commentators are worried about, either. This autumn, there will be important elections in the eastern German states of Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is leading the polls in the first two states.
The Taylor Swift concerts were called off after Austrian authorities arrested four teenagers suspected of plotting an ISIS-inspired suicide attack. Tickets had sold out long ago. As well as the tens of thousands of fans inside the stadium, the organisers expected almost as many onlookers to gather outside. As one suspect has reportedly admitted, it was here that the alleged plotters wanted to kill ‘as many people as possible’. Four teenagers – aged 19, 18, 17 and 15 – were arrested last week, although the 15-year-old was released following questioning. A picture of the 19-year-old has been published by the police. It shows a muscled man, dressed in black ISIS garb, holding two daggers with long blades across his chest. A stockpile of chemicals and detonators have also been found in his home. Mercifully, he is now in police custody.
The Taylor Swift terror plot is a stark reminder of the threat Islamist extremism still poses in Europe. Although the plot was foiled by the Austrian security services, they seem to have relied on a tip-off from the US. The Austrian authorities have faced a great deal of criticism for not having been aware of the threat earlier. An article in Die Welt notes significant failures in intelligence gathering. Similar criticisms were levelled at the security services following a deadly Islamist attack in Vienna in 2020, which killed four people and injured many more.
It is right that citizens ask themselves how well equipped the authorities are to protect them. The Taylor Swift concert plot has raised new questions about the threat of Islamist terror, and has brought other less-prominent cases back into people’s minds, especially in Germany.
In July, court hearings began in the German city of Düsseldorf against seven men accused of having formed a ‘jihadist terror organisation’. The men, aged between 21 and 47, entered Germany as refugees or on student visas. They come mainly from Tajikistan and have been accused of setting up an ISIS cell. Their plan was allegedly to carry out several ‘spectacular ISIS-inspired’ attacks. One of their targets is reported to have been a liberal mosque in Berlin.
Earlier this month, a 17-year-old was sentenced for having planned an ISIS-inspired attack on a Christmas market in the German town of Leverkusen. He and another young man planned to drive a lorry into the market, and then stab as many survivors as they could.
Even when there seems to be no Islamist motivation, the increasing regularity of extreme acts of violence has been profoundly unsettling. Only last week, a Jordanian taxi driver chased down and attacked women in Cologne with his car. Several women were injured, one seriously. Only the amazingly brave actions of a waiter, who managed to stop the man, injuring himself in the process, prevented the driver from doing even more harm. Although the trial hasn’t yet begun, police have said that this rampage was probably not terror-related, but the result of psychosis.
The same has been said about a knife attack against a four-year-old girl in a supermarket in a small town in southern Germany in April. A 35-year-old Dutch-Syrian man is said to have attacked the girl, whom he had no relation to, entirely out of the blue. The girl needed emergency surgery. Last week, a court ordered the perpetrator to be placed in ‘protective psychiatric custody’. It has since emerged that he was known to the German police before the supermarket incident.
There is now a widespread sense that the state cannot guarantee people’s safety. This was underlined when the news spread last week that an ‘extremely dangerous murderer’ had been allowed to escape in Bavaria. The killer, a refugee from Somalia with schizophrenia, was supposed to have been held in a secure hospital. In 2021, he murdered a fellow resident in a homeless shelter. The case caused a huge outcry at the time not only because of its brutality – the murderer stabbed his victim 111 times and then beheaded him – but also because interior minister Nancy Faeser tried to downplay its seriousness. The killer managed to escape during an escorted visit to a local cinema, during a screening of Inside Out 2. Although he was thankfully caught by police later that evening, most Germans are baffled as to why such a dangerous man was ever let out in the first place. Germany’s Bild tabloid reported with dismay that this ‘head-chopping killer was allowed to go to the cinema’.
Of course, it’s important to stress that not all these cases are the same. Yet, in each instance, the main concern of the commentariat has not been the threat these men pose to the public. Instead, they fear that each case could be ‘weaponised’ by the so-called far right (by which they usually just mean populists). Often, the perpetrators’ psychological problems are at the forefront of media reports. While it is indeed very likely that many of these attackers have severe psychological problems (there must surely be something wrong with you if you want to mow women down with a car, for instance), people are growing increasingly wary of being told to view these criminals as pitiable ‘victims of past traumas’, rather than as dangerous individuals. The overwhelming message from the media is to keep calm and not get too worked up about these brutal and violent crimes. Yet there is a widespread feeling among the public that things are spinning out of control. Quite understandably, most people do not think the threat of violent crime and terrorism should be allowed to become the ‘new normal’.
The elites’ fear that more and more people will turn to populists is well founded. But they only have themselves to blame for this. Their constant warnings about a ‘far-right surge’ in the wake of every violent atrocity are not changing people’s minds. Worse, would-be attackers are surely aware that they are facing a pretty weak, wavering state, which all too often prefers to turn a blind eye to Islamist extremism, for fear of rocking the boat. Indeed, far from challenging Islamist narratives, the never-ending message from on high is that Europeans are inveterate racists and Islamophobes.
Much has been made of the very young age of those arrested in Vienna. And that is indeed worrying. Those who say that it’s much too simple to reduce this to a problem of immigration are right. At least three of the suspects have lived in Austria for a long time and two even had Austrian citizenship. The problems we are confronted with are at least as much homemade as imported.
One of these problems is the increasingly unworldliness of our diversity-obsessed elites. Asking itself the question, why a Taylor Swift concert was targeted, one broadcaster claimed it was because these concerts were the only truly ‘safe spaces for queer people’. Even when confronted with horrendous acts of terrorism, the establishment cannot resist pushing its woke agenda.
The elite’s flight from reality is becoming truly dangerous. There was a recent feature in the FAZ newspaper reflecting on the horrific Islamist knife attack in Mannheim a couple of months ago, in which a policeman was killed. Reporters interviewed people in the city. Interestingly, the sense that something has gone badly wrong was shared by both immigrants and German natives alike. One man, a Turkish owner of a Kebab shop said: ‘Germany has given these people freedoms they are abusing.’ A woman who migrated from Brazil said:
‘When I came here 50 years ago, this country seemed to me like a little paradise. Germany wants to present itself as more and more open to the world… Maybe it has become too liberal. Now I deplore the situation here.’
If the elites were more honest, competent and less afraid of the voters, they would admit that there are plenty of good reasons for people to be increasingly fearful for their safety – and angry at the authorities who have practically given up on protecting them.
Sabine Beppler-Spahl is spiked’s Germany correspondent.