Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Eight Podcast Eight

Emily, 2015             In October 2015, “Emily” of Rotherham, England, wrote an open letter to social services. She, like Bibi, weeps with the frustration, anger, and fatalism of a girl who feels powerless and is convinced that the civil service and civil society have abandoned her.   To the medical professionals who did nothing—Were you blind to my bruises, multiple sexually transmitted infections . . . You gave me treatment, I took the medication but how could it work when I was being raped by the same men every day . . . Were you deaf to my pleas for help? Did you even listen when I told you what was happening? No. You had me down as a sex worker.               To the school as a whole—Did you never wonder why I missed so much school? While you were teaching students math, science, and English. I was in a cold room of a half-renovated flat. Lying naked on a bed while approximately eight men were taking turns raping me.               To the policeman who told my mother I was a known prostitute when she came to you for help—I was a child. Is there such thing a child prostitute? You were the most insensitive officer I ever met, and the only reason I can think of for you being how you were, is that maybe you were covering up out of fear of causing racial tension?               To the politically correct government who refuses to see that Muslims are a problem, the idiots that think Islam is compatible with our ways—Think again. Open your eyes to the million girls already raped and trafficked by Pakistani Muslim gangs. I wait and I wait. I wait for justice, it’s never served.   From Willkommenskultur to Pegida               By summer 2016, polling revealed that, in the view of many Germans, Muslim migrants were no longer very welcome. The era of Willkommenskultur, or Welcome Culture, quickly faded. By then, less than a third of native Germans, or 32.3 percent, still wanted more immigrants, and half strongly associated the migration with terrorism. Some Germans saw the million-migrant inflow as the latest twist in a continuing cultural death spiral, reflecting a deep national self-loathing. Importing Muslims to serve as a vast labor pool for menial jobs was, in this view, shortsighted and, ultimately, self-destructive. For them, Eurabia is a teeming Muslim ghetto within Germany. It is poor, unassimilated, angry, and religiously supremacist. They fear Yugoslavian-style balkanization and, then, disintegration.               Fearing Islamic swamping of German society and anger at censored dissenting voices, antimigrant activists established Pegida, short for Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident. Some called it blatant racism, and its controversial leader did not help his cause by calling foreigners “cattle” and “trash.” Some intellectuals have argued that Pegida has become a catch-all movement for frustrated Europeans who are turning to nationalism to cope with social trends they do not understand or welcome. Others do not see an alternative.   Militant Islam             The number of Caliphate supporters in Germany continues to grow. Germany’s domestic security services set the number of radical Salafists at over 8,000 in September 2015, and it could be over 10,000 by summer 2016. By summer 2016, 60 percent of the new arrivals had no documentation, making it difficult and sometimes impossible to verify their claims of nationality and age. The radical element in Germany is growing. Some of the Islamist groups have canvassed the refugee centers for those who share their radical views or those who look like easy marks for conversion to the cause. Under the flag of humanitarian assistance, radicals recruit for the Caliphate, and the police are challenged to stop it or even fully understand it. Guarding against the Caliphate or other Islamists is fraught with problems.               First, German police, like other European police and security forces, often cannot verify the identity of migrants. In 2015, the German border police were only able to obtain 10 percent of the migrants’ fingerprints. Hundreds of thousands of migrants could not be identified by their travel documents, many of which were forged.               Second, it is difficult to monitor and penetrate domestic Islamist cells, some of which recruit for the Islamic State. There are civil liberties that hamper investigations. There are well-known figures in the German Islamist movement, but many take care to avoid language that might be perceived as threatening. But by late July 2016, many Germans were anticipating a mass killing, like those suffered by Britain, France, Spain, and Belgium. According to a poll released on July 22, 2016, 69 percent of Germans believed that a terrorist attack would hit Germany “soon.” They were right. Later that day in Munich, an Iranian-German, previously unknown to German security professionals, killed nine victims and then himself. Germany had joined the killing club.   Profile Thirty: A Long, Hot Summer               Munich had not seen anything like this since the 1972 Munich Olympics. Ali Sonboly, eighteen years old, lured children to a McDonald’s by offering free food. Perhaps the tactic worked; most of his victims were in their teens. He killed nine and then killed himself. Sonboly was an Iranian-German, who didn’t precisely fit the mold of Caliphate killers. Most Iranians are Shia, and the Islamic State is Sunni. After an investigation, the Munich chief of police said, “There is absolutely no link to the Islamic State.” It was a “classic act by a deranged person” and described an individual “obsessed” with mass shootings. When the shooting started, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer initially speculated that a “right-wing” anti-refugee shooting was taking place. At MSNBC, Chris Matthews explained that Germany was undergoing a “nativist attack.” But why, then, did Sonboly yell “Allahu Akbar”?               Two days after the McDonald’s attack, a twenty-one-year-old Syrian refugee killed a forty-five-year-old Polish woman with a machete and injured two other people before being arrested in the southern German city of Reutlingen. Authorities said the assailant and victim knew each other from working in the same restaurant, and the incident was not related to terrorism. Others are not sure.               One day after that, a Syrian man, whose asylum bid had been rejected in Germany, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State on his cell phone. He then tried to get into an outdoor music festival so he could explode his bomb-laden backpack. Having been turned away, he blew himself up outside a wine bar instead, injuring fifteen people. The perpetrator was identified as Mohammad D. The Bavarian interior minister said that he didn’t know if this man “planned suicide or if he had the intention of killing others.” The BBC headlines ran, “Syrian Migrant Dies in German Blast.” The BBC changed the headlines after being mocked on social media. Readers snickered at what they saw as the anodyne and empty wording of the headline. The revised column read, “Syrian Asylum Seeker Blows Himself Up in Germany.” The Caliphate attacker explained his motive. He did it so “Germans won’t be able to sleep peacefully.” Many don’t.               July 2016 ended in an explosion near a migrant processing center near Munich. At first, the police suspected that right-wing extremists had detonated the bombs. But witnesses described several “Arab-looking men” seen fleeing from the scene. By the end of the month, the motive was still unknown. The summer of 2016 rocked Germany as few summers since unification. Rage at the chancellor spewed across the social networks, coining a new hashtag of contempt—”#Merkelsommer.”