Christmas Is Cancelled

Mir ist schlecht. What is an Islamophobic terror attack? We can split hairs over the precise predilections of Taleb al-Abdulmohsen. But the bottomline is: motive is irrelevant. At least motive is insignificant to mass murder or an attempt at the same. A 50-year-old Saudi, who had arrived in Germany in 2006, whose status as refugee was recognised in 2016, who worked as a psychiatric (of all things), became a self-proclaimed—and publicly recognised—critic of Islam, helped Saudi women seek asylum among others, and had reportedly expressed his intention to kill random German citizens, did so by ploughing a black BMW through a crowded Christmas market in Magdeburg on Friday, December 20, killing four women and a child and injuring more than 200, several critically, keeping the death toll open. Those are the facts, the counter-intuitive fundamentals notwithstanding.

In Kaput: The End of the German Miracle, published earlier this year and praised as the most detailed account of German economic decline to date, Wolfgang Münchau calls Germany the world champion of the analogue era which missed the digital revolution, although Germany is where it had begun in the early 20th century. Relying on heavy industry and manufacturing and singed by the turn-of-the-century dot.com bubble, Germans said never again and lost sight of the future. Governments and industrialists doubled down and refused to see the wood for the trees. Betting against the German economy is a loser’s choice as history has proved and yet, this time it is different. The German economy is too dated and clueless for the world it inhabits.

That’s not a digression. German policy and policymakers seem to have lost the ability to look ahead, anticipate and plan. They have been running away from reality, as with Russian gas and oil-consuming cars. “Germans invented the fuel-driven car engine, the electron microscope and the Bunsen burner. But they did not invent the computer, the smartphone or the electric car.” In the late 1990s, Siemens’ honchos dismissed the mobile phone market and was still building a state-of-the-art analogue telephone exchange which turned out to be the last. When the Russian gas finally stopped, Germany shut down nuclear power.

If Germany read the economic winds wrong, it seems to have miscalculated even more in trying to be more humane than the rest at the wrong time.

That is not a diagnosis from the AfD but a direction towards a prescription for what Germany must do to halt the AfD, even as it is cheered by Elon Musk. Musk may be right in calling Chancellor Olaf Scholz a fool but Scholz is only the latest in a long line of fools who were actually quite clever people. ‘Mental illness’ was the nonsense that covered up for Islamist terror attacks on German soil for a time and it spread like a disease across the continent and over the Channel. Intelligence agencies must have squirmed attributing terrorist attacks to mental illness although, ultimately, all terror are cases of mental illness. The 2016 Christmas attack in Breitscheidplatz in Berlin, in which more than a dozen people were killed and scores injured, was perpetrated by a failed Tunisian asylum seeker. This time, the perp is a successful asylum seeker and on the other side of the extremism divide, which ironically made him an extremist of sorts as the tragedy proves.

As Magdeburg, which has ‘cancelled’ Christmas, and Germany mourn, exasperated German citizens and over-cautious politicians must now engage in an unavoidable debate—and then act on it. As historian Katja Hoyer writes in The Spectator: “German politicians need to think carefully about how they acknowledge the strength of feeling on an issue they have too long brushed aside. It will backfire if the discussions on the Christmas market attack once again revolve around new safety measures, as they did after the Solingen stabbings [August 23, 2024; perp was a Syrian and three people were killed] when politicians squabbled about the exact length of blades people should be allowed to carry in public.”

Germany has a choice, and a decision to make. Either way, it will have repercussions across the European Union. The AfD won the state of Thuringia in September, the first by the far-right since World War II. It is nationally placed second after the CDU-CSU and the Magdeburg attack can only help it in the snap polls round the corner after the collapse of Scholz’s government. For their part, the centre-right (and old West German right) CDU-CSU are turning their back on Angela Merkel’s 2015 asylum policy which had opened the floodgates inwards. They may find it difficult to keep their word given Germany’s need for workers but a hitherto very patient voting public is no longer patient enough to be keep the far-right at bay. That’s why the Magdeburg attack, in its timing, is different. France and Germany are the strongest evidence of the real and present danger of the far-right. In 2023, 3.2 million people were registered as asylum seekers in Germany. Doubtless, Ukrainian refugees were in that count but immigrants/ would-be immigrants did not become 4 per cent of the population overnight.

Bandages and quick-fixes won’t be forgiven; safety measures and more policing won’t do the job. What’s at stake is not merely a Western institution such as the traditional Christmas market without which Germany, for one, won’t be Germany. It is about freedom and the right to step out into the street free of fear. The very sight of armed police protecting what should be a playground of mirth, necessary forgetfulness and togetherness is revolting. It asks: Whose freedom? How can a guest’s flight to liberty become the host’s loss of the same?

Democracy is a responsibility. It allows one to wield the axe (or knife) against itself. To take that right away would be to turn democracy into something else. But that does not preclude shutting the door once in a while. And that’s why the predilections and motive of Taleb al-Abdulmohsen are irrelevant.

AfDAngela MerkelChristmasEuropean UnionGermanyMagdeburg attackWeb Exclusive