By Andrew C. McCarthy
Thursday, December 22, 2016
German investigators have named a Tunisian refugee, Anis
Amri, as the jihadist whom they suspect carried out Tuesday’s mass-murder
attack. Amri is believed to be the man who drove a truck through a Christmas
festival in Berlin, killing twelve and wounding four-dozen others in an
atrocity reminiscent of the attack in July, when 86 people were killed at a
Bastille Day celebration in Nice.
Notwithstanding that they arrested and held the wrong man
for several hours, it turns out that German authorities have been well aware
that Amri posed a danger. He is yet another of what my friend, the terrorism
analyst Patrick Poole, has dubbed “known wolves” — Islamic terrorists who were
already spotlighted by counterterrorism investigators as likely to strike.
Amri, who is variously reported to be 23 or 24, arrived
in Germany in July 2015 as an asylum-seeker. He was able to remain because of
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s suicidal open-door policy for refugees from the
Muslim Middle East and North Africa. Prosecutors in Berlin attempted to deport
Amri back in June, after learning three months earlier that he was planning “a
serious act of violent subversion.” He is reportedly a follower of Abu Walaa,
an Iraqi sharia-supremacist firebrand who was recently arrested on suspicion of
being a top ISIS leader and recruiter in Germany.
His terrorist activities aside, Amri has also been
involved in narcotics trafficking, theft, and the torching of a school. That
last felony occurred in Italy, where the “refugee” was sentenced to five years
in prison before being welcomed into Deutschland. All that baggage, and still the Germans allowed him to remain.
Reportedly, officials felt they could not deport him because he did not have a
passport and the Tunisian government would not acknowledge him (despite the
fact that the Tunisian government had convicted him in absentia of a violent robbery).
That might explain a brief delay in repatriating him; it does not explain a
legal system that permits a suspect with a lengthy, violent criminal record to
remain at liberty while he is suspected
of plotting mass-murder attacks.
Yesterday’s atrocity highlights an aspect of the refugee
crisis to which I have been trying to draw attention for over a year: The main
threat posed by the West’s mass-acceptance of immigrant populations from sharia
cultures is not that some percentage of the migrants will be trained
terrorists. It is that a much larger percentage of these populations is
stubbornly resistant to assimilation. They are thus fortifying sharia enclaves
throughout Europe. That is what fuels the jihad. It would be foolish to think
it couldn’t happen here, too.
To be sure, the infiltration of trained terrorists is a
huge problem; even a small percentage would compute to thousands of jihadists
within the swarms of migrants. Alas, that is a secondary concern. The bigger
threat is the enclaves.
These are not merely parallel societies in which the law
and mores of the host countries are supplanted by Islamic law and Islamist
mores. Even residents who are not jihadists tend to be jihadist sympathizers —
or, at least, to be intimidated into keeping any objections to themselves. That
turns these neighborhoods into safe havens for jihadist recruitment, training,
fund-raising, and harboring. They enable the jihadists to plan attacks against
the host country and then elude the authorities after the attacks.
In short, the jihad succeeds not just because of the
jihadists, but primarily because of the swelling, assimilation-resistant
communities. They are the incubators.
Recall the horrific November 2015 Paris attacks, in which
130 were killed. The atrocities spurred what was said to be a tireless
transcontinental manhunt. When Salah Abdeslam, one of the main culprits, evaded
capture for four months, it was assumed that he must have made his way to
Syria, rejoining his ISIS confederates.
But in mid March, he was captured in Belgium, just a few
paces from his family home in Brussels’s Molenbeek district. He had been moving
with relative ease from safe-house to safe-house.
Belgians were not surprised to hear it. Molenbeek is a
notorious Islamist enclave. As the Independent
reported, the neighborhoods there are a “magnet for jihadists,” and the
community, home to many Moroccan and Turkish immigrants, “has been connected to
almost all of Belgium’s [several] terrorism-related incidents in recent years.”
Belgium does not admit that it has so-called no-go zones,
where Islamists challenge the authority of the host country to govern. German
officials similarly pretend the problem does not exist. But Gatestone
Institute’s superb analyst Soeren Kern, recently published a jaw-dropping
report, “Inside
Germany’s No-Go Zones,” part one of which focuses on North
Rhine-Westphalia. It is Germany’s most populous state, and it just happens to
be where Anis Amri lived — in housing set aside for asylum seekers.
Kern observes that the German press has identified more
than 40 “problem areas” across the country. The newspaper Bild describes parts of Berlin, Hamburg, and elsewhere as
“burgeoning ghettos, parallel societies and no-go areas.” The Rheinische Post reports that numerous parts
of North Rhine-Westphalia fall into this category:
Aachen, Bielefeld, Bochum, Bonn,
Bottrop, Dorsten, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Euskirchen, Gelsenkirchen-Süd,
Gladbeck, Hagen, Hamm, Heinsberg, Herne, Iserlohn, Kleve, Cologne, Lippe,
Lüdenscheid, Marl, Mettmann, Minden, Mönchengladbach, Münster, Neuss,
Oberhausen, Recklinghausen, Remscheid, Rhein-Erft-Kreis, Rhein-Sieg-Kreis,
Solingen, Unna, Witten and Wuppertal.
How do these communities operate in practice? Kern
relates:
The president of the German Police
Union, Rainer Wendt, told Spiegel Online
years ago: “In Berlin or in the north of Duisburg there are neighborhoods where
colleagues hardly dare to stop a car — because they know that they’ll be
surrounded by 40 or 50 men.” These attacks amount to a “deliberate challenge to
the authority of the state — attacks in which the perpetrators are expressing
their contempt for our society.”
If we are lucky, Anis Amri will be apprehended before
long, and before he can strike again. It is entirely possible, though, that he
will remain on the lam for some time. Like Salah Abdeslam and other jihadists,
he is not without places to go.
And that is the crux of our challenge here at home. It is
not just a matter of weeding out the trained jihadists from among the tens of
thousands of refugees the Obama administration has already admitted, and the
110,000 more refugees for whose admission in 2017 the president has paved the
way. The real problem is the thousands of assimilation-resistant refugees who
will gravitate to and reinforce Islamist communities. They could form the
breeding grounds and sanctuaries for the jihadists of tomorrow.
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