The bloody truck attack on Berlin’s Christmas market is a reminder how the West’s destabilization of the Mideast and North Africa now destabilizes Europe and Chancellor Merkel, as Gilbert Doctorow describes.
By Gilbert Doctorow
It took German Chancellor Angela Merkel 10 hours to find the words to respond to the attack on a Christmas market in Berlin that left a dozen dead and scores injured. When she finally spoke and acknowledged that it looked like a terrorist act, she hastened to express the pious hope that it was not the deed of a “refugee.”
Merkel’s hesitant response to the attack on Monday shows why many Germans feel that their country is defenseless against terrorism and why Merkel’s political fortunes may be declining. The failure to promptly capture the assailant – on Wednesday, the search focused on a Tunisian suspect – has compounded public worries that Merkel has largely contained concerns about Islamic terrorism through control over information, not effective preventive steps.
President Barack Obama talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G7 Summit at Schloss Elmau in Bavaria, Germany, June 8, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
The Chancellor has directed the whole state apparatus to serve the purposes of her personal rule, which means to ensure the general public is lulled into a sense of false security. Officials recoil at making any connection between terrorist acts and refugees from the Middle East whom she so warmly welcomed.
To protect her political flanks, Merkel has muzzled the police who are not allowed to say anything that contradicts her political narrative hailing the benefits of multiculturalism. With a pliant German press, she has withheld full information about rapes and other attacks which are alleged to have been committed by immigrants/refugees going back to the rampage by migrants at the Cologne main railway station last New Year’s Eve.
What we see in her rhetoric and in the political correctness she enforces is precisely what Donald Trump called out in his debates with Hillary Clinton — the refusal to deal with “Muslim extremists” or “Jihadists” in the name of…