More evidence revealing the ridiculousness of the centrist position on immigration – namely that refugees can be seamlessly integrated into European society without a spike in crime or terror – has emerged courtesy of the German newspaper Welt Am Sonntag which revealed Sunday that the number of terrorism-related cases investigated by German authorities has quadrupled over the past year.
Prosecutors have opened more than 900 cases so far this year, compared with just 240 throughout 2016, and 80 cases in 2013.
Germany’s federal police estimate 705 Islamist extremists willing to carry out terror attacks are active in the country, up from 600 during an estimate in February. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency recently said around 24,400 Islamists are active in the country but most of them don’t pose an immediate terror threat.
To be sure, the number of migrants applying for asylum in Germany plummeted to about 280,000 in 2016, about one-third the number from the prior year. But the increase in crime – coupled with the Christian Democratic Union’s embarrassing showing in federal elections last month – are slowly inspiring the country’s centrists to accept that more needs to be done to limit and control immigration in Europe’s largest economy.
According to the Daily Caller, Germany’s federal prosecutor’s office can’t keep up with the increase in the number of cases. To wit, nearly 300 cases have been transferred to the state level. Not all cases involve plans to carry out attacks. Migrants from Syran, Iraq and Afghanistan have been tried over alleged membership in terror groups without being suspected of planning attacks on European soil.
BKA chief Holger Münch told daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau in July that the danger from politically motivated far-right and far-left wing extremist is dwarfed by the threat posed by jihadis.
“In the left-wing scene, the [German] states have currently estimated a number that can be counted on the fingers of one hand,” Münch said. “In the right-wing scene, the number is in the low double digits.”
Frustration over this increase in crime manifested last month in the far-right Alternative for Germany party’s sweeping electoral triumph. The party, while still a minority, received 13% of the vote, earning it a place in Parliament – the first time a far-right party has held a spot in the legislature since World War II. It’s now the third strongest party in Germany, and has created a headache for Chancellor Angela Merkel by busting up her ruling coalition.
As Statista points out, perhaps key to understanding Germany’s tilt to the right is the indication that the majority of AfD voters say they made their decision not based on belief in the party, but rather as a reaction to their disappointment in the other parties – a dissatisfaction stemming from Merkel’s insistence on an “open doors” refugee policy that has been proven to be a failure.
Two years after the European Commission carried out the bidding of German Chancellor Angela Merkel by approving a plan to distribute migrants entering the Schengen area through Greece and Italy evenly across the European Union, the recent landslide victory of “Czech Donald Trump” Andrej Babis and his Eurosceptic and anti-establishment political party shows how disillusioned the people of Europe have become with “open doors.” Babis’s victory followed another important win by Austria's young conservative star, Sebastian Kurz, who at 31 is now the youngest leader in Europe.
The reason for this populist surge? Well, it appears Europeans have begun to realize that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – three countries that refused to accept migrants under the EU plan – have suffered far fewer terror attacks, as the map below shows.
Can you spot the gaps?