German Chancellor Angela Merkel said today (28 July) that terrorists threatened Germany’s readiness to take in refugees but her government would maintain its policy towards asylum seekers. Three were committed by asylum seekers, and two of those are being investigated for links to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISSI/ISIL).
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The country has been rocked by series of heinous attacks, including a mass shooting in Munich that left nine dead, an axe attack on a train.
The worst recent attack was in Munich on 22 July when nine people were killed by a German teenager of Iranian extraction.
Despite populist attempts to gain political footing over a threat they say was magnified by Chancellor Merkel’s “open door” refugee policy – and anger by some Germans who were skeptical about the policy – many say that she might actually gain politically rather than lose after the attacks, as might be expected.
Merkel’s ratings dipped earlier this year amid concerns about the 1.1 million refugees who arrived in Germany in 2015, but soared again after Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in June and a coup attempt in Turkey earlier this month.
She called for a better “early warning system” against signs of radicalization, faster action to create a center to help crack encrypted messages and better intelligence sharing among countries.
The degree to which refugees integrate into Germany will, in the long-term, determine whether Angela Merkel’s open-door policy has worked.
“The terrorists want us to loose our oversight of the things we deem important and break our unity and sense of community”.
But she said that Germany had faced such challenges before, repeating the phrase “We can do it” several times.
Also on Thursday, Bavarian officials pledged to hire hundreds of extra police officers and urged tougher background checks on asylum-seekers as they presented an anti-terror plan following the four attacks.
“I have the feeling that I acted responsibly and correctly and no other feeling”, she said.
“I have the feeling that I am acting responsibly and correctly, and no other feelings”, she said.
One Twitter user posted a pair of hands covered in blood, quoting Merkel with, “We have already accomplished a lot”, using the #MerkelSommer hashtag.
The anti-immigration party Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) said under “the current ideology of unsafe “multiculturalism”, the country’s domestic security and the order of Germany keeps getting destroyed”. “Let me be clear, we are at war with Islamic State; we are not at war with Islam”, she said.
Merkel’s distance from the recent attacks, both physical and rhetorically, has led her political opposition to criticize her calm approach and question her leadership.
Dr Merkel vowed to “redouble efforts” to deport failed asylum seekers and proposed an information security agency to decode encrypted communications used to plan attacks. Mrs. Merkel & Co.: WE can not make it!
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“I didn’t say this as if it were something that we could do easily, otherwise I wouldn’t have said it”, Merkel said in Berlin on Thursday. “They spread hate between cultures and also among religions”.
