Shouldn’t this sad episode be a wake-up call for Europeans to stop importing causes and flags that aren’t ours?

Officially, the Bundeswehr was in Afghanistan because “our security is also defended at the Hindu Kush”, as Defence Minister Peter Struck (SPD) justified Germany’s twenty-year military intervention in the Central Asian country in 2002.

Last Friday, 25-year-old Afghan Sulaiman Ataee stabbed a policeman to death in Mannheim, Western Germany. The officer wanted to prevent the immigrant from attacking members of the “Pax Europa” movement, who were holding an event there later in the day.

The organiser of the event, Michael Stürzenberger, was injured. He is a well-known anti-Islam activist who travels all over Germany, sets up his stage in city centres, criticises Islam, and I would go so far as to say that he enjoys provoking Muslims, arguing with them and repeating to exhaustion platitudes or phrases taken from the Koran without any context and thus justifying Islam’s incompatibility with democracy, in the same line as Dutch Geert Wilders or Brit Tommy Robinson.

Stürzenberger is a former CDU member, describes himself as ‘pro-American and pro-Israeli’, writes against immigration and the left on the website “Politically Incorrect News”, has been making videos of the same nature on his YouTube channel since 2009, and makes a point of displaying the German flag in front of his stand, accompanied not by the European flag, as one might understand, but by the Israeli flag.

Sulaiman Ataee arrived in Germany in 2014, aged 13 or 14, as an unaccompanied minor. According to press reports, it is now known that his asylum application was rejected at the time. However, he remained in Germany illegally, finished secondary school at the age of 17 or 18 and, after having a child with a German woman of Turkish origin in 2023, managed to legalise his situation. Not only was he tolerated, but he benefited from state subsidies, studied and learnt martial arts. From 2020, coinciding with the pandemic, he grew a beard, a sign of radicalisation. Although the authorities knew he was involved in Salafist activities, they didn’t intervene. As in........

© New Eastern Outlook