Terror Again and Again! – Expert Sees Huge Security Gap in Europe

The scale of jihadist activity has increased dramatically in recent times. German terrorism researcher Peter Neumann has reported 21 attempted and seven executed attacks in Western Europe in the past ten months. Two-thirds of the terror suspects arrested since October 2023 have been young people.

Experts associate teenagers with the predicted new wave of Islamist terror – and therefore very young attackers who, for example, do not radicalize in mosques but in social networks. The Chinese platform TikTok plays a central role in this.

The how doesn’t matter – the important thing is terror
What is also striking about the events in Ternitz/Vienna, Solingen and Munich is that the attackers, at least in part, acted with relatively simple equipment, weapons that were of course easy to obtain and without much planning and logistics.

The motto of Islamic terror preachers is: if you have the chance to kill ‘infidels’, do it. The equipment plays a secondary role. The focus is on spreading fear and terror to destabilize Western societies.

Large security gap in Europe
Neumann repeatedly warns of a yawning security gap at European level. For the leading terrorism expert, seamless cooperation between intelligence services on the international stage is the order of the day – and that is not the case at the moment. The case of the Munich shooter would particularly illustrate the problem.

Here Neumann describes the problem in the video:

As a reminder, on Thursday an 18-year-old Austrian shot at the Israeli Consulate General in Munich before being killed by police. Authorities are suspecting a terrorist act. Investigators are looking into evidence of Islamic and anti-Semitic motives. The young man with Bosnian roots was officially known in Austria, but not in Germany. There was no exchange of information, even though the potential threat actor lived just an hour’s drive from Munich.

The number of terrorist acts is noticeably increasing
A few hours after the attempted attack in Munich, a suspected Islamist stormed a police station in northern Rhineland-Palatinate. The man, armed with a machete and a knife, was locked in a security gate and overpowered by special forces.

In a suspected Islamist terrorist attack in Solingen on August 23, a man killed three people with a knife and wounded eight others during a city festival. The suspected perpetrator is in custody. In late May, an Afghan stabbed several people in Mannheim, Germany, and a young police officer died from his injuries.

Early warning systems need to be improved
“Even with these individual perpetrators, who often radicalize themselves, it is not the case that they become terrorists overnight,” Neumann explained to ARD “Tagesthemen”. They are often preceded by weeks or months of radicalization, during which it is possible to intercept “signals”.

“We need to better intercept these signals, raise awareness in the environment and focus on the risk groups from which the terrorists actually come.” Although attacks cannot be completely prevented, the number of attacks that are prevented can be increased.

Rationality instead of hysteria
Hysteria, however, remains the wrong method of choice. Neumann advises to deal with the risk of attacks as rationally as possible: “You cannot let yourself be terrorized, then the terrorists will win in principle.” Because the goal of terrorism is to terrorize societies and people. The risk of dying in a terrorist attack is still very low.

“That means that in everyday life there are many threats that are much more dangerous,” says Neumann, a lecturer at King’s College London. “Of course this horror and terror is something very bad, but you have to try to deal with it rationally.”