Why do they hate us?:
The scene at Frankfurt Airport yesterday
(Source: spiegel.de)

GERMANY’S NEWLY APPOINTED INTERIOR minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, didn’t exactly begin his new position on a harmonious note today.  In his first press conference he said: “The idea that Islam belongs to Germany is an assertion that has no historical basis whatsoever.” Muslim organizations immediately protested, and the head of the Green Party, Cem Özdemir, whose parents are Turkish, stated that Friedrich “has a crude understanding of society,” and that it was “at least doubtful” whether the new minister was willing and able to conduct a dialogue about integrating Islam beneath the umbrella of the constitution.

The cabinet shuffle became necessary with the sudden resignation of defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who quit over a plagiarism scandal on Monday, apparently without even consulting Chancellor Merkel in advance. The serving interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, took zu Guttenberg’s chair and Friedrich took over the interior ministry, where he will be responsible for domestic security and internal affairs.

In his comments today the deeply conservative Friedrich, until now the deputy chair of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, was referring to a divisive line in President Christian Wulff’s Unity Day address on October 3, where the new head of state proclaimed that “Islam belongs to Germany” the same way that Christianity and Judaism do. This was a clear attempt to promote integration now that virtually everyone recognizes the failure of Europe’s multicultural utopia.

But by publicly telling the President where to put it, the feisty Bavarian was clearly also referencing yesterday’s gun attack on an American army bus outside Terminal 2 of Frankfurt airport.  One soldier and the bus driver were shot dead and two other persons are in critical condition. The assailant appears to be a 21-year-old man of Kosovar origin called Arid Uka, who has already confessed to the murder. During his interrogation, he told police that he acted alone and only decided to stage the attack the day before after watching a Youtube video showing American soldiers plundering an Afghan house and then raping an Afghan girl. He said that he "couldn't sleep for days" after seeing it. He was also outraged at what he regarded as disrespectful comments that American soldiers regularly made about Afghans before they departed from the airport on their way to their deployments.

 
Might it be a lack of gratitude?
Afghan bombing victim

Germany’s Federal police suspect that the man, who was employed at the airport’s postal centre, became radicalized over the last couple of months after he began reading radical Islamist websites. The people behind these websites, such as the radical Moroccan cleric Sheik Abdellatif, who is active in the Frankfurt area and was only arrested last week, seek to recruit not only volunteers for jihad in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries, but increasingly also prospective terrorists who are willing to launch attacks in Europe itself.

This is the first Islamist attack in Germany to claim human lives.  But it is certainly not the first conspiracy. Back in 2007 police arrested the four-member “Sauerland Group” in northwestern Germany.  This group, which was affiliated with the Uzbek-inspired Islamic Jihad Union, had also been planning terror attacks but were caught before they could do any damage. Two of the conspirators were Turkish and two were German converts to radical Islam. By staging car bomb attacks on American soldiers in barracks, discos, and airports with up to 150 deaths, they intended to bomb German forces out of Afghanistan.

 
War on America:
German-Turkish Islamist Cüneyt C. of the "Sauerland Group"
(Source: spiegel.de)

Arid was born in Kosovo and came with his family to Germany as a tiny child. At the time of the shooting he was living with his parents and two brothers in a subsidized high rise apartment in nearby Sossenheim. So far, the police suspect that the disaffected young immigrant was indeed acting alone.  He’s what you might call a "Facebook Jihadist" – a loner and loser who copied and pasted his worldview together from items and comments he found on social websites and then decided to take up arms against a civilization where he felt he had no place and shoot his way to glory. Aside from the religious element, the parallels with Jared Lee Loughner and other lone assassins are striking. Since completing high school, Arid worked odd jobs and apparently had no career ambitions. Whether or not he deliberately sought out the job at the airport in order to kill American soldiers is not yet clear.

Interior Minister Friedrich does not intend to raise the nation’s terror alert level at this time.  He might be smart to cool the rhetoric, however.   Psychopaths like Loughner and Arid Uka are virtually impossible to identify before they commit their terrible deeds. But if Friedrich's goal is to make young Muslims identify more strongly with their adopted homeland and not feel as if they have no alternative but to wage private wars on their perceived enemies, there must be a better way than the one he appears to be choosing.