The four murderous attacks in Bavaria over the last week, which have left 10 dead and 34 injured, have led to political charges, notably from the far right, that chancellor Angela Merkel is not doing enough to protect the public, and even that she is responsible because of her open-door policy for Syrian migrants. That she has left Germany vulnerable.
Two attacks came on Sunday – including a Syrian refugee who blew himself up in Ansbach.
A shooting spree on Friday in Munich that left 10 dead followed an axe attack on a train last Monday.
The axe attacker claimed an association with IS. The Ansbach bomber recorded a mobile phone video in which he “attests to his affiliation with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrmann said yesterday.
However, Germany’s interior minister Thomas de Maizire had cautioned that “in the Ansbach incident, neither a link to international Islamic State terrorism nor a mental disorder of the perpetrator can be ruled out,” saying: “It could be a combination of both.”
There is an increasingly blurred line in public discourse, in Germany as in France and the US, over the nature of the mass attacks or "terrorism" and responsibility for them.
But the rush to blame IS for and to name as “terrorism” each attack heightens public apprehension and plays into the group’s hands by overinflating its reach and importance. It is only too happy to claim all and sundry as adherents.
Such overhasty labelling is likely to undermine rational discussion over what to do about the phenomenon.
The reality is that there is now an ongoing and long-term threat in which attackers are part of a continuum that ranges from trained IS squads who infiltrate target countries for the purpose, through lone-wolf attackers who attach themselves to the group for ideological reasons, perhaps without even contacting it, to the mentally challenged for whom IS-style attacks are simply an example and trigger, a way of venting rage and alienation.
However, for Ali Sonboly in Munich on Friday, inspiration came as readily from Norway's far-right mass killer Anders Breivik.
In the normal sense of the word they are all “terrorism”. But the labelling itself has become political – a reluctance, for example, by the authorities to attribute terrorism to white supremacist Dylann Roof ’s attack last year at a black church in South Carolina in which nine died, led black Americans to complain that white terrorism was being played down and the term was being used as code for and in order to demonise Islamists.
That politicisation of the term feeds the fallacious argument that all that has to be done to end terrorism is to cut the stream of migrants, and it detracts from a sensible, and difficult, discussion about how to address a very real problem in a section of troubled youth.