JOACHIM LÖW, the manager of the German national football team, was unusually composed after his team threw away a two-nil lead over England in a friendly match on March 26th. “Thank God everything somehow went smoothly,” Mr Löw told German television afterwards. Like many Germans, the manager seemed less concerned about winning or losing than about terrorism. A German friendly against France was a focal point of the November 13th attacks in Paris, and a match against the Netherlands on November 17th was called off due to fears of a bomb.
To date Europe’s growing problem of Islamist terrorism has left Germany almost entirely unharmed. The country’s only deaths at the hands of Muslim extremists have been two American servicemen gunned down by a Kosovar Albanian at Frankfurt’s airport in 2011. Some see this as evidence of superior intelligence and policing. After the September 11th attacks and the failure to detect the Nationalsozialistische Untergrund, a far-right terrorist group which killed ten people between 2000 and 2007, Germany’s federal and 16 state-level domestic intelligence services were repeatedly streamlined, leading to better...Continue reading
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