German Media Roundup: Frankfurt’s Lone Terrorist

4 March 2011

What caused a young man in Frankfurt to turn to radical Islam and kill two US airmen? Newspapers in The Local’s media roundup on Friday try to make sense of a senseless act.

A top German lawmaker called Friday for the expulsion of “hate preachers” in the wake of the shooting.

“Religious freedom does not mean the freedom to do anything you like,” Wolfgang Bosbach, the parliamentary interior policy spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), told the regional daily the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung.

Meanwhile, the head of the German Police Union, Rainer Wendt, called for 2,000 additional staff to monitor extremist websites.

“Only via a massively increased police presence on the internet can the emergence of hate preachers or messages from Islamists be discovered in time,” he told the paper. “If it is technically possible, internet sites from the Islamist scene must be blocked.”

The Leipziger Volkszeitung said the shooting had changed the quality of the threat of Islamist terrorism.

“The security authorities could not hinder an Islamist attack in Germany that cost human lives,” the regional daily wrote. “However, it wasn’t al-Qaida or another terrorist organisation behind it, but rather someone acting alone. Of course, there will never be complete protection from disturbed attackers, but there must be consequences in light of this new kind of perpetrator. Otherwise there’s only helplessness.” (…)

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