RUTHFULLY YOURS

BERLIN—Four acts of violence in seven days have shattered Germany’s calm and revived an emotional debate over the security implications of taking in more than one million migrants and refugees in the past 20 months.

Police identified asylum applicants as suspects in three apparently unconnected high-profile attacks in the past week, from an ax attack on a train last week to a knife killing and a suicide blast late Sunday.

Only the ax rampage, in which a teenager registered as an Afghan refugee wounded five people, has been identified as Islamist terrorism. But all four incidents—including a German-Iranian teenager’s shooting spree in Munich on Friday that killed nine—have put the European Union’s most populous country on edge.

“I thought Germany was safe—no shooting, no terror,” said Faruk Sazil, a 30-year-old of Turkish origin, who owns and runs a Munich kebab stand next to the McDonald’s where the shooting spree began Friday. “Now I don’t know. Who can know?”

Authorities say the Munich shooter had been treated for depression and was obsessed by mass killings.

If there’s one lesson to be learned on the 10th anniversary of the Second Lebanon War, it is that ‎brokered cease-fires and U.N. resolutions are not to be trusted in the Middle East, where the ‎definitions of “victory” and “defeat” are elusive.‎

For 34 days during the summer of 2006, Hezbollah pummeled the Jewish state with rockets, and the ‎Israel Defense Forces conducted airstrikes to destroy the infrastructure and weaponry of the ‎bloodthirsty Shiite organization, which — in typical Arab terrorist fashion — were strategically placed in ‎and around the homes and schools of civilians.‎

When the war was over, both sides declared victory, though then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s ‎announcement sounded feeble to most Israelis. The regular IDF soldiers and reservists who ‎participated in the fighting felt particularly deflated and bitter. When the war was over, their stories of ‎inadequate equipment and lack of training for the missions they were sent to conduct emerged to ‎everyone’s horror and disgust. One friend of mine recounted having to improvise all the time — for ‎example, by using chocolate spread as face camouflage, and operating a tank with which he was ‎completely unfamiliar.‎

The Winograd Commission, set up in the aftermath of the war, delved into these and other mishaps ‎on the leadership and military levels. But the real culprit was a false assessment, reached more than a ‎decade earlier, that the “conventional battlefield” was a thing of the past. According to this ridiculous ‎theory, it would be wasteful to expend energy and resources training for ground incursions, when the ‎era of high-tech sorties from the air was the wave of the future.‎

Still, analysts pointed to the major blow suffered by Hezbollah in the war, pointing to the “restoration ‎of quiet” in the north and the heavy losses incurred by the terrorist group. One such optimist was ‎Iranian-born, London-based Middle East expert Amir Taheri, who visited the Jewish state in May 2007, ‎less than a year after the war was over — on the eve of the release of the Winograd Commission’s ‎interim findings. ‎

Hamas was one of the many entities rushing to congratulate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his successful quashing of the attempted coup against his government last weekend. Like leaders of other countries worldwide, the heads of the terrorist organization ruling the Gaza Strip hailed Erdogan’s success as a “victory for democracy.”

Unlike those who waited for the military takeover to fail before applauding the autocrat in Ankara, Hamas was genuinely relieved. After all, the Islamist Palestinian group has no greater friend than Erdogan.

Thus, Hamas has been able to proceed with its summer activities in a particularly festive manner. Two of these activities are particularly worthy of note.

The first is a special exhibit marking the second anniversary of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s 2014 incursion into Gaza to destroy the terrorist infrastructure — tunnels and missile-launchers — used by Hamas to kidnap and kill innocent Israelis.

Though Israel managed to decimate much of the infrastructure, leaving swaths of Gaza in ruins, Hamas did not feel defeated; nor should it have. No military match for the mighty Israeli army, it nevertheless succeeded in sending the Israeli populace into bomb shelters several times a day, while retaining political power and several tunnels and subsequently buckets of money and materials with which to keep its terror mill running.

To boost morale and demonstrate that it is doing its job properly, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades — amusingly known as Hamas’ “military wing” — has created a death-and-destruction Disneyland for family fun, free of charge. This consists of a display of various authentic weapons deployed in the slaughter of Israelis, and an extra-special tour of a tunnel bordering the Jewish state.

REUTLINGEN, Germany—A Syrian man used a long knife to kill a woman here on Sunday in an apparent personal dispute, and injured two other people before being detained, police said.

The suspect is a 21-year-old asylum seeker from Syria, the police said. The man was known to the police and had been charged in the past with assault.

The incident quickly made national news in a country on edge in the wake of a spate of violence across Europe that has fanned fears of a rising terror threat. Another asylum seeker, registered as a 17-year-old Afghan, injured five people in an ax attack last Monday in Würzburg, a two-hour drive from here.

But unlike the Würzburg assault, in which Islamic State claimed responsibility, the Reutlingen incident appeared to be the result of a personal dispute, police said.

“There is no evidence that it was religious or terrorist-motivated,” a police spokesman said.

Germans have been anxious amid a series of high-profile violence in Europe, including the July 14 truck attack in Nice, France; the Würzburg assault; and Friday’s shooting spree in Munich that killed nine.

The police initially described the man’s weapon as a machete but later said it was a long knife, likely a kitchen knife. They said the man and woman had some kind of personal dispute, but said they didn’t yet know the nature of their relationship. Police said they weren’t able to immediately identify the woman and didn’t know her nationality.

It also wasn’t clear when the man came to Germany. More than 300,000 Syrians have applied for asylum in Germany since January 2015, according to government figures. Reutlingen, a city of 110,000, is in the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg.

CONTENTS
1. Germany’s first suicide bomb
2. Western Europe’s (still relatively small-scale) Islamist insurgency
3. BBC omits Muslim first name of attacker
4. CNN – if the same attacks happen against Israelis, it is not terror
5. AFP: no terror in Israel
6. In Paris too
7. Ex-Democrat congresswoman: Israel behind European terror attacks
8. Israel a “major cause of Isis” says British Lib-Dem politician
9. A no-fly zone
10. Turkey: Erdogan publishes photo of new government