Senior reporter for the German-language newspaper, Welt am Sonntag (The World on Sunday), Per Hinrichs, on December 1, 2023, wrote an opinion piece, “Risk of Attack: Islamism has finally come to our everyday lives.” Hinrich’s article was spurred by news that local police had foiled an attack planned by two ‘Islamists’ targeting a Christmas market; and was meant as a warning to all Germans of the potential for the violence of the Israel-Hamas conflict to spill over into their country as radical Islamists attempted to influence Germany’s support of Israel.

Per Hinrich’s article appears below [as translated from German by LOC]:

Two young Islamists wanted to wreak a bloodbath at a Christmas market. That they were stopped shouldn’t be the end of the story. The efforts in more areas must become still greater now – and that touches us all.

Thomas Haldenwang, Chief of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution [BfV; Germany’s domestic intelligence agency], last week drew a gloomy picture of the violence-ready Islamist scene. “The danger is real and higher than it has been for a long time,” he clarified on Wednesday in Berlin. The risk of attack has achieved “a new quality.”

On Tuesday, the police had just arrested two youths in North Rhine-Westphalia and Brandenburg, who were to have planned an Islamist attack on a Christmas market in Leverkusen. Both, the alleged offspring of terrorists, wanted to connect to the Islamic State (IS) afterward. “I’ve already got the gasoline,” one of the two celebrated in an intercepted chat.

The excitement following such reports is always great and condemnation of such actions follows immediately. But too often it remains only words. Islamists can appear openly in this country – they say what they think and want. They form clubs and recruit followers in the mosques. That must be prevented.

Whoever takes a more or less hostile stance against the basic order of freedom and democracy must be fought politically and juridically. Whoever goes after Israel must experience clear opposition.

It is crystal clear: Islamism is an aggressive movement hostile to democracy and human rights, a movement that directs itself against each one of us individually. We must take it seriously and, wherever we see it, to deal with it – in schools, in the workplace, in neighborhoods, on the street.

It is unacceptable that it is nearly impossible out of solidarity with Israel to hang its state flag on town halls because anti-Semites tear them down. It is unacceptable that Iran operates a mosque in Hamburg, which, in truth, accommodates the headquarters of its secret service in Europe. How can it be that the BfV surveils dozens of mosques in the country because they are considered breeding grounds for new radicals? Freedom ends where it is hated instead of preached.

But fighting also means: Making the effort to integrate. [But] newly arrived emigrants say what is and what doesn’t go here [i.e., they demand that society conform to their model.] The defense of democracy is not only the task of the BfV. It concerns all of us.