Amri: The Twelve Failures of Christmas

Alphen, Netherlands. 23 December. Sadly, given the events in Berlin I am not feeling particularly Christmassy this year. No, I am angry. Angry at the Islamist who took the innocent lives at a Berlin Christmas market. Angry at the failure to capture the alleged perpetrator Anis Amri. Above all, I am angry with our so-called leaders. Yet again one event has revealed them for what they are; wishful thinking, bungling incompetents seemingly unable or unwilling to properly defend the very people who put them in their ivory towers. For Amri, or whoever carried out the Berlin attack, to get behind the wheel of that articulated lorry and mow down swathes of festive revellers there were at least twelve failures to act:

Failure One: The very fact that Amri was allowed to get to Europe reveals again the farce that is the EU’s so-called external border.

Failure Two: The failure of Italy to deport Amri back to Tunisia once he was convicted of setting a detention centre alight.

Failure Three: The radicalisation of Amri within an Italian prison. Prisons across Europe seem to be little more than incubators for Islamisation these days.

Failure Four: Failure by Italy to deport Amri after he had served his sentence.

Failure Five: Failure to monitor Amri as he made his borderless way through Schengenland from Italy to Germany.

Failure Six: Having established that Amri was a threat the failure to maintain surveillance on him in Germany, partly as a function of the limited resources available to the German security services and partly due to the German government’s own fragmented structure.

Failure Seven: To permit a ‘fighter’ on a martyrdom mission to walk away from the scene of his crime and to bungle the investigation for twenty-four hours.

Big Failure Eight: The well-intentioned but absurd pretence by Chancellor Merkel with her ‘wir schaffen das’ mantra that by letting in well over one million irregular migrants into Germany (and thus Europe) without any real effort to properly document the new arrivals.

Big Failure Nine: The determined refusal to ignore the relationship between a failed migration policy and a failed security policy at a time when Islamic State declared their determination to attack Europe.

Big Failure Ten: To infer that any criticism of gross elite incompetence is somehow a right-wing political conspiracy and express feigned surprise when more European citizens die at the hands of an extremist permitted to make his way across Europe in spite of a whole raft of warning signs.   

Big Failure Eleven: To place more importance on hiding the facts of failure from citizens above establishing a proper policy, structure and system to manage both extreme migration at a time of extreme insecurity. This failure includes failing to prepare for or manage the huge and dangerous inflows into Europe, to establish a mechanism for establishing nationality early, to properly monitor dangerous individuals, to establish a proper system for deporting failed asylum seekers, to deal effectively with radicalising Mosques and individuals.    

Big Failure Twelve: If Amri is indeed the perpetrator, and that has yet to be properly established in a court of law, perhaps the biggest failure this whole tragic saga reveals is this; Europe’s leaders deemed Amri’s human rights to be more important than the human rights of the victims of his attack who had their lives snuffed out at that Christmas scene I know so well.

Europe is in a security crisis. Yet again the seemingly total inability of Europe’s leaders to properly secure and defend the very European citizens who elevate them has been revealed. Not for the first time, and I suspect sadly not for the last, I must again ask of our leaders how many more of us have to die before they get collective their security act together.   

Europe today is neither secure nor properly defended precisely because of the dangerous conceits of an incompetent European elite political establishment who simply refuse to face up to the hard realities of this dangerous world. And, in spite of their abject failure Europe’s leaders wonder out loud why so-called populists are emerging to challenge their complacency. Just how many Amris are stalking our streets? Europe’s leaders have not got a clue.

Get you act together, leaders!

Julian Lindley-French