On September 5, German police raided a house near the village of Oberschledorn, near Dusseldorf, and arrested three suspected Islamist terrorists. They had accumulated enough hydrogen peroxide to build a bomb with the explosive power of 550 kg of TNT, and they had scouted potential targets like Frankfurt International Airport and the huge US Air Force base at Ramstein. As usual, the German police released only their first names and initials: Daniel S, age 22; Fritz G, 28; and Adem Y, 29.

It was the closest call yet for Germany, which has so far escaped attacks like those in Madrid and London. More attempts will doubtless follow, for Germany has peace-keeping troops in Afghanistan and Lebanon, and the disaster in Iraq has poisoned the well so badly that Western troops in any Muslim country look like part of the “Zionist-Crusader assault on Islam” to some young Muslims. But the response of the German media was instructive.

There was, inevitably, the “blame the immigrants” gang, like Jacques Schuster in the Berliner Morgenpost: “...the government must increase the pressure on Muslims to integrate. Even peaceful parallel societies cannot be tolerated.” Which kind of missed the point that two of the three men arrested were ethnic German converts to Islam. (The other was a Turkish citizen long resident in Germany.)

But the most trenchant comment came from Richard Meng in the Frankfurter Rundschau: “It was Fritz and Daniel who were arrested with Adem, not Mohammed or Mustafa. It can no longer be denied that it is foolish to regard immigrants as a greater security threat than the indigenous population. It is even more foolish to make sweeping judgments about Islam.” Exactly.

Right approach

“Islamist” extremism is a political phenomenon, and it has precisely the same appeal to the disoriented and the alienated as previous millennial doctrines, from the Hashishin of the 12th century Middle East to the anarchists and Bolsheviks of 20th century Europe. Like many such doctrines, it wraps itself in religious symbolism: most religions are, after all, millennial. But terrorism is not religion, and “Islamism” is not Islam.

First- and second-generation immigrants from Muslim countries who have not found their feet in Western countries are prime recruits for “Islamist” doctrines, of course, but so are alienated people in the host society, like Fritz G. and Daniel S. in Germany or the Jamaican-born, British-raised London bomber Abdullah Shaheed Jamal (né Germaine Maurice Lindsay). These people thought they were converting to Islam, but they were actually attracted by the violent, apocalyptic fervour of the extremists.

At least 90 per cent of the terrorist attacks in Western countries come from people who live in those countries, not outsiders trying to get in. True, a lot of them go to camps in Pakistan for training, but this is something that should be warmly encouraged. The training is obviously not very good, for few of the bombs have worked, and few of the terrorists have even got to the point where they actually tried to blow something up. And it was travelling to Pakistan that first put them on the watchlists of Western security forces: the “terrorist training camps” are obviously infiltrated by people who hand over lists of foreign visitors to Western controllers.

Osama bin Laden created the template, so in that very limited sense every “Islamist” attack has an al Qaida link, but the organization itself is no longer a major player. The terrorist attacks in the West will continue, but they will be far less destructive than those in the Muslim countries, and will diminish if Western troops pull out of Muslim countries. So the German approach is just right: do the intelligence work, don’t over-estimate the threat, and above all don’t panic.