Last month I spent an afternoon in the company of a 91-year-old German called Karl-Heinz. He was a teenage paratrooper in 1944, whose war ended when he was shot in the face by an American sniper the day after D-Day.
Karl-Heinz hated the Nazis, but they for their part respected the martial prowess of the parachute regiment. On several occasions, he told me, he was approached by the SS while about town in his uniform, but their attempts to recruit Karl-Heinz into their ranks failed. He didn’t fall for their guff about true Germans only serving in the SS.
ISIS is to Islam what the SS was to Germany and as the West prepares to usher in a new year we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking 2018 will be any different to the three previous years. ISIS may have been defeated militarily in the Middle East but its ideology is intact, as enticing as ever to a minority of young Western Muslims.
How the West eradicates this ideology is the question taxing the minds of every Prime Minister and President in office.
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