Europe has no idea how to stop the spread of Islamism

Last week was surely one of the grimmest in Europe in years. The day after an Afghan migrant allegedly stabbed a two-year-old boy in Germany to death, Axel Rudakubana was sentenced to 52 years in prison for murdering Alice, Bebe and Elsie, three little English girls with a combined age of 22, in Southport.

The court heard that Rudakubana told police in the immediate aftermath of the killing: ‘It’s a good thing those children are dead…I’m so glad…so happy’. What we didn’t hear enough about was the exact nature of his extremism. We know that an Al-Qaeda training manual was found in his bedroom, and that he was referred to the Prevent counter-terrorism programme twice in 2021, once for uploading images of Colonel Gaddafi, and once for researching the London Bridge atrocity of 2017 when an Islamist terror cell murdered eight people. We also know, because the BBC and other media outlets are desperate to point it out, that he was ‘obsessed’ with Adolf Hitler and had ‘an interest in Nazi Germany’.

In the coverage of the Southport attack, there are shades of the same dissimulation that characterised the reporting of an atrocity in the French town of Annecy in the summer of 2023.