WorthyNews: Netherlands, Germany Under Pressure Over Deadly Knife Attacks (Worthy News In-Depth)

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By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

BERLIN/AMSTERDAM/BUDAPEST (Worthy News) – Governments in the Netherlands and Germany were under pressure Monday to halt the influx of migrants from mainly Muslim nations as more details emerged about deadly knife attacks in which children were among those killed.

In the Netherlands, police announced they had detained a man of Moroccan and Dutch nationality suspected of fatally stabbing an 11-year girl in the Dutch town of Nieuwegein.

The girl was attacked Saturday in the street at 3:00 p.m. local time, and medics were unable to save her life, according to police investigators.

Earlier reports had wrongly identified the man as coming from Syria, police added. “In the immediate vicinity, the police arrested a 29-year-old suspect based on information from bystanders and others,” a statement from the Utrecht regional police added.

The authorities did not indicate the motives for the attack, but police said they were investigating reports that the suspect had been acting “confused” in the week ahead of the attack.

Residents said they had been “concerned about the man’s behavior for some time, and three complaints had been made to the police about him.”

The dead girl and her family “came from Eritrea, and the girl had celebrated her 11th birthday on Friday,” neighbors said. Police also told Dutch radio the girl may have been “a random” victim.

GERMANY’S AFD

In neighboring Germany, Europe’s largest economy, the once isolated, fiercely anti-migration Alternative für Deutschland or Alternative for Germany (AfD) party received more endorsements Monday despite concerns about pro-Nazi views within its ranks.

Polls suggest the AfD could become one of the nation’s largest parties amid mounting anger about violence linked to Muslim asylum seekers.

German police revealed that they detained a 28-year-old Afghan man over a knife attack in a park in the German city of Aschaffenburg on January 22 that killed two people, including a toddler.

With less than a month left in a campaign for early elections dominated by debate on immigration and asylum policy, the country’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, condemned it as an “act of terror.”

Police said a two-year-old boy and a 41-year-old man who reportedly attempted to help the child were killed. Two other victims were severely injured in the stabbing, whose motive was not immediately clear, police added.

Local media reports said the attacker targeted a group of children from a daycare center who were in the park. The suspect lived in an asylum center in the area, news outlet Der Spiegel reported. Other media reported the man had been treated for “psychological problems.”

Election frontrunner Friedrich Merz, head of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), said he was deeply shocked by the violence. “This can’t go on,” he stressed in a statement. “We must and we will re-establish law and order.”

REMIGRATION DEMANDS

Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, running second in the polls, posted on social media platform X: “Remigration now!” referring to her party’s highly controversial call for mass deportation of migrants and asylum seekers.

Both parties have not ruled out governing together, and the AfD backed the CDU’s proposals for strict migration rules. According to police, at least 160,000 people marched in Germany’s capital, Berlin, and other cities on Sunday in protest. Organizers said 250,000 people participated in the Berlin rally.

Yet in Hungary, fiercely anti-migration Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Monday announced AfD leader Alice Weidel’s visit to Hungary on social media. “Berlin has always been a city of walls. It’s time to tear another one down,” Orban said on the social media platform X.

Orbán told Switzerland’s Neue Zuercher Zeitung newspaper that Weidel herself had initiated her visit to Hungary.

“The AfD could get 20 percent of the vote [in Germany’s February 23 national election]. If its head wants to talk to me, why should I say no?” the newspaper quoted him as saying in an interview. Its success would mirror the success of the Dutch anti-Islam Partij Voor de Vrijheid, or Party for Freedom (PVV), which became the largest party in the Netherlands and is now part of the government.

The AfD also received endorsement from U.S. billionaire Elon Musk, a government efficiency adviser to U.S. President Donald J. Trump.

The party also received an unprecedented 5 million euros ($5.2 million) in financial donations, announced in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, on Monday.

MILLIONS GIVEN

Germany’s Bundestag disclosed that the AfD received its largest-ever donation, 2.3 million euros ($2.4 million), from a far-right Austrian politician on February 1. That followed two contributions from German business people in January totaling almost 2.5 million euros ($2.6 million).

Each was individually larger than the total in declared donations that the party received in any given year of its 10-year history, officials said.

Musk, the world’s richest man, endorsed the AfD before Trump’s January 20 inauguration.

Yet the AfD’s rise has worried at least some Jewish people and others who recall that Björn Höcke, leader of the AfD party in the state of Thuringia, has twice been fined by a German court for using a banned Nazi slogan. The phrase “Everything for Germany” (“Alles für Deutschland”) was a slogan of the Nazi stormtroopers and engraved on their daggers.

Alexander Gauland, an AfD co-founder, former party leader, and current Member of Parliament, has engaged in Holocaust trivialization on several occasions. In a 2018 speech to the AfD youth wing, he said, “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” Gauland also said in 2017 that Germans should be “proud of the achievements of German soldiers in two world wars.”

AfD leaders have also threatened to deport German citizens of non-ethnic-German heritage, saying, “Islam does not belong in Germany. The AfD sees the spread of Islam and the presence of over 5 million Muslims, whose numbers are constantly growing, as a great danger to our state, our society, and our system of values.”

AfD members were also exposed as participants in a November 2023 secret meeting of far-right extremists in Potsdam, including Austrian neo-Nazi Martin Sellner, who discussed a mass deportation plan for foreigners and “non-assimilated” Germans as part of AfD’s strategy should it be elected to govern Germany.

DEPORTATION PLAN

Following the exposure of the secret meeting, AfD politicians initially denied participating. Still, just weeks later, they began actively campaigning with the slogan “remigration,” which was the term used at the meeting for the mass deportation plan.

The prospect of the AfD becoming part of a government prompted a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor to return his federal order of merit to the German president.

Albrecht Weinberg’s move came after an anti-immigration motion in parliament passed with the support of the AfD.

Weinberg, whose parents were murdered in Auschwitz, told The Guardian newspaper that he was “horrified.”

He added: “You know German history? You know then how some people posing as democrats in 1933 abused the legal, political process to get into power? What happened in the Bundestag on Wednesday reminded me of Germany in 1933 of how [Adolf] Hitler and the Nazi party managed to come to power through legitimate means.”

Analysts say, however, that while most Germans do not want the nation to return to the antisemitic Nazi era, there is genuine concern about the extremism among Muslim migrants following recent deadly violence, including stabbings and other attacks.

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