Germans have begun to wonder why terrorists hate them, especially since they have steadfastly stood against the Iraq War, but hate them they do. As one man goes on trial for attempting a deadly terrorist strike on the German rail system, the Times of London reports on the panic felt by the Germans themselves:

A LEBANESE student suspected of trying to paralyse the German railway network with a bomb concealed in a suitcase appeared in court yesterday, as a huge police hunt for a second suspect continued. ...

His arrest has thrown the country into panic since it coincides with Berlin’s emotionally charged decision to deploy troops in the Middle East for the first time since the Second World War. Suddenly Germans, too, are beginning to feel that they have become a target.

“The terrorist threat has never before come so close to us,” Wolfgang Schäuble, the Interior Minister, said. Police patrols on railway stations have been stepped up but the scale of the problem — 5,700 railway stations and 4.3 million passengers a day — makes it impossible to impose the security measures being put in place in airports in Britain and elsewhere.

Americans learned this lesson on 9/11, and other nations have been slower to recognize it. Free societies cannot possibly apply the kinds of security procedures that would make mass transit completely safe, not if they want to remain free societies. We can adopt better technology and hopefully screen airline passengers more effectively, but in truth that approach alone always puts us behind the terrorist curve. They only have to be successful once; we have to be successful every single time, and still protect the civil liberties of the travelers in our nations.

The only way to effectively fight terrorism is to fight it somewhere else. The Germans have consistently failed to grasp this, but that may come from a lack of attacks on their own assets. This plot has awaken some to the danger of the strict law-enforcement model. If every counterterrorism strategy relies on waiting until the terrorists have come to the Western nations they target, then this war is lost.

Germany understood that the terrorists had come to their territory, and so they have even less excuse for their willful myopia on the threat. The 9/11 conspirators came from an al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, and terrorists used Germany on several occasions for meetings and support tasks. Perhaps the Germans convinced themselves that Islamofascists only hated America, and that as long as they remained publicly neutral on the war, terrorists would bypass them in favor of more attacks on America and Britain.

This obviously has failed, and for obvious reasons. Radical Islamists do not just hate America -- they hate Western culture and its freedoms. They hate sexual expression, voting, secular humanism, modern art, pork, the exposure of skin on women, and the economic success of others. Any nation which exhibits these characteristics will find themselves in the crosshairs of al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups. Appeasement works just as well as it did in the 1930s, a lesson the Germans should understand better than almost anyone.

Maybe the Germans will start taking seriously this war and the forward strategy of the US to engage and kill terrorists where they live rather than where we live. We're not going to just sit around and try to catch them in the act of killing us, and hope our timing is good. That strategy has shown itself over and over again to be a loser, and the Germans have provided just another example of this.

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