How Germany is manufacturing the Islamist bogeyman

Germany finds itself at a historic turning point that could redefine what it stands for and what it wants to project to the world. As the far right makes significant electoral inroads, the country is in a deep identity crisis, facing serious structural economic and societal challenges.

While in the Weimar Republic a century ago, demagogues and populists thrived on “othering” German Jews, today this “other” is the migrant - more specifically, those with Muslim backgrounds.

As in other European countries, this broad-brush approach to political Islam has become widely accepted in the German mainstream, where any form of Islamic activism is regarded as a potential “gateway drug” to the world of jihadism.

The Islamist bogeyman is a beautifully simplistic narrative in populist fear-mongering. Mirroring the story told in the video posted by Bavaria’s interior ministry, any contact with Islamic discourse is portrayed as automatically putting the participant on a conveyer belt from moderate Islamism to al-Qaeda-style terrorism.

The oft-debunked “conveyer belt theory” has been pushed by Israeli and Emirati networks in the counter-extremism space in an effort to securitise political Islam in all its diverse shapes and forms.