Dhe Expert Group on Political Islamism, which Horst Seehofer founded in June 2021, was a miscarriage in name alone. The term “political Islam” stands, like “Islamism”, for the ideology of domination that wants to transform the whole world into a theocracy under Sharia law, using primarily legal means. Political Islamism is therefore tautological. That was one of the few things that the extremely heterogeneous body, which has now, after a year of work, been dissolved by the new interior minister, was able to agree on. As if through a magnifying glass, the crooked title showed the embarrassment and inability to distinguish, even the fear with which government politicians face the phenomenon.
The attitude of the group of experts is a fatal signal. The ministry acts as if it now knows enough and can refresh this knowledge from time to time at non-binding specialist conferences. Like broader political circles, the ministry only seems to care about Islamism when there’s a bang, when there are deaths, when trucks drive into crowds or when heads are cut off. Then great embarrassment spreads every time, politicians outdo each other in keeping quiet about the background to the crime or in declaring the perpetrator to be a madman, a lone wolf, although past attacks like the one in Vienna clearly showed the breeding ground on which terror grew.
