How Trump reacts to terror
After the terrorist attack in New York that left eight dead and eleven wounded, US President Trump wants to tighten immigration restrictions and abolish the green card lottery and has demanded the death penalty for the self-confessed attacker. Commentators accuse the president of double standards and voice fears that lone wolf terrorist attacks are impossible to prevent.
Dreadful double standards
President Trump's reaction to the attack in New York has been far stronger than his response to the far worse attack in Las Vegas one month ago, the Guardian criticises:
“What if you drive a truck down a New York street, knock people down and shout, 'Allahu Akbar'? You are a Muslim terrorist, a global news story and a threat to the security of nations. ... There was no mention of 'extreme vetting' of gun owners, despite their posing a threat a thousand times greater to Americans than any terrorist. There was no hint that any change in the criminal law, or in the wider regulation of this particular pastime, was due. Las Vegas has passed into history as just one of those things that happen. Guns are a very American form of terror.”
Terror is unpreventable
President Trump's reaction to the attack in New York shows just how helpless politicians are, Der Standard writes:
“The fact is that there's no way 'lone wolves' can be prevented from becoming radicalised in backstreet mosques or on the Internet, from getting behind the wheel of a truck and driving headlong into a crowd. Trump's controversial travel ban against six majority Muslim countries wouldn't have helped at all in the present case: Uzbekistan isn't on the list and the presumed killer had already been in the country for years anyway. It may well make sense to end the bizarre lottery for EU immigration visas and to select immigrants on the basis of their qualifications instead. But that won't protect the country from terror. Even a trained electrical engineer can become an Islamist.”
IS goes underground
Now that the IS has been defeated militarily the terrorist threat is greater than ever, La Repubblica concludes:
“The territorial defeat of the Islamic State doesn't mean the end of terrorism in the West but that it is taking on the form of an asymmetric war. After the fall of its strongholds Raqqa and Mosul the terrorist militias have been forced to go underground. The strategy of asymmetric warfare will inevitably spread. How many more like the Uzbek Sayfullo Saipov, the Tunisians Amri and Bouhlel before him or the Brit Masood, to name only the fanatical drivers of Berlin, Nice, and London - have become 'soldiers', as the IS calls them, without ever having fought under the banner of the IS in Syria or Iraq?”
Trump will tighten immigration laws
The attack in New York will heat up the immigration debate in the US, writes Wessela Tschernewa of the think tank European Council on Foreign Relations in an opinion piece for Standart:
“Trump knows that the attack in New York, at the heart of America, could hurt his approval ratings. That's why his first reaction was to put the immigration debate back in the foreground. He talks on Twitter of scrapping the Green Card lottery because that was apparently how the suspected attacker got into the US in 2010. Now we can expect the US to further tighten its rules for legal immigration - particularly from countries with Muslim populations.”