The Drudge Report is in mourning over the new Munich massacre. Not because 10 people so far have been confirmed killed, but because Drudge has had to deep six his purple headlines that this was another “Allahu Akbar” attack that Donald Trump could blame by association on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Instead, the shooter, Ali David Sonboly, an 18 year-old dual Iranian-German citizen born in Germany, did not apparently have any ISIS-related or Islamist terrorist motivation. From the first revelation of his Iranian Shiite origins, it was unlikely that he would be a fan of Sunni Muslim ISIS. Rather than shout “Alluhu Akbar,” he voiced obscenities against Turks resident in Germany.
The mentally unstable Sonboly, according to his Facebook Page, was a big fan of mass murder rampages, particularly that committed by far right xenophobe Andres Breivik. Sonboly chose for his own crime the fourth anniversary of Breivik’s murder of 77 Swedes, mostly young people belonging to a Social Democratic Party youth group.
Sonboly’s terrorist act might be characterized as “tertiary terrorism” in that it was neither organized nor even inspired by a terrorist network, but was a “copy cat” imitation meant to pay homage to a mass murderer out of admiration for the crime of mass murder. Sonboly might have picked Charles Manson to idealize, but Breivik was perhaps a better choice because he shared Sonboly’s loathing of (non-Iranian) Muslims in western countries.
As terrorism reaches a sort of critical mass in western societies, more such tertiary acts of copy cat terrorism by the mentally unstable can probably be expected. Shame on the Trump crowd for wanting to exploit them by sowing fear for political advantage.
But the Munich McDonald’s massacre was not the only Trump-related Munich outrage. Simultaneous with it, Trump idea man, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, suggested that it might be OK to allow Russia’s Putin to gobble up NATO member, Estonia, because “I’m not sure I would risk a nuclear war over some place which is the suburbs of St. Petersburg.” If Trump is elect president, and dominoes begin to fall in a manner reminiscent of the betrayal of Czechoslovakia in 1938 at the Munich Conference, this Friday may be remembered less for the Munich McDonald’s massacre than for a Munich II anticipation of the betrayal of NATO voiced by Gingrich, the likely Chief of Staff in a Trump White House.
Estonia and the rest of the Baltics might be the first sacrifices on Trump’s perverse penchant to appease Putin at NATO’s expense, but Israel also would have reason to fear that the Jewish state, despite Trump’s recent reassurances, might eventually also become a falling domino victimized by Despicable Donald’s feckless foreign policy.
