A Killing Spree at the Diversity Festival

The report opens with the case of Issa al-Hasan, the Syrian national who, in August 2024, carried out a mass stabbing at the Festival of Diversity in Solingen, Germany, killing three people and injuring eight. The symbolism of that attack almost writes itself: a Syrian asylum seeker, whose application had reportedly been rejected, launching an ISIS-claimed attack at an event devoted to the celebration of multiculturalism. It is the kind of detail that, in a sane politics, would provoke serious reflection. But in modern Germany, it is more likely to provoke a row about whether noticing it is “islamophobic”.

Cottee’s central argument is that the dominant discussion of European jihadism has become distorted by a comforting but false idea: that terrorism is primarily homegrown, rooted in Western alienation, Western racism, Western foreign policy, Western social exclusion and so on. In this thesis, the second- or third-generation migrant, born and raised in Europe, is so oppressed and radicalized by European racism that he – or she, but nearly always he – begins to sympathize with anti-Western radicalism. In that understanding of the problem, the root cause of terror in Europe can be addressed simply by making Europeans less racist or bigoted toward migrants.

Dr. Cottee’s objection is that this explanation – attractive though it may be to liberal-leaning European policymakers – does not explain away the striking involvement of foreign-born migrants in recent European jihadi violence. A foreign-born migrant, after all, is by definition not exposed to European “cruelty” to immigrants from birth.

The Foiled Terror Attacks We Do Not Hear About

The report’s dataset includes both completed attacks and foiled plots, which matters because measuring only completed attacks risks understating the scale of the problem. Cottee defines a migrant plotter as a jihadi born outside Europe who had his formative childhood experiences in a non-European country. He does not include every migrant convicted of a terrorism-related offense, nor every violent migrant whose attack vaguely resembled terrorism. On the contrary, he says that he has erred on the side of caution.

Even with that cautious approach, on which we must take him at his word, the numbers are revealing, and grim.

Of the 100 migrant-related plots, 51% were launched and 49% were foiled. By contrast, among jihadi plots not involving migrants, only 36% were launched and 64% were foiled. In other words, migrant-involved plots were not merely common; on Cottee’s data, they were more likely to get through. This is presumably because European police forces lack intelligence structures among communities of recent migrants that they may have painstakingly established in more settled migrant communities.

Attacks from “true foreigners” were also, on the face of it, more deadly. Migrant-related plots caused 279 deaths, compared with 107 deaths from jihadi plots not involving migrants. Cottee does note an important caveat: two atrocities – the November 2015 Paris attacks and the 2016 Nice truck attack – account for 216 of those deaths.

Germany as the Central Case Study

Germany emerges as the central case study. Cottee finds that migrant-related plots occurred across 12 countries, but Germany accounted for nearly half of them, followed by France and the United Kingdom. He argues that since global jihadism has no obvious special obsession with Germany, the obvious explanation is the scale of Germany’s intake during the 2015 migration crisis.

The profile of the plotters is also familiar. They were overwhelmingly male – 97% – and mostly in their 20s and 30s. They came from more than 20 countries, but the leading countries of origin were Syria, Iraq and Morocco. Most migrant-related plots were ISIS-affiliated. Most were also lone-actor plots. Of the 51 migrant-related plots that were actually launched, 96% were committed by a single individual.

Perhaps the most politically uncomfortable finding is that almost half of the 137 migrant plotters had some form of protected status in Europe: asylum or residency. This complicates the easy argument that the danger is confined only to people whose asylum applications have been rejected, or who have fallen into some bureaucratic limbo. In some cases, rejection of asylum does seem to have triggered violence. But formal acceptance by the host country was no firewall against extremism. It also suggests that Europe’s screening process for detecting “genuine” refugees has deep flaws within it, and that even if the number of people beating the screening process is small, it remains large enough to be deadly.

The report also challenges the claim that jihadism is only a problem of ISIS at its territorial peak. Cottee’s data show a spike in migrant-related plots in 2016 and 2017, which one might expect after the Syrian war and migration crisis. But there was also a new spike in 2024, long after the ISIS caliphate had collapsed. His conclusion is that ISIS now survives less as a territorial project than as a kind of ideological revenge fantasy against Western liberalism.

Attacks as Expressions of Contempt

This is where the report becomes most interesting. Cottee argues that many attacks appear to be directed not merely at “the West” in some abstract geopolitical sense, but at precisely those aspects of Western liberal society most cherished by progressives: LGBT events, women, Jews, civilians at festivals and police officers protecting public order. The targets are not accidental. They are expressions of contempt.

The report’s conclusion is that Europe has entered what Cottee calls a “fourth wave” of jihadism. This new wave, he says, is made up of “rootless, nomadic individuals” who leave the Middle East or North Africa for Europe, but whose alienation, resentment or ideological hostility turns violently against the societies that receive them.

Cottee’s report is therefore useful not because it tells us that all migrants are dangerous – it does not – but because it tells us that a small minority have been very dangerous indeed. In a grown-up Europe, that would be enough to begin a serious debate and reevaluation of immigration policy. In the Europe we actually inhabit, it may merely be enough to get the author called names.