angela merkel for her humanitarianism in welcoming these refugees, but i do think it was not handled very well by europe, and there is clearly a huge backlash politically. she is paying a political price. how so, the vetting of it? there was no real coordination among european countries, no consensus about how to handle it. there wasn t adequate security vetting. it also created, unfortunately, this incentive for everybody in so many different countries to feel that this is their moment to lunge toward europe. it created this race. everyone in west africa was rushing to the mediterranean to get across the mediterranean. this backlash she is having, is she having to we re already seeing that in her position on the hibab
poland, in hungary, in france, in germany, in the united kingdom to some degree. certainly hostility to immigrants in general. and this is a wave that is across europe, and angela merkel could be a victim of this kind of ultra nationalist resurgence that we re really seeing right now. phil, i want to talk about the assassination of the russian ambassador. the assassination the assassin, i should say, screamed, don t forget aleppo, don t forget syria, and before that, al akbar. does it seem like a plot of russia s bombing of syria? much the latter. i think you could interpret this as in the same basket of what we ve just seen in germany, that is someone screamed god is great. therefore, he must be isis inspired, especially because he is from a country that is turkey that borders syria.
letting them in. are terrorists trying to infiltrate the refugee populations? is that serious? is that a danger? it s certainly a danger in europe. we saw in the paris attacks at least two of the people involved posed as refugees. when you ve got a million people coming into the country, just by the law of averages, some of them are not going to be good people. and, of course, angela merkel has paid a huge political cost for the very generous approach to refugees which is in marked contrast to the united states extremely stingy approach. we ve taken something like 10,000 so far, refugees. they ve taken a million. so it s a very different kind of situation. but, you know, she s up for election. she s going to run for her fourth term, she announced relatively recently, and she could lose on this issue of the ultra nationalist, the right in germany, couldn t do as well as they did in various other countries around europe. we ve seen hostility to refugees as being a very important part
counterterrorism, and that is one that the germans have to be thinking about, which is that the terrorist was actually not in the truck when it happened. this is consistent with what tom was just reporting. it stops, no one knows quite why, no one was making it stop, and there was no witnesses showing someone getting out of the truck. which may mean he sent it on its way to plow through a crowd and then stopped. that s got to be a theory as well, which means there is likely no pictures. just picking up on what phil said, it s the worst kind of investigation possible at that stage. i see peter shaking his head. do you have anything to add? i was just greagreeing. we re all in agreement. there is not much to say because the most simple facts about this thing are not known in terms of the identity of this person. peter, let s talk about angela merkel. angela merkel has led the way in terms of taking in syrian refugees. more than 900,000 are in germany. a lot of people are now questi