‘He tried to join ISIS!’ | Dawn Neesom gives a scathing verdict on the Berlin Pride attack suspect

Welcome back to Breakfast at 6.45. Should we take a look at some of the newspaper front pages on this Monday morning? We should. Let's have a quick look at the Telegraph, shall we? Their Prime Minister plans to crack down on youth benefits. The Times claims that teen anxiety pays more than a job. Young people who take up part-time work on minimum wage earn £100 less than those claiming sickness benefits. In the sun this morning, lights, camera, act wrong. Ronaldo Cristiano will play himself in a new TV drama. And lastly, The Guardian reports this morning, Miliband vows to give UK global leadership on the climate crisis. All right, well, joining us to talk about all of the fantastic stories this morning are Olympian Chris Akabusi and GB News presenter Dawn Neeson. Good morning, you two. Good morning. I say fantastic news, but I mean, actually, we should probably start with what happened on Saturday at the Berlin Pride. What seems to be an Islamist attack. Stop saying that, because it is an Islamist attack. I mean, it seems to be. We've got to tiptoe around it. We do know the full facts. I mean, you know, this chap tried to join ISIS. I think it's fairly safe to say that he was an Islamist and he wanted death on the West. So I think we're OK to say that. And the fact that this story isn't on any of the British page ones, I find really strange. It's inside some of them, but it's very strange it's not on the page one. Because, I mean, this happened in Germany. It happened in Berlin. OK, I get that. But this could happen here. Yeah, this is the West. It really could. I mean, this wasn't a pride event. This wasn't because it was Germany. This is because there are a group of people out there who simply hate us and hate the West. And they want to hurt us. And we are letting them hurt us. I mean, this bloke just didn't slip through a net, did he? The door was open for him. I mean, they let him roam the streets. He would come out of youth custody, 21 years old. He'd tried to join ISIS for God's sakes. And he was allowed to hire a van in his own name, despite posting threats online, posing with guns. He was allowed to do this. And now we have people throwing up their hands in horror and saying, oh, we've got to be careful how we talk about this. We can't be seen to be Islamophobic. And we've had commentators in this country saying, this is the fault of right-wing rhetoric, their version of right-wing rhetoric, whatever that actually is. And no, it's not. This is the fault of radical Islam, who want to kill us. I was really, last night, for anyone who's watching this morning, if you're a bit like me, an insomniac, and you stayed up, absolutely furious to see some of the, even politicians pointing the finger at political parties, GB News included in that as well. In some cases, absolutely despicable to point the finger at anything other than Islamist extremism, which I think we do not, many people just don't want to have a conversation about that, Dawn, and that bothers me. Yeah, and all the time, Alex, we are looking elsewhere and trying to be, we are all this kind, inclusive, and we all love diversity. Yes, of course we do. But, but, but, but, all the time we are saying, oh, it's the right-wing rhetoric that are causing this. We're ignoring the actual problem. And the actual problem is what's caused the death of that young woman in Germany. We're ignoring that, and the Germans are in the same situation, and like you over the weekend, I interviewed several very respected German journalists on this situation, and they were saying the same thing, that the German government and various people over there, including the people, all the Pride event organisers, were saying, oh, we need more love, we need more Pride events to get over this. This isn't about having more Pride events. No, it's not, unfortunately, it's not the solution. So many viewers getting in touch just saying, well said, Dawn, thank you for calling it out, exactly what it is. Well, I mean, it's really, all the time we tiptoe this, we are going to get this in our country. Well, we hope not. Chris, what's your reaction to what you've seen over the weekend? Well, it's a guy called Abidal Ballout. He's a madman. He's dead. Twenty-nine-year-old German citizen of Lebanese descent, and he was obviously deranged. I take on board a lot of what Dawn has said. But I want to point out this guy, while he was known to the German authorities, and slipped through the net, and as Dawn said, he travelled to Lebanon via Turkey to try to get involved with ISIS. He was obviously a madman. I don't want to actually lambast the religion with this one guy, although I take on board... This is the other thing, Chris, and I completely agree with you that this is not about Muslims. This is about radical Islam, and there is a difference, and we do need to make that difference very, very clear, because ordinary Muslims are suffering just as much as we are when these things happen. Because, now, an ordinary Muslim will walk down the street, and people point and think, right, OK, you're involved in this, and they are not. There is a huge difference between the faith of being a Muslim and radical Islam, a huge difference. Well, look, the good news of all of this is that this coward is dead. This man, from what reports the German press are reporting over the weekend, that he was found hiding in a garden shed somewhere. So is a young woman. No, I know, we can't change that, but at least they found him and they got him, because the worry was, with a 20-hour manhunt, that he had escaped, and I'm glad that he hasn't. Well, there will be more attacks, that's the fear. And that he won't be put in some cushy prison somewhere and have an easy life. Actually, taking these people out is the best thing you can do. But on that note, let's just move on very, very quickly. Fire hit France. Any plans to go to Bordeaux this summer, Chris? Well, I mean, again, the fires, Spain, France, and one day, could it happen in the UK? Climate change is a reality. Australia and Los Angeles have dealt with them over the last decade or so. But now we're seeing them coming close to our shores. Dawn, what's your reaction to the pictures we've seen? They've made many of the front pages today, haven't they? Ironically, they have, and these fires have been going on for a while now. And it is awful, and sort of like, you know, it's... I mean, yeah, the climate is changing, temperatures are getting warmer, but what's causing these wildfires is many people, it's human idiocy. It's people being careless. It's people deliberately starting fires in some cases. We've had that fire in the Cairngorms going on for ten days, and that was probably arson as well. Man suspected of driving a van into a crowd at Pride in Berlin has been shot and killed after officials suggested it was an Islamist terror attack. Yes, Abdul B. was a German citizen with Lebanese heritage and was previously arrested in Lebanon for trying to join ISIS and planning a terrorist attack. Yeah, one person was sadly killed in 29, were injured, some of them with very serious injuries, when that van was driven at high speeds into revellers. Well, the suspect emerged from the car and began attacking people with what's been described as probably a machete. Absolutely horrific, isn't it? Yeah. Well, let's speak now to Chris Phillips, former head of the National Counterterrorism Security Office, who joins us now. Very good morning to you, Chris. First of all, what's your reaction to what we saw at the weekend? Absolutely horrific scenes. Yes, but it's straight out of the low-fidelity playbook for anyone that wants to be a terrorist with no real skills, isn't it? It's someone that clearly was a danger. I mean, the questions must be asked of the German criminal justice system that brought him back to the country and then released him back onto the streets. This was clearly a very dangerous young man. It appears at the moment that he was acting on his own, which is effectively a good thing in as much as he was less effective than he would have been otherwise. So, good work by the police to catch him and take him out as quickly as they did. The thing is, Chris, the criticism now is that Western countries, including ours, Germany, France, where we see these sorts of attacks, unfortunately Germany seems to have them far more often regularly than we do. I was giving an account of how many there have been last night on my show, but it seems to me that the situation is so prolific that actually we are far behind the MI5 watch list for Islamist extremism. I think top something like 48,000 in this country. Are we just at this point a ticking time bomb? Well, we have been for some time, to be quite fair. The key point is 45,000 in the UK, 7,000 people referred to prevent every year. These numbers are just increasing. And of course, there are nowhere near enough police officers, security services to deal with all of them. And all the services that have been tasked with dealing with these people from the social services, etc. otherwise, have been cut back. The police have been cut back. We're kind of just, you're right. We're sitting on the word time bomb is a good word for it actually. We're sitting on a big, big problem. But this is a problem right across the West. France, Germany, Belgium is a particular problem. Even Ireland now has the similar sort of problems. And it's something that as the West, we've got to deal with. But how do we deal with it, Chris? When we see individuals like this, and as you in your first answer, you referenced low skill, all a person requires is a certain mindset and a vehicle, a vehicle that they then use as a weapon. How do we stop that? Well, there's lots of ways that we can stop vehicles from attacking people, but you can't stop them from attacking all people everywhere. And that's the key point. Almost impossible once they get the desire and the effort to do that, to prevent them from causing damage to someone. I mean, individually, we can help ourselves by being aware of what's going on around us to protect ourselves. But it is almost impossible to stop someone getting a van or a vehicle. And it's pretty much impossible stopping them getting a knife. So it is difficult at that stage. We've got to deal with it at source, I'm afraid. Chris, how do we combat this in a digital age as well? We've seen terrorism, of course, in the West for a long time. It's nothing new to us. We can go back to the IRA in more recent memory as well in Britain. How do we tackle this in a digital age? Because a lot of radicalisation is happening online. You don't even need to be sent to some training camp abroad now. You can just be radicalised online on the Internet. And this kind of links into your previous story as well. People with mental illness sitting in their bedrooms, looking at the Internet. It's a very, very difficult thing to do. Of course, the cyber companies, the social media companies can do some work on this. Police do do a lot of work. And the security services pick up certain words and things that go together to let them know whether someone's a risk. But we've got an awful lot of people who are a risk. And this is a dangerous game because the police and security services every week have to look at the remit. And they're worrying how worrying individuals are and which one at any given stage is likely to go rogue. And that is, you know, that's a very, very difficult game when you're talking 40 odd thousand people, as we said. And some of those, you know, maybe five, ten thousand of those are really, really worrying. And those are just too many for the resources that we've got.