TWO FORMS OF SAVAGERY THWARTED IN GERMANY

First, there was another terrorist plot by al Qaeda operatives that was thwarted (may also be related to this report):

BERLIN - Three militants from an Islamic group linked to al-Qaida were planning "massive" bomb attacks against Americans in Germany when an elite antiterrorist unit raided their small-town hideout after months of police surveillance, officials said Wednesday.

Prosecutors said the suspects — two German converts and a Turkish citizen sharing a "profound hatred of U.S. citizens" — had military-style detonators and enough material to make bombs more powerful than those that killed 191 people in Madrid in 2004 and 52 commuters in London two years ago.

And that wasn't the only grisly case that was fortunately stopped. In Bremen, a plan to subject two infant girls to Islamic genital mutilation was stopped too:

It was an anti-terrorism raid with a big difference.

Police in Bremen, Germany, raided an apartment recently not to arrest any terrorists but rather to prevent two of its occupants from being terrorized by another form of barbarism: female genital mutilation. In what has been described as “a first” by a German women’s organization, authorities in the northern, port city were able to intervene and thwart a planned, female circumcision of two girls aged one and four. The infants, taken into state care, were to have undergone the horrifying procedure in their 25-year-old mother’s native country of Gambia at a female circumcision ritual.

However, the girls’ German father discovered the mother’s gruesome plan when he returned home one evening and found two packed bags and his daughters missing. Very fortunately for the girls, their father was vehemently opposed to the hideous ordeal his wife of five years, whom he had married “according to Muslim law”, was planning for them. Already aware of the father’s fierce opposition to her scheme, the mother had hidden the intended victims among countrymen at another apartment, from which at least the one-year-old was slated to leave the next day for the West African country.

An ensuing, loud argument between the two parents about the mother’s scheme luckily drew a visit from the police, now keen on finding the two little girls. The mother, however, refused to help the authorities and was taken into custody for obstructing police. But other Gambian women indicated where the toddlers were hidden, leading to their timely rescue.

It is estimated that 30,000 women living in Germany have undergone female genital mutilation, most in their native countries, and are part of the one hundred and thirty million women worldwide who have suffered the same, tragic fate. In addition, three million females, mostly girls aged four to ten, but babies as well, undergo this savage “operation” every year, while in Germany alone as many as 5,000 girls are in danger annually of joining that number.

The police in Bremen did the right thing to stop the mother from subjecting her two children to such a sick, gruesome act. It's most definitely something that requires police surveillance just as much as terrorist suspects do.