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December 21, 2024 - 4:50pm
In such polarised times, there is a strong temptation to interpret acts of violence through the lens of one’s own biases. The attack on a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg yesterday evening, which killed five and injured over 200 more, has revealed this impulse in the starkest terms. Already, attention has been drawn from the Right to the background of the alleged perpetrator as an asylum seeker from Saudi Arabia, and from some on the Left to his support of Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Importantly, the main suspect, a 50-year-old Saudi national and psychotherapist named Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, was less a “lone wolf” than a “known wolf”. Not only did Saudi authorities repeatedly warn their German counterparts that he was posting online about his desire to kill civilians, Abdulmohsen had also contacted prominent ex-Muslims such as Yasmine Mohammed and Ali Utlu. Both Mohammed and Utlu suspected he was a Saudi agent spying on ex-Muslims and dissidents, with the latter claiming today: “He acted ex-Muslim on the outside, while in direct messages he threatened ex-Muslims, especially Saudi women who had fled.”
Abdulmohsen also contacted the German-Egyptian writer Hamed Abdel-Samad, one of the country’s most prominent critics of Islam, demanding that Abdel-Samad distance himself from a secular group which supports refugees as he was planning to do something which would make the organisation “the talk of the world”. Over a year ago, a Saudi woman sought to alert authorities that Abdulmohsen wanted to “kill […] 20 German people” because he felt he had been treated unfairly by police in a separate case. Unfortunately, she sent the email to a police station in Berlin, New Jersey instead of the German capital.
Reacting to Friday evening’s attack, some journalists described Abdulmohsen as an activist who opposed the Saudi government, supported women’s rights, provided aid for refugees and was an atheist. Yet people who interacted with him on social media argued that, rather than supporting women, he deliberately targeted female ex-Muslims who had fled Saudi Arabia with the purpose of exposing them.
Additional reporting by the German weekly Der Spiegel stated that the suspect sympathised with the AfD, Elon Musk, and British anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson, with the article arguing an “Islamist background can almost certainly be excluded”. Abdulmohsen also reportedly had plans to create an academy for ex-Muslims together with the AfD. But there has not been a good explanation as to why an atheistic former Muslim would target families at a Christmas market eight years, almost to the day, after a similar incident happened in Berlin.
It is also unclear why German authorities did not act on the information coming from Saudi Arabia. A country which calls the police on citizens who label prominent politicians “idiots” evidently did not see the need to investigate someone who spoke openly about his intention to kill Germans. Additionally, apart from the accusations that Abdulmohsen was a spy rather than a dissident, much attention has been paid to the concept of Taqiyya, supposedly a doctrine used by Islamists allowing them to deny their religion in order to deceive others and achieve their goals by stealth.
Evidence is still being collected, and while the Magdeburg attack might not fit the usual pattern of an Islamist terror attack, it also doesn’t match the behaviour of a Right-wing extremist. Could Abdulmohsen have been a Saudi agent gone rogue? Or was his violence the product of a mental breakdown rather than a twisted ideology?
Whatever the truth, this incident will have wider ramifications across Germany. In one of the oldest Christian countries in the world, families can no longer safely visit a Christmas market; once there, they must pass through detectors similar to airport security. The German people will demand accountability, and the emerging narrative that Adbulmohsen was radicalised by the AfD and Elon Musk is unlikely to convince them.
Ralph Schoellhammer is assistant professor of International Relations at Webster University, Vienna.
Raphfel
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SubscribeI thought “Covid definitely didn’t start in a lab researching it’s specific capabilities” was probably as far as you could take public gaslighting.
Then along came a terror attack by a Saudi immigrant and we got ‘far right Islamophobe.’
There is just no chance the killer is an ex-muslim atheist. Very obviously a sordid, unstable double agent of some sort (probably al-qaeda or similar) who has flipped mentally for whatever reason, as such people are wont to, and embarked on a killing spree. And this is the point, considering the influx over the last two decades, there are probably lots of such people all across Europe in the shadows.
The authorities didn’t investigate as that could be interpreted as being racist I would imagine.
Taqiyya.
Yeah, never knew it was a “thing”, but just about sums up the entire mindset.
Never mind being a serious religion, pious and peaceful, this is the reality of Islam. It’s all about control; nothing more, nothing less.
Explains this, Dublin, Southport etc. Try to stay off radar while you set things up. Only the dopey journalists who are fooled.
Dopey or wilfully credulous? I think there was an article here earlier in the week about the “curious lack of curiosity” displayed by certain journalists about certain subjects.
I’m certainly not buying the “radicalised by the AFD and Musk narrative”. Firstly because Musk only just started to endorse the AFD and radicalisation doesn’t happen that quickly, the timing is more coincidental.
Also, if you are an AFD supporter, why would you try and kill Germans in Magdeburg where 22% voted for the AFD in the EP election? It makes no sense, but since when did that stop the media pushing silliness like this.
The whole thing is weird, but it bears all the hallmarks of an Islamic attack of the type we’ve seen repeatedly. And, as we say in our house, if you hear hooves galloping behind you, the likelihood is that it’s a horse and not a zebra.
Somethings just don’t add up.
The only thing we can say with certainty is the German state police are incompetent.
He was radicalised by the AFD so he killed and injured over 200 German people? Really? I don’t buy it.
This is just another example of MENAP immigration failure.
Mass deportation is the only thing that will save our continent now.
The German Stasi/Gestapo are even now test marketing the narrative that this murderous attack is actually the fault of the AfD, Elon Musk, and President Trump.
The ‘anti-Islam, AfD supporting’ instinctively feels like a crass and poor identity cover attempt doesn’t it. We’ll no doubt understand more in a few days, but gut says this is a classic nut-job Islamist hit, with perhaps the only surprise being he surrendered and is now in custody.
One has to ponder the question though – why do Islamists undertake such attacks when they must know it undermines all the peaceful Muslims who have migrated? It is of course because they do not want them to integrate/assimilate and further develop a more moderate Islam that then percolates back home. They want to generate division and if possible attacks on these Muslims in order to hopefully radicalise them too. Once you grasp that you realise they are generating in many exactly the reaction they want. Do you want to help them?
It’s a good argument, particularly if you want to quieten anti Islamic feeling. You’re basically saying that to express such feeling is to become a tool of the terrorist.
But this assumes that terrorists have no psychology, but are simply rational actors pursuing a worked out strategy. We’ll have to wait and see in this case, but it is quite possible for terrorists to be driven by emotions like hate, and to even commit acts which are destructive of their cause. Indeed any strategy they claim to be following may be pure rationalisation, and make little real strategic sense.
‘Additional reporting by the German weekly Der Spiegel stated that the suspect sympathised with the AfD, Elon Musk, and British anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson, with the article arguing an “Islamist background can almost certainly be excluded”’
So not a lone wolf.
“Tommy Robinson” even follows him on Twitter.
Der Spiegel‘s journalism is so wilfully naïve that to describe as “student union politics” would be an insult to student union politics.
How dare the fools (mis)leading the West continue their nihilistic self-righteous crusade against the West. Yet here we see how a member of the nihilist class dares to, even as the. Victims are still dying, pretend it is not clear as to what is going on. This author dismisses his readers as fools.
Some journalists and politicians of the German Left already want to ban/censor X and blame it for the “right wing” radicalisation of the Saudi terrorist. The story is that Musk and the AfD were the trigger of this terrible attack on innocent families at the Magdeburg Christmas Market. You couldn’t make it up…
Why would an Atheist ex-Muslim drive through an “emergency opening”(all Christmas Markets in Germany have the so-called “Merkel Bollards” since mass migration) at a Christmas Market, killing and injuring innocent visitors of his host country and not showing his hate for Islam driving into recent Muslim Demonstration?
Are you quite certain an Israeli Jew didn’t plow through the market ….you know that revenge is a part of Judaism….and Jews have an abiding hatred for all non Jews….so it can’t have been a Muslim who abides by Allah…it had to be the JEW again…. this is my SATIRE….or sarcasm …..because everything and anything can be dumped on the JEWs today and this UNHeRD I see is contributing to this too….getting pretty pissed off at Unherd now.
There are already virulent anti-semites popping up on other site claiming it was a zionist plot to frame the muslims. Unlike you, they are not being sarcastic.
Jews don’t have an abiding hatred for all non Jews. Why would they? Or has the /sarc gone right over the top of my head.?
The only question this Magdeburg suspect prompts : why have our rulers enabled our enemies with open arms to corrupt and destroy our societies?
You can take the man out of the Islam but you can’t take Islam out of the man.
To me this story makes little sense. A far right islamophobe who supports AfD wishes to punish the Germans for allowing Islam to take over their society so he attacks where AfD support is some of the strongest in the country and decides to attack a Christian Christmas market?
Or maybe he’s just one of the many nutcases out there who finally snapped , with many more to come, on all sides.
If Taleb al-Abdulmohsen had been as initially suspected, then there would have been no suggestion that he had “acted alone”. But we were still right that he was the sort of person whom our lords and masters were supporting in Syria, much of which is being made Greater Israel. In having attacked a Christian target, as such, al-Abdulmohsen is firmly in the tradition of the church-bombers and church-burners of Gaza and Lebanon, of the West Bank and the Armenian Quarter. In that same tradition are all of the purported liberators of Syria.
Al-Abdulmohsen identifies with the noticeably irreligious Alternative für Deutschland, which does best in some of the most secular places on Earth. Right-wing populists have no interest in answering Islam with a return to structured daily prayer, to the setting aside one day in seven, to fasting, to almsgiving, to pilgrimage, to the global community of faith as the primary focus of personal allegiance and locus of personal identity, to the lesser outward and greater inward struggle, to the need for a comprehensive and coherent critique both of capitalism and of Marxism, to the coherence between faith and reason, and to a consequently integrated view of art and science. On the contrary, their blanket opposition to immigration would prevent the re-Christianisation of the West. If they are social conservatives, then they have an entirely Boomer or Generation X understanding of what they wanted to conserve. And we now see just how dangerous they are.
If this Islamic terrorist had actually been pro-AfD, we can rest assured the German stasi would have been on him like white on rice.