Last Friday’s atrocity at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany had all the hallmarks of a jihadi attack. It was lethal, indiscriminate and utterly horrifying, transforming a boringly familiar object — a car — into a weapon of mass murder. Jihadist groups have been calling for such attacks for well over a decade now, and scores of their supporters have carried them out with deadly effect. A very similar attack to the one in Magdeburg happened in 2016 in Berlin, when Tunisian-born Anis Amri rammed a truck into a group of pedestrians, killing 12 and wounding 56 others.
But Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, the sole suspect, isn’t a jihadist. He isn’t even a Muslim, but instead an apostate from Islam, having left the fold some years ago. To my knowledge, and I’ve written a book on apostasy, this makes him the first ever ex-Muslim to launch a terrorist attack.
Unlike most ex-Muslims, who remain closeted about their apostasy, Abdulmohsen was open and highly vocal about his and had even planned to write a book setting out his reasons for leaving. To say that he was a stern critic of Islam is an understatement. Indeed, he loathed it with all the intensity that only a former believer can muster. In doing so, he aligned himself with some unsavoury bedfellows. On X, he voiced support for Germany’s anti-immigration party, the AfD, and defended the British Right-wing activist-jailbird Tommy Robinson. He also reposted tweets from a brazenly racist account whose main shtick is to circulate inflammatory videos about Islam and black people.
This seems to have befuddled quite a few people, and some have sought to characterise Abdulmohsen as a figure of the far-Right. Terrorism expert Peter Neumann, for example, observed in a widely shared post on X: “If anything, the #Magdeburg attacker Taleb A. was far right: a self-declared Islam-hating, ex-Muslim atheist, who despised German society not for being against Islam but facilitating its spread. He also very much liked the AfD.” Maryam Namazie, a British-Iranian ex-Muslim activist, concurred. On X, she wrote: “Abdulmohsen, a Saudi-born doctor and self-proclaimed ex-Muslim atheist activist, starkly illustrates that right-wing extremism knows no racial, cultural, or religious boundaries.”
If only it were that straightforward. Even the most cursory glance at Abdulmohsen’s online chatter shows that his politics cannot be reduced to any one ideology. He was, though, fixated with the theory that the German system of asylum prioritises religious Muslims from Muslim-majority countries over secular ex-Muslims fleeing persecution from those same societies. Specifically, he was convinced that Germany has a two-tier system of asylum which unjustly favours Syrian Muslim refugees over secular Saudi ones. If this is a politics of the far-Right, it is a very strange one, especially given the far-Right’s implacable opposition to asylum of any kind.
Indeed, Abdulmohsen is more a single-issue terrorist who does not really align with any particular coherent ideology. In this respect, he is the murderous embodiment of a new threat that terrorism experts have been warning about for some time and which they refer to as “MUU”, an acronym for extremist ideologies that are “mixed, unstable or unclear”. According to the UK Home Office, MUU refers to “instances where people exhibit a combination of elements from multiple ideologies (mixed), shift between different ideologies (unstable), or where the individual does not present a coherent ideology”. Terrorism researchers Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens and Moustafa Ayad have even written of “an age of incoherence”, noting a growing number of extremists who share “beliefs across ideologies like jihadism and white supremacism”.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeIt’s not very complicated: he’s a terrorist who specifically targeted “Germans,” and by “Germans,” he meant “White Christians.”
Double standards are inherently racist. If a “White Christian” threatened to kill “Arabs” and then drove a truck into a gathering of Arabs, it would unquestionably be labelled a race-hate terror attack. The fact that this is not being recognised as a race-hate terror attack is just another sad aspect of the anti-white racism that plagues Europe.
Racial hatred is common to both left, right and centre. Just different targets; that’s all.
“unsavoury”: Yes, how dreadfully, dreadfully unsavoury of that little working-class oik, Tommy Rot, to expose the cover-up by councillors, police and courts of perfectly savoury men performing absolutely delicious acts over the course of two decades.
“jailbird”: The unsavouriness of that little man is, of course, proven by the fact that he has been repeatedly jailed (for, ahem, his exposure of those delicious acts). Clearly, a little man of such low breeding cannot rise to the connoisseurship of his social betters.
Jihadism is not what you say, it is what you do.
Exactly!
As Jordan Peterson said, “If you wonder about someone’s motivation, just look at the consequences of their actions and the motivation will become clear”.
Am not citing verbatim, but that was the gist of his message.
Absolutely Sean. Same for Israel right?
Doesn’t matter. The left will categorise him as far-right and the right will categorise him as far-left. The truth is, he’s a one-off religious nutter and weirdo. His murders strengthen the argument for restricting immigration from those parts of the world which seem to breed fanatics.
Another of those German fairy tales for Christmas?
I would expect something much more precise and profound from Mr Cottee.
The Magdeburg attack bears all the characteristics of an Islamist attack. The attacker created a completely fake background story about himself in order to avoid extradition to KSA.
Of course, he would make some (insignificant) effort, posting things that would confirm his carefully curated image of a hero persecuted by an oppressive regime, when in fact he was nothing more than a criminal. And. later, an Islamist terrorist.
There are other things in the article that contradict well-established facts covered extensively by MSM.
One example. Mr Cottee states that:
“Mangione also seems to have been radicalised and deranged by a very specific grievance, which was to do with the US healthcare industry and how it prioritised profits over patients.”
M. was not insured by UnitedHealthCare whose CEO he killed in cold blood.
His “particular grievance” was a condition for which he was operated upon and apparently successfully so, because he disappeared for one year and neither his mother, nor his friends heard from him.
(This is according to an article in Forbes published on December 13th)
Highly unlikely behaviour of someone who really had a serious health problem that would require care and support (incl. financial support from his rich family).
Other trustworthy sources state the L.M. was an anticapitalist activist. In other words, he was far-Left who resorted to violence not untypical of this ideology.
There’s plenty of information on the Internet that is within reach. No need to provide rather implausible explanations.
Occam’s razor, etc.
“ But, according to his perverse terror-logic, mass murder would give him a voice.”
Not so perverse. His act got him an article on UnHerd.
I doubt us (the general public) will ever have a clear and accurate picture as to what led to this horrific attack.
If an apostate is prepared to carry out mass murder it might be better for them to have remained a follower of a religion of peace.
An apostate in Germany isn’t going to suffer any penalty from any quarter.
Since this essay was written, we now know that this “apostate” committed his murderous attack to teach Germans to support Hamas more or die.
Where are you reading that? I’ve been trying to find more info but Google just pushes the AP, Al-Jazeera, CNN etc. on you.
I would suggest that you switch to DuckDuckGo. I have been using it for years and the difference with Google is striking.
I have heard good things about Brave, but just have not concentrated on downloading it, beacuse am by and large happy about DDG.
I still use Google for searches like “a pharmacy near me that is open on Sunday”, etc. Also, Google maps are still the best (although not without glitches).
However, DDG is my main browser and search engine for everything else.
Same strategy 🙂
Look at all these conspiracies fly!! Countdown to “Mossad op” in 3..2..1..
Oh that’s right, UnHerd readers don’t go that far
This individual is reported to have claimed that he was history’s greatest critic of Islam.
Arguably, the greatest critic was Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India.
I love this author.
I also thought this seemed a bit like Mangione, in its incoherence.
No matter how it reveals itself, as rightly mentioned in the Courage.Media news piece, European mass migration policies need to be revisited:
https://courage.media/2024/12/21/europe-should-not-have-to-live-like-this/