An Islamist known to the authorities turned Berlin Pride into a killing ground. The attack exposes both the enduring threat of Islamist violence and the failure of a state that identifies dangerous radicals, releases them and responds to the bloodshed with the same exhausted promises.
In Berlin, a young Islamist known to police deliberately drove a car into a Christopher Street Day crowd in an attempt to kill those taking part.
Neither the identity of the attacker nor his choice of victims was accidental. In the eyes of devout Muslims, few minorities symbolize the decay of the West more clearly than the flamboyant LGBTQ community, whose members openly put their sexuality on display. Only Jews are routinely hated more. In truth, however, any “infidel” can be targeted simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That police were able to track down the suspect in a Berlin garden colony early on Sunday evening was a major success in the manhunt. When officers attempted to arrest him, he lunged at them with a knife and was fatally shot. One attacker fewer. The fundamental problem remains.
Ten years after an Islamist drove a truck into the Christmas market at Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz, precisely nothing has been done to stop such people from entering the country in the first place – or, if they are already here thanks to open borders, to identify them, protect the public from them and, ideally, remove them. That is, unless they have long since been naturalized under fast-track procedures introduced as part of a naïve and foolish migration policy. Berlin regularly boasts that it naturalizes more migrants than any other German city.
On Saturday, it was once again presented with the bill.
Not everything is yet known about the attacker, but more than enough is already clear. Abdul Rahman Ballout is 21 years old. He is of Lebanese descent but is said to have been born in Berlin in 2005. He is a German citizen and thus a textbook example of Germany’s utterly failed integration policy.
The website NIUS cites an internal police notice stating that Ballout was well known as both an Islamist and a criminal. It reads: “The accused is the subject not only of general police records, but also of extensive state-security intelligence relating to religious ideology/Islamism.” A police spokesman also publicly confirmed that Ballout was considered part of Berlin’s Islamist scene and was a supporter of the Islamic State terrorist group.
He had been released from juvenile detention only in May, on condition that he attend a total of 26 sessions with deradicalization services. Bild, meanwhile, reports that Berlin’s Tiergarten District Court sentenced him in May 2026 to one year and 10 months in prison for preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state. He was a convicted criminal, a known Islamist and a religious fanatic who had at times been under police surveillance – yet he remained free on probation.
Anyone who comes straight out of juvenile prison and immediately wants to kill a few German gay men cannot be tamed by social workers. Did anyone seriously believe otherwise?
Then the story becomes almost absurd. Ballout had apparently been arrested in Lebanon and brought back to Germany for the proceedings that led to his latest conviction. Germany even goes so far as to forcibly bring its attackers back into the country.
Now one woman is dead, around two dozen people have been injured and several victims remain in critical condition. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has also confirmed that the attacker was already known to the security authorities and had previously attracted attention “through a high level of criminality and radicalization”. After driving into the crowd, he is also said to have injured further victims with a machete. The number of victims has now risen to 29.
The absurdity of Germany’s legally mandated protection of perpetrators is perhaps best illustrated by a post from the Berlin police. The force appealed to the public for help in finding him but did not show his photograph online – for data-protection reasons. Readers then posted the picture beneath the police appeal themselves.
German police must therefore protect a perpetrator’s privacy even while he is on the run after a killing. By that point, German newspapers had long since placed Abdul B.’s photograph on their homepages, and the image was circulating widely online. Anyone could share it – except the German police.
Open borders bring death. Germany’s Islamist attacks now form a dark and lengthening chain.
At least this time, the authorities were quick to acknowledge that, “in view of the target of the attack and the apparent manner in which it was carried out”, a connection to “religious ideology/Islamism cannot be ruled out”. Their initial assessment was therefore that the attack amounted to terrorism or politically motivated violent crime of national significance.
These are terms that the politicians responsible are initially reluctant to utter. Instead, they remain busy reciting the platitudes and stock phrases they evidently keep ready for every such occasion. They speak of a “suspected Islamist” and declare that “our way of life” has been attacked – a way of life that, naturally, they will “not allow anyone to take away from us”. They invoke the “diverse society”. “values” and “diversity”.
Such language no longer sounds merely hollow and ridiculous. In light of the violence that has become part of daily life, it sounds almost cynical.
Berlin politicians’ continuing loss of touch with reality is exemplified by Alfonso Pantisano, the Berlin Social Democrats’ so-called queer commissioner. Only recently, he said his political work was chiefly concerned with attacks by “conservatives, right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis”. Asked by the interviewer whether he wished to revise that assessment after the Islamist attack, Pantisano said no. He explained that he classified Islamists and religious groups as “conservative forces”.
Islamists are now right-wing too. The Queers for Palestine activists are not the only lunatics making themselves heard around the world. Berlin is catching up.
I no longer want the Abduls and all their friends in our country. They kill our children, destroy our culture, rape our girls and cost us money without ever contributing anything to our society. They must go.
In Germany, such statements can now officially bring people to the attention of the domestic intelligence service. Politically active citizens can lose their right to stand for election and risk their jobs because Germans are denied the right to choose with whom they wish to share a common culture and everyday life.
A young man whose parents apparently came to Germany as refugees from Lebanon uses the country that welcomed them not to build a better life, but to kill those who took his family in. How much hatred of the Western way of life must exist in such milieus, even as its comforts are eagerly embraced?
A political establishment that promotes this madness instead of stopping it must be voted out and replaced. If the law stands in the way, the law must be changed.
The Migration Reversal That Never Came
Only a few days ago, Marius Dick, a young, ambitious and determined German, was killed in Trier. He was stabbed by a man barely older than himself who had also been welcomed into Germany as a supposedly vulnerable minor.
Not a day passes without knife attacks of a kind once unknown in Germany. Anyone can now become a random victim. Enough.
Germany has little time left to act. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has missed no opportunity to insist that the “migration reversal” has been successfully set in motion. Where is it?
It is now considered a success if the government manages to deport a single planeload of habitual offenders or if fewer people cross the border illegally than before – while hundreds of thousands would have to be removed simply for German law to be enforced. In reality, hundreds of thousands more continue to enter through family reunification alone instead of being expelled.
A genuine reversal would mean the large-scale deportations Merz promised the public in January 2025, after the shock of the Aschaffenburg attack, if elected chancellor. In that attack, a migrant assaulted a group of kindergarten children with a knife in a park. A child died, as did a father who tried to help.
Speaking to reporters before the hastily convened memorial service in Berlin for the victims of the Christopher Street Day terrorist attack, Merz said such crimes had only one purpose: to divide our society and rob us of the things that matter most – openness and freedom. That is wrong. The perpetrators also want to take their enemies’ lives.
Anyone who drives a delivery van into a crowd, a Christmas market or a demonstration does not merely want to destroy abstract concepts or the endlessly invoked “values” of our society. Above all, he simply wants to kill. Anyone who swings a machete or plunges a knife into a neck or chest seeks death and bloodshed, not the destruction of diversity.
Merz invoked unity across party lines. “We are more, we are stronger and we stand together.” Everything necessary would now be done, he said. The public could rely on that. Oh, really.
Germans have heard more than enough grand declarations of this kind. The cowardice and paralysis that regularly follow have driven nationwide support for the Alternative for Germany to almost 30%.
At present, Germans can unfortunately rely above all on one thing: the Islamists in their country have already demonstrated far greater determination to act than Germany’s successive governments.
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