At first glance one really doesn't know what to make of the latest Christmas market atrocity in Germany. But it is notable that it was carried out by a Saudi national who identified as "anti-Muslim" and an atheist (the guy was even into wearing fedoras, FFS!).
In fact, the BBC even positively profiled him in 2019:
"Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen lives in Germany now – but there was once a time where he lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, and was incapable of safely expressing his atheism. After successfully seeking asylum in Germany, he decided to set up the website wearesaudis.net to create an information resource for others to do the same. It’s now a go-to resource for people all over the Arab region – but why are most of the people that approach Taleb for help women? We spoke to an Emirati woman - we're calling her Dina to protect her identity - about how she used Taleb’s site and the ex-Muslim online network to escape."
(Shades of the Southport Stabber's appearance as a junior Dr Who on the BBC!)
The dude also appears to have positioned himself as a based-Arab ally of the anti-immigrant AfD party. Elon Musk must be pleased:
Based and red-pilled? (source)
As yet, every data point of why Al-Abdulmohsen carried out this savage attack has not been nailed down, but, going by a video he posted online, it might have been triggered by a letter from the German government. This may even have been a "rejection letter" telling him that he was no longer welcome in Germany, and that it was time for him to return to Saudi Arabia to discuss his atheism and anti-Saudi activism with the authorities there. After all, there is a German general election soon, with the AfD threatening to do well; and of course, since Russian supplies of oil and gas dried up, Germany is much more reliant on its "friends in the Arab World."
If it had chosen nuclear power, Germany wouldn't need to juggle Putin and Bin Salman
Whatever the exact circumstances, what stands out is that this was yet another Christmas market attack that everyone instantly assumed was committed by a die-hard jihadi Muslim extremist, even though the guy doing it was "kinda, sorta" the exact opposite.
Are we to conclude from this that Islam is so toxic that even opposing it causes great evil?
Although this sounds a little too neatly counterintuitive, there is considerable evidence for it. We are often told, not without reason, that the Crusades were early examples of the "evilness of the White man." These, of course, were in response to centuries of aggression from the Mahometan side.
And then what was the sheer evil and sadism-on-an-industrial-scale of the Assad dynasty of Syria, so recently revealed by the fall of the Syrian dictator, but an attempt to oppose radical Islam? It seems they merely opposed it with something as violent, brutal, and nasty, if not more so.
But much stronger than this tension between Islam and its rejection, is the irreducible hold that former identities and modes of being exert on those who see themselves as "apostate."
Renunciation, with its desire to "be different," almost always becomes a distorted mirror of the thing it rejects. Al-Abdulmohsen's "choice of weapon" -- a speeding car into an event redolent of non-Islamic identity -- is the most blatant and egregious confirmation of this.
Those with a disposition to oppose Islam in the West will find little difficulty in framing this so-called "anti-Islamist" attack as somehow peculiarly "Islamic," and even if their explanations are weak, they won't really be that far off the truth.
Although this sounds a little too neatly counterintuitive, there is considerable evidence for it. We are often told, not without reason, that the Crusades were early examples of the "evilness of the White man." These, of course, were in response to centuries of aggression from the Mahometan side.
And then what was the sheer evil and sadism-on-an-industrial-scale of the Assad dynasty of Syria, so recently revealed by the fall of the Syrian dictator, but an attempt to oppose radical Islam? It seems they merely opposed it with something as violent, brutal, and nasty, if not more so.
But much stronger than this tension between Islam and its rejection, is the irreducible hold that former identities and modes of being exert on those who see themselves as "apostate."
Renunciation, with its desire to "be different," almost always becomes a distorted mirror of the thing it rejects. Al-Abdulmohsen's "choice of weapon" -- a speeding car into an event redolent of non-Islamic identity -- is the most blatant and egregious confirmation of this.
Those with a disposition to oppose Islam in the West will find little difficulty in framing this so-called "anti-Islamist" attack as somehow peculiarly "Islamic," and even if their explanations are weak, they won't really be that far off the truth.
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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.
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