by Jan A Karon, The Critic
If politicians cannot do better at protecting Germans, the politicians will be replaced
Last weekend Berlin’s Christopher Street Day parade took place under the motto “Haltung ist Hot” which translates to “(The right) Attitude is Hot”. On Saturday evening, as the procession was drawing to a close in the Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate, a white van driven by 21-year-old Abdul Ballout careered into the crowd.
One woman, a 65-year-old Polish mother, was killed; twenty-nine others were injured, some critically. The attacker then got out with a knife, lashed out at bystanders and fled. A manhunt lasting almost twenty hours followed. By Sunday evening Ballout was dead, shot by police in a Spandau allotment garden after a brief stand-off. The slogan, mostly connected to the pride parade, now reads differently, it says: “Islamism kills”.
By the evening hours of Sunday, when Abdul Ballout was shot, it was already clear that this was no random act of road rage. Ballout was a 21-year-old German citizen born in Berlin in 2005 to Lebanese parents. His mother had been naturalised in 2002. The Lebanese-German was known to the security services as an Islamist “Gefährder”, a classified threat, and had a criminal record stretching back to his mid-teens. In 2022, as a 14- and then 15-year-old, he had been convicted of assault and robbery-extortion after beating a schoolmate and later helping to shake down another for Apple headphones. The court ordered a short behavioural course and community service; the judges noted early signs of intensifying religiosity — three or four weekly classes with his imam — but concluded that he showed genuine remorse.