by Owen Shapell, spiked
As the Berlin attack showed, Western liberals are still turning a blind eye to the violent intolerance in their midst.
The German state cannot fairly be accused of inattention when it came to Abdul Ballout. It had been observing him for the better part of a decade. It had convicted him three times and had, by the start of July, arrived at an assessment of his character that turned out to be entirely accurate. The counsellors of the deradicalisation programme into which a Berlin court had released him in May had logged their misgivings, concluded that his cooperation was a performance, and set about drafting a recommendation that he be removed from their books. They were still drafting that recommendation on Saturday 25 July, when the 21-year-old drove a white van into the closing party of Christopher Street Day, a part of Berlin’s Pride season, a few hundred yards from the Brandenburg Gate. He killed one person and injured 29 others, and then proceeded to set about the survivors with a machete.
The failure, in other words, was not one of assessment. Everything necessary had been perceived, written down and filed. What could not be managed was to convert an accurate judgement into an action within a period shorter than the one a young man needs to hire a vehicle.
His record showed that he posed a threat to civilians. He was found guilty of assault in 2019, assault and extortion in 2022 and distributing Islamic State propaganda on Instagram in 2024. In May of last year, he took a flight to Lebanon with the declared aim of crossing into Syria to enlist himself in the cause of the Islamic State – an ambition frustrated only by the Lebanese authorities, who jailed him for incitement to sectarian conflict and returned him to Germany in November last year. A Berlin juvenile court gave him one year and 10 months, for preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state, then deferred the question of suspension by six months, lifted the arrest warrant and consigned him to a course of counselling. Twenty-six sessions were prescribed, of which Ballout attended two.