by Sean Atkinson, spiked
Islamic hardliners don’t like gay people. It’s time progressives accepted this fact.
On 25 July, Islamist Abdul Ballout drove a van into a Berlin Pride parade, killing a woman and injuring 29 others. It was a horrific attack.
Ballout – who was shot by German police on Sunday – had a history of Islamic extremism. In May this year, he was sentenced to a year and 10 months for ‘preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state’. He previously served a prison sentence in Lebanon for incitement to religious and sectarian conflict. In 2025, he tried to join the Islamic State in Syria.
Yet instead of criticising Ballout’s religious bigotry, activists immediately started looking for someone else to blame. One woman, speaking at the Berlin vigil in a now viral video, said she wished the attacker had been a ‘white Christian’ instead of an Islamist. Not because it would’ve changed a single thing for the victims or made the attack any less evil – but because it would have sat more comfortably with her tribe’s worldview.
One of the images from Berlin Pride that spread across social media afterwards showed an Antifa flag lying soaked in blood. It exposed a bitter, tragic irony. The people who wave that flag belong to the same political movement that has spent years dismissing concerns about Islamism – and its violent homophobia – as racism, Islamophobia or ‘far right’ fearmongering. Even the Berlin attack itself has been blamed by some on white conservatives spreading ‘hate’, instead of confronting the ideology that put the man behind the wheel.