The Berlin Pride attack wasn't a tragedy. It was a choice.
This week, an ethnic Lebanese Muslim named Abdul Ballout rammed his van into a peaceful crowd of people celebrating Pride in Berlin, then hopped out and started hacking people up with a machete. He murdered a Polish woman in her 60s and butchered 29 others. Part of what makes this story so sad is that Germany saw it coming, and did nothing. In 2019, Ballout attacked an injured kid in a schoolyard, robbed someone the following year, and was convicted for these crimes in 2022. Last year, he went to Lebanon where he made contact with ISIS and planned to cross into Syria to join them, but local police arrested him and Germany repatriated him. Ballout was sentenced to less than two years, but German authorities suspended the sentence because he said he didn’t really mean it and renounced ISIS, even though they also found that he was constantly looking at extremist Muslim propaganda on his father’s smartphone. Nevertheless, they released him back onto the streets, and ordered him to attend deradicalization classes. He attended only two meetings, pledged allegiance to ISIS, and went on a murderous rampage last week, after which police shot him dead. If only German authorities could have seen this coming.
But to understand how this could have happened, it’s helpful to ask ourselves whether anything similar has ever happened before, and indeed it has.
In the winter of 1979, Iran’s leftists believed history was finally moving in their direction. Marxists, socialists, secular liberals, university students, trade unionists, and public intellectuals poured into the streets alongside the followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, united by hatred of the shah’s dictatorship and their belief that the shah was an American puppet. Many on the left understood Khomeini’s vision of an Islamic state was profoundly different from their own. They assumed the contradiction could be dealt with later. Their immediate concern was breaking Western influence and the monarchy along with it, and they persuaded themselves that the Muslim clerics represented an authentic, popular, anti-imperialist force.
In the end, they got what they wished for. The shah fled. Khomeini returned from exile to enormous crowds. And for a brief and joyful moment, the revolution appeared to belong to everyone who had helped make it. But Khomeini’s movement had advantages their allies did not: a nationwide network of mosques, disciplined organization, armed loyalists, and a clear idea of what the new order should be. While the left debated how to police people’s speech, Khomeini’s movement began tightening its grip on the nation. Today, the woke left calls anything they dislike “racist” or compares it to Nazism as a way of policing the boundaries of acceptable opinion. Back then, leftists used the terms “liberal” and “Western” to discredit people without addressing their arguments. Today, being insufficiently anti-racist makes you “racist.” Back then, being insufficiently anti-imperialist made you “imperialist,” which is precisely how the pro-Khomeini Tudeh Party attacked Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and other secular moderates.
Many leftist feminists welcomed Khomeini, even adopting the chador as an anti-shah and anti-Western political symbol. Women’s participation in the revolution was substantial and Khomeini actively encouraged it. When he made veiling compulsory later that year and women protested, leftist feminists saw the protesters as bourgeois, Westernized whores and chanted, “Death to foreign dolls!” Then the purges came. Liberal officials were pushed aside. Secular newspapers were shut down. Universities were subjected to Islamic reform. The leftists who had marched alongside Muslims as their fiercest allies were among the first to go, branded traitors, atheists, foreign agents, or moharebs — enemies of God.
Even still, the left defended the regime, reasoning that its hostility toward the United States made it objectively progressive, no matter how many it murdered. They had cast America as the oppressor and Iran as permanently oppressed. But in the end, their loyalty bought them little time. By the early 1980s, the alliance had become a hunt. Even the loyal Tudeh Party, Iran’s main communist group, which had ferociously supported the new Islamic Republic and defended its early abuses, was dismantled, its leaders tortured, forced into televised confessions, and executed. The final horror came in 1988, when the regime carried out mass executions, including of leftists who had fought to bring their own executioners to power.
I wish I could pretend this nightmare belonged only to Iran, but leftists around the world have repeated this suicidal error. In Algeria, communists fought alongside the largely Muslim nationalist FLN against France. Independence came in 1962, and the FLN immediately established a one-party state, outlawed the Communist Party, and executed its members. In Sudan, leftists and Muslims fought together in the 1964 October Revolution that removed General Ibrahim Abboud. Then Jaafar Muhammad Nimeiry crushed the left, and later Omar al-Bashir systematically tortured and executed communists and socialists. In Pakistan, leftists joined Islamic parties against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, which led to the rise of General Zia-ul-Haq, who imposed Islamic rule, denounced socialism as un-Islamic, executed Bhutto, and tortured leftist activists. In Tunisia, leftists helped drive out Ben Ali, and the Islamic Ennahda party took over, after which Salafi jihadists assassinated left-wing leaders Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi, as well as their supporters.
If there’s a lesson to be learned here, the West isn’t learning it. Consider the genocidal rape of Britain. Consider that Sweden had a rape rate of 8.2 per 100,000 residents in 1970, then took in more Muslims than almost any other European nation, and now has a rate of 192, making Sweden the rape capital of Europe — although a meaningful chunk of that rise is attributable to legal reforms that broadened the definition of rape. Or consider the horde currently invading Spain, as up to 60,000 mostly young Moroccan men cross into the town of Ceuta, where local police now say they are on the edge of operational collapse, and the European Union itself is showing cracks as multiple nations are calling for Spain to be kicked out of Schengen over this. In every case, left-wing actors pushed their nations toward these outcomes while right-wing actors were labeled “far-right” and compared to Nazis for pushing in the other direction.
“The issue that is taboo, David, and you know this better than I do, is immigration,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali once told me. “This is immigration as subversion. It’s the spread of radical political Islam through da’wah. Da’wah itself is a program of subversion. It’s the assault on the family and other institutions, precisely as Yuri Bezmenov laid out.”
Here in America, college students nationwide have embraced not only the Palestinian cause, but specifically that of Hamas, chanting “from the river to the sea,” celebrating October 7 as “resistance,” wearing keffiyehs like it’s the new red bandana, all despite the movement’s Nazi origins. Or there’s the fact that Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York, and when the city suffers an Islamic terrorist attack, he slams the victims as white supremacists. Or you have Hasan Piker, the darling of leftist media, who thinks America “deserved 9/11” and Hamas and Hezbollah are the good guys, and who has leftist intellectuals defending even his most obscene remarks.
The pattern is clear. When it comes to Islam, leftists repeatedly mistake shared enemies for shared values. A movement that opposes American power, Western influence, capitalism, Israel, or the political right may therefore be treated as progressive even if its own commitments are openly hostile to liberal freedoms. At the same time, leftist-dominated institutions are reluctant to confront illiberal forces because doing so might strengthen an adversary on the right, or because it would mean laying down the law in a way that codes as right-wing itself.
The mechanism is always the same. An institution decides that an enemy of its enemy is worth protecting, and loses the ability to address or even name the danger once it’s inside the house. Iran’s leftists couldn’t call Khomeini’s men a threat because they needed them against the shah. Germany’s courts and deradicalization programs couldn’t fully act on what they saw in Ballout because that would have meant admitting the shape of the threat they’d spent a generation bringing in.
Critics have wondered why Germany brought Ballout back from Lebanon in the first place, but Ballout was a German-born citizen so Berlin was obligated to take him in, and they arrested him at the airport. However, the Ballout family are Shia Muslims, and a 2023 poll found that 93% of Lebanese Shia view Hezbollah positively, so perhaps Germany should amend its “admission criteria” to deprioritize such people. One problem, however, is that Germany’s post-Nazi constitution gave unusually strong protection to asylum seekers. This was done in a noble effort to prevent another Holocaust, but European Jews during World War II are not comparable to young Muslim men from Middle Eastern countries today.
Anyone who cares about basic rights and freedoms, Western civilization, the sanctity of human life, and the truth about our world should be burning with rage.
Another problem is the media coverage. The media has a powerful leftist bias and we are seeing the impact of disinformation play out in real time. In covering the Berlin attack, The New York Times ran the headline, “Car Plows Into Crowd at Berlin Pride Event in Suspected Terror Attack,” as if someone had merely parked on a hill and left the car in neutral. That headline reads less like an account of a Muslim terrorist than a story about a radicalized Nissan. Separately, the Times ran the headline, “Even Before Attack, Berlin’s Gay Community Felt ‘More and More Unsafe’,” suggesting this is not an isolated incident. And it’s not. Last year in Munich, an Afghan Muslim rammed his car into a crowd of people, killing a mother and her two-year-old daughter and injuring dozens more. In 2020, an Iraqi Muslim ploughed his car into motorists in Berlin. Also in 2020, a Syrian Muslim stabbed a gay couple in Dresden, killing one. Not to mention, the deadliest terrorist attacks in German history were carried out by Palestinians at the Munich Olympics in 1972, and an ISIS terrorist who drove his truck into a Christmas market in Berlin in 2016.
Except none of this is what the Times had in mind by hinting at a larger pattern in Germany. Instead, the article goes on to say “far-right ideology was the most frequently cited specific motivation for homophobic attacks in the city in 2025.” But you have to read carefully because that hyperlink goes to a German police report that says the far-right was responsible for a grand total of 11 violent homophobic attacks in Berlin last year. The Times ignores this, as well as the larger pattern of Muslim violence in Germany or Europe overall.
This is all deeply depressing and anyone who cares about basic rights and freedoms, Western civilization, the sanctity of human life, and the truth about our world should be burning with rage. But also, know that if you say you are, “progressive” leftists are likely to smear you as Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, or even a Nazi. Indeed, in the wake of this recent attack, one German activist said she was sad because she “had hoped that the attacker was not a foreigner, but a white Christian person.” A pink-haired young woman said, “I’m not going to say anything about the rest of the Muslim population because of the actions of this one person, but what I can say is that the people who were celebrating about this were all white men … with crosses in their profiles, because … we’ve all seen how you guys react towards gay people.”
This user refuses to comment on how Muslims react towards gay people, but she’s willing to comment on homophobia among white men? Well, for the record, Pew Research found in 2013 that Lebanon is one of the most homophobic societies in the world, where 80% of people say gays shouldn’t be accepted, while Germany is one of the most tolerant countries toward gays in the entire world, where 87% of people say it should be accepted. Another leftist German woman, with pronouns in her bio, went a step further and blamed all men:
The problem is masculinity!
We as a society have failed; Abdul was only released from the youth prison in May and would have needed more support for his reintegration.
I can’t understand that the state didn’t pay for his participation in seminars on critical masculinity. Abdul would have needed our help.
As far as I can tell, the problem here isn’t toxic masculinity so much as toxic femininity, or what some people simply refer to as suicidal empathy. And this isn’t just German women, of course. This week the American news cycle features Melissa Chaudhry, a Democratic candidate challenging Rep. Adam Smith in Washington’s 9th Congressional District, who deliberately omitted LGBT issues from her campaign website because, as she told The Stranger, “A lot of Muslims do not feel that way.” Or consider Darializa Avila Chevalier. In his essay “The Democrats have their own MAGA now,” Noah Smith wrote of her:
Darializa Avila Chevalier is almost certainly headed to Congress, having won the Democratic primary in New York’s 13th congressional district. In 2024, while she was a sociology PhD student at Columbia, she founded a group called “Columbia University Apartheid Divest,” which was involved in the Palestine protests. In a now-deleted Instagram post, CUAD declared: “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” Avila Chevalier’s group also tweeted “Marg Bar Amrika,” meaning “Death to America” in Persian.
CUAD also celebrated October 7 as a “moral, military and political victory,” portrayed the slaughter as an act of liberation, and when two Hamas gunmen murdered seven people on a metro line outside Tel Aviv in 2024, CUAD praised the slaughter as “bold.” After the death of Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of October 7, CUAD called the Hamas leader an inspirational figure, praised him effusively, and called the massacre his “crowning achievement.” This makes CUAD worse than if they supported Neo-Nazism or white supremacy because no such groups today are responsible for killing 1,200 Jews. (Among neo-Nazi terrorist cells, Germany’s defunct National Socialist Underground probably had the clearest high-casualty death toll, with 10 murders.) Nor, for that matter, do white supremacists groups seek the “total eradication of Western civilization.”
Avila Chevalier also apparently opposes interracial relationships, and in a now-deleted 2019 tweet, she attacked black and Arab men for “fetishizing ugly colonizer women.” She’s a police abolitionist too. She once told someone who asked about coming up with a more sensible slogan than defund the police, “Fuck you. We’re gonna defund and abolish.” She later clarified that “defund” does not mean reform, “It means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever.” She also recently refused to answer when asked whether she would put a murderer in prison, and has said America’s support for Ukraine is “bullying Russia.” But, Smith adds, “The woman who said all of these things is going to be a U.S. Representative … a member of the United States’ highest legislative body … formally supported by the Democratic Party … Nor is this a case of one wacky person winning a lone, lucky victory. Avila Chevalier was one of three Congressional primary candidates backed by New York City’s powerful and charismatic mayor, Zohran Mamdani.”
Put next to each other, all the stories above rhyme in an uncomfortable way. But of course, being honest with ourselves about what Islam or illiberal leftism truly are does not require believing that every Muslim is a threat or that every democratic socialist is a terrorist sympathizer. As I have written many times before, I acknowledge the good that leftists have done in America. I have also known many beautiful Muslim individuals. But when illiberal leftists and Muslims gain a critical mass of influence within a society, the result is virtually always hell on earth. The question worth asking ourselves is how many more people — in Germany, in Washington state, in New York’s 13th district — are currently telling us exactly who they are while leftist institutions and political parties keep covering their ears, lying to the public, and holding open the door.