Newsletter #15: On Magdeburg

PLUS: London mayoral election rumours; Tulip Siddiq; and more

Good morning.

And Merry Christmas, as this is the last newsletter before Christmas! But as you’d expect, this newsletter isn’t particularly ‘merry’… Sorry!

Today’s agenda: On the Magdeburg terrorist attack — don’t fail the test! (free); London mayoral election rumours: will Sadiq Khan run again? (paid); Anti-corruption minister Tulip Siddiq accused of involvement in embezzling billions from Bangladesh (paid); Mini-updates: Ireland v. Israel; WASPI women; Southport (paid).

On the Magdeburg terrorist attack — don’t fail the test!

On Friday evening, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, an Arab living in Germany, killed at least five people and injured more than two-hundred after ploughing a car into shoppers at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt.

There has been a massive amount of speculation about al-Abdelmousen’s motivations. On first glance, this appeared to be a typical Islamic terror attack: a man from a Muslim country had killed and injured people, overwhelmingly (entirely?) white Germans, at an event of religious, historical, and cultural significance to European Christians, with a method that has been repeatedly used to deadly effect by Islamic terrorists elsewhere (most notoriously in Nice).

Yet soon after the attack, it soon became clear that not everything was as it seemed. Elon Musk, unlike the previous owners of X/Twitter, decided to keep al-Abdulmohsen’s account up, rather than deleting it within minutes of his arrest (in line with past policy). His X account quickly revealed that al-Abdulmohsen — a fifty-year-old psychiatrist from Saudi Arabia who claimed asylum in Germany — in fact detested Islam, and was an ‘ex-Muslim’ activist. This confused people: why would he attack people, then? Surely he was lying?

In order to believe that the attacker was not, in fact, an ‘ex-Muslim’, but was actually (despite his professed beliefs) motivated to kill ethnic Germans by radical Islam, you need to jump through an absurd number of hoops. People are clearly desperate to keep the attack in a specific, tried-and-tested box: that this was a jihadi attack, just like all the others, and that the Right can respond to it as they always do — that we need to support Liberal Values, and Reform Islam, and so on. (You can also avoid much more difficult questions about immigration than those that are raised by Islamic terrorism.) People can regurgitate the same talking points as ever. It’s fantastic if you’re intellectually lazy.

It’s also because people have seen — correctly — that the Left are using the attacker’s idiosyncratic beliefs to claim that he killed people because he is ‘Islamophobic’, and was inspired by ‘the ideas of the AfD’. As we shall see, this is a complete lie, but you shouldn’t try to counter one lie with another.

As such, a number of conspiracy theorists — and I use the words ‘conspiracy theorist’ deliberately — have cited ‘taqiyya’ (that is, the ability of Muslims under certain circumstances to publicly deny their religious beliefs) in order to explain away the blatant contradictions in their narrative. It is perhaps plausible that his ‘ex-Muslim’ schtick may have at first been invented, or at least exaggerated in order to bolster his asylum request (some Saudi sources claim he was fleeing from allegations of rape in his home country, but we should stress that there is no way of verifying this). But he has been speaking on these issues for far too long — over a decade — for it to be at all plausible that he was merely lying about his views.

Nor does his behaviour seem to have allowed him to fly under the radar — indeed, quite the opposite. It has been alleged that a number of Saudis tipped off the German Government about the attacker, who was behaving increasingly erratically and making violent threats both publicly and privately, but nothing was done (seemingly due to bureaucratic failures). By being a very, very loud ex-Muslim, constantly posting his thoughts on X under his real name, and once even appearing on the BBC, he was far more noticeable than your ordinary extremist Muslim — a far more typical figure, it should be added! — who kept his head down. In short: al-Abdulmohsen stood out. And even if he didn’t, it’s obviously completely unnecessary to go to these lengths — indeed, they may even be counter-productive — if you want to commit a terrorist attack in a Western country.

Finally, even assuming away all of the above, if he was actually motivated by radical Islam, he would have dropped the mask on the day of the attack, and announced to the world what he was doing and why. This did not happen. (Please note that any videos purporting to show that he shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ immediately after the attack are spreading blatant misinformation.)

The basic fact is that the attacker stated his motivations very clearly indeed on X, and it should require a mountain of evidence to contradict this. What was his stated motivation? He was angry at the German state for (allegedly) mistreating ‘ex-Muslim’ asylum seekers from Saudi Arabia. He writes on X:

Germany is the only country — other than Saudi Arabia — that chases female Saudi asylum seekers all over the world to destroy their lives.

I assure you 100% that revenge will come soon. Even if it costs me my life.

I will make the German nation pay the price of the crimes committed by its government against Saudi refugees.

How much more unambiguous a statement of someone’s motives do you need? The reason he chose to attack a Christmas market is because he wanted to harm white Germans — not because he was Muslim. Obviously, this raises interesting questions about the very possibility of ‘integration’, and usefully shifts the debate away from ‘Islam’, which is increasingly a red herring in 2024.

(The mistreatment, for the record, seems to refer to a conflict that he had with an ex-Muslim activist organisation in Germany. This organisation seemed to be siphoning off money while sending these women to live with unpleasant, shady characters who sexually harassed them. More speculatively, I also wonder whether at some point the German Government partially or fully complied with a request from the Saudi Government to help return a minor who had fled the country.)

Yes, these motives do not fit into an obvious, already-existing box. The man is clearly crazy, with very strange, highly idiosyncratic political beliefs, hence his occasional praise for the AfD and Geert Wilders, yet also Hamas — and yet also Israel…?

These beliefs all seem to have been an attempt to fulfil his two consistent aims: (1) destroy Islam, in Europe and in the Arab world; (2) destroy the Saudi Government. The methods to achieve this were often odd, and sometimes outwardly contradictory, not least because these are not aims that can easily fit into existing political ideologies. Sometimes, his methods — including, most obviously, the terror attack itself — didn’t make much sense. As well as a desire for revenge, it seems to be based on the idea that Germany was ‘weak on Islam’ because of Islamic terrorism — so perhaps, al-Abdelmohsen thought (and this idea is backed up by a number of his posts on X), to get Germany to do what he wanted, he should commit a terror attack himself?! It seems ridiculous, but sometimes you need to take crazy people at their word.

The lesson today is that not everything is so easy to classify. Sometimes, strange things happen. This is one of them. An intelligent person should be able to remain adaptable, and interpret things as they are, rather than forcing them to be something that they are not.