On Saturday night, a man drove a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride Festival, before getting out and stabbing several people, leaving one woman dead and dozens injured.
The suspect, identified as 21-year-old Abdul Ballout, a German national and reported supporter of the Islamic State group, was shot dead by police on Sunday following a daylong manhunt.
“We do not want this deed to be used for political ends,” said the organizers of the festival, also known as Christopher Street Day, in a statement on Sunday before the attacker had even been located. “We don’t want any groups to be placed under suspicion for this. People are trying to divide our society and set some people against others. We will not allow this.”
Amid the shock and grief, the organizers saw the immediate need to stop malign political forces using the horrific attack and the queer community’s suffering to fuel Germany’s already fervent anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-immigrant sentiment.
The far-right Alternative for Germany Party, or AfD, moved to weaponize the Berlin attack within hours.
They had reason for concern. The far-right Alternative for Germany Party, or AfD — which decries trans people as a “cult,” opposes marriage equality and gay adoption, defines a family as only “father, mother and children,” and condemns so-called “gender ideology” — had moved to weaponize the attack within hours.
“The AfD has been warning for years: Islamism is and remains the greatest security threat to our country,” said AfD member of parliament Martin Hess in a statement. He remarked that “we also urgently need a genuine shift in migration policy” — despite the fact that Saturday’s suspect was born and raised in Germany.
The AfD, which is currently the most popular German party according to recent polls, boasts numerous state-level branches classified as extremist organizations by Germany’s intelligence agencies.
Alliance for Bigotry
The party is using a familiar playbook. In 2016, the day after the deadly Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a total ban on immigration from Muslim countries. His two presidencies have since been dedicated to destroying both trans lives and Muslim lives with vigor.
Trump has sought to leverage attacks abroad, including in Germany, to his galvanize anti-Muslim base. The president was quick to condemn the 2016 massacre at a Berlin Christmas market to double down, once again, on his Muslim ban plan.
So far, Trump hasn’t said anything about the Berlin Pride attack — perhaps his demonization of Muslims has been so thorough that he no longer needs to feign concern about queer lives to gin up Islamophobia — but the alliances that inform these bigotries nonetheless remain a powerful political force.
Trump and his allies have long boosted the very German politics that is cynically leveraging the Berlin attack for political gains.
Last year, anti-trans zealot Elon Musk threw his support and his social media platform behind the far-right party.
“Only the AfD can save Germany,” he wrote on X.
The Right’s Own Attacks
Day in and day out, meanwhile, it is the likes of the AfD and other conservative German parties, and the Republicans at home, who are assaulting the LGBTQ+ rights.
A spike in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in Germany in recent years has been directly linked to a rise in far-right extremism, including more than two dozen attacks at Pride events.
The attacks themselves, however, are only part of the story.
“Politicians are now shamelessly exploiting the suffering of the queer community for their own agenda, while cutting funding for queer organizations, aid projects, and cultural initiatives,” wrote Mohamed Amjahid, a columnist for German newspaper, Taz.
It’s true. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Party, in its role in the coalition leading Berlin’s municipal government, has cut funding for queer community programs in the city and banned drag story hour readings in public libraries.
Of the perpetrators of Saturday’s brutality, Merz said: “They want to take away the most important things we have: our openness, our freedom.”
This purported shared “openness” and “freedom” had not been on display when Merz opposed plans to fly a rainbow flag atop the Reichstag Building to honor Pride last year.
“The Bundestag is not a circus tent,” the conservative chancellor said.
Just hours before Ballout rammed a truck into Pride attendees, Berlin riot police had focused their energies on making arrests and aggressing attendees at the explicitly anti-colonial, anti-capitalist Internationalist Queer Pride march elsewhere in Berlin.
Part-Time Solidarity
As Berlin-based journalist James Jackson noted, Merz’s statement on the attack, along with statements by three other senior conservative politicians, wholly failed to explicitly mention gay or queer people.
The statements defended “tolerance” and “freedom,” but when queer and trans people are attacked and killed, it is not “freedom” that is threatened in the abstract, it is specific forms of life — the very ways of being in the world that have been under assault by far-right politics and centrist complicity, across Europe and the United States.
On Sunday, thousands gathered for a vigil in front of the Brandenburg Gate, which was lit up in rainbow colors by night.
“Last year they refused to let us fly the rainbow flag in front of the Bundestag, because it’s not a circus tent, after all,” said one vigil speaker who identified as Muslim and gay. “Today the flags are flying at half-mast. But solidarity shouldn’t be a knee-jerk reaction after a tragedy.”
It’s a lesson that self-identifying allies in the U.S., above all Democrats who continue to fail trans people, would do well to learn, too.
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