With the Berlin Pride parade attacker dead, I guess we’ll never know his motives

Yesterday, a German-born man named Abdul Ballout—and when I wrote “German-born,” I bet you were expecting a name like Fritz Shlangenbaum—drove a rented car into a huge Pride parade in Berlin, after which he attacked attendees with a machete. Ballout killed a woman and injured 29 others, many seriously.

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Even though Ballout was a known Islamic terrorist sympathizer and used a preferred terrorist method for attacking a crowd, Berlin police were mystified as to his motive. And now that Ballout is dead, I guess we’ll never know.

The attack needs little description: Ginormous parade with out-and-proud LGBTQ+ attendees, car driven right into the parade, man jumps out with a big knife. We’ve seen it before. And every time we’ve seen it, as the meme goes “…and it’s Islam.”

What’s a little more interesting in this case is the attacker and what the German authorities knew about him before he went on a rampage:

Although the 21-year-old Ballout was born in Germany, he came from a Lebanese family.

Ballout had an extensive youthful criminal history.

In 2024, he was distributing Islamic State propaganda on Instagram.

In 2025, he headed to Lebanon intending to continue to Syria, where he could join ISIS. The Lebanese arrested him, and Germany, because he was a citizen, took him back.

In May 2026, the police arrested him for his efforts to join ISIS. Ballout was eventually sentenced to almost two years in prison, but he got a suspended sentence. Because he’d been held in prison in both Lebanon and Germany before his trial, and because he promised he’d distanced himself from ISIS, the authorities let him walk.

As part of this suspended sentence, Ballout was sent to an extremism-prevention or deradicalization counseling program. He’d attended two sessions and was due for another session tomorrow. His first two sessions were unsatisfying, for he was hard to assess and gave clearly rehearsed responses to the counselors.

In sum, Ballout was a first-generation German, a home-grown radical Islamist, a man anxious to shed blood, and a career criminal. But there he was, out and about, driving a rental car around, and ready to commit jihad. Such is the state of modern Germany.

The police soon announced that they suspected Ballout might be a terrorist, but they were never ready to commit to that conclusion. They eventually located him in Spandau (the location of the prison in which convicted Nazis were held after the war). When Ballout saw police approaching, he attacked them with a knife, earning a bullet that killed him.

In other words, it’s a typical story, one we’ve read and seen over and over. It’s what the West has become since it made porous the border between the West and the Islamic world.

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And yes, most Muslims are peaceful, but 10% are not, and 10% of 1.6 billion is a very big number (160 million), especially because, in some places, as many as 90% of “peaceful” Muslims support the same goal as the violent ones: The establishment of a global caliphate controlled by sharia law.

But here are a couple of thoughts for you. Across the West, LGBTQ+ people tend to be leftists—although certainly not all. Brave people like Scott Bessent, Scott Presler, Dave Rubin, and others think with their brains, not the contents of their undies. But there are the brainless ones…so many brainless ones, like this man at Berlin’s Pride parade before the jihad attack:

I wonder if this man is still locked in his pro-Islam, antisemitic delusion or if he’s struggling with cognitive dissonance. The best-case scenario is that he’s heading for the nearest AfD headquarters.

For those who don’t pay close attention to German politics, AfD stands for Alternative für Deutschland or “Alternative for Germany.” One of its founders is Alice Weidel, a lesbian, who concluded that unlimited Islamic and other Third World immigration was destroying Germany and putting people like her at risk.

The German establishment has relentlessly castigated the AfD as a Nazi-style party and has worked hard to make it illegal. What the establishment really objects to is AfD’s core stance: It’s opposed to unlimited Middle Eastern and African immigration, which has changed Germany into a place unrecognizable from what it was a mere 30 or more years ago.

And while it’s true that Germany successfully had mass Turkish immigration in the 1960s, because it needed people to do its scut work, those Turks were secular and mostly assimilated well. The newer immigrants have not assimilated well, and they’ve managed to radicalize many of the descendants of those original Turks.

Despite government efforts, the AfD is the largest opposition party in the Bundestag, with 151 members out of a total of 630. I suspect its numbers will grow in the next election.

But meanwhile, the German police will just be left guessing as to what really drove Abdul Ballout to target a gay Pride parade.

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Composite image from here and here.