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So, this is very interesting. I wonder: was his plan to essentially make this look like an Islamist attack, to stir up hostility toward Muslim immigration? I imagine he understood that everyone would, justifiably, assume that an Arab man driving his car into a Christmas market (with an explosive device inside, no less!) would be interpreted by all sides as an Islamist terror attack. Maybe he was hoping nobody would identify him and discover his Twitter account? If he did expect people to find his account, I really have no idea what political outcome (if any) he was hoping to facilitate as a result of this attack.
On the one hand, his background as a former refugee from the Middle East makes him an incredibly unwieldy weapon for progressives to use to discredit immigration skeptics; on the other hand, his support for the AfD and his criticism of Muslim immigration makes him pretty much impossible to use as a cudgel by the right wing. Some commentators, such as Keith Woods, are taking the position that this proves that all Arab immigration to Europe should be cut off, because even the apparently liberal/assimilated ones are still ticking time bombs of potential violence; this seems fairly tendentious even to me, given what we know about the guy so far.
I'm going to have to write this story someday.
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I’ll consolidate my replies to @SecureSignals, @Walterodim, and @Belisarius, since they’re all making similar points.
Firstly, I agree that this guy should not have been allowed to live in Germany. Now, to be clear, he came as an asylum seeker in 2006, nearly a decade before Merkel’s Mistake; at the time, Arab migration to Germany was, as I understand it, quite minimal (it was Turks who were by far the largest source of Middle Eastern immigration at the time) and it’s significantly more understandable that he would have been let in. There was no large insular Arab community in Germany into which he could have ensconced himself to obviate the need to assimilate. He was fluent in English, and had clear and explicit anti-Islam sentiments. He seems basically like an Ayaan Hirsi Ali type, and given how live a threat Islamist terror seemed at that time, I think it was understandable to expect this guy to act as a potentially impactful voice steering young Arab men away from Islamist radicalization. (And, to be clear, it’s entirely plausible that he did have some impact, substantial or not, of that nature at the time.) Given what we know now in hindsight, not only about him personally but about the larger effects of Arab immigration to Europe, it’s clear that the stance toward asylum seekers should have been far more exclusionary than it was at the time.
However, I want to make sure that opposition to Arab immigration is based on specific, articulable, predictive claims. I oppose large-scale Arab immigration because of the specific qualities that I expect most Arabs (and, especially, most Arabs choosing to emigrate to Europe) to possess, and because of the specific actions they are likely to take and the motivations behind those actions. Let’s look at what specific problems/pathologies I expect to accompany large-scale Arab immigration, and analyze the extent to which this guy embodied those pathologies:
I expect Arabs to create culturally-insular ethnic enclaves, in which they are able to continue to replicate the cultural practices of their homeland rather than assimilating. Well, this guy was fluent in English, and had already marked himself as not only culturally-distinct from the vast majority of Arabs, but actively in opposition to them. It is true that he brought baggage and cultural grievances with him from his homeland; however, those grievances toward Arab Muslims are pretty much exactly the same grievances that liberal Westerners had about Arab Muslims at the time. “They’re culturally backward, they mistreat women, their culture is anti-Western, and anti-science, they’re susceptible to radical jihadist beliefs.” All of those grievances are true and valid! This is the Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Ayaan Hirsi Ali line about Arab Muslims. They’re not the sort of arcane inter-ethnic blood feuds and tribal jockeying we normally associate with foreign ethnic groups immigrating and co-mingling in places like the U.K. and Canada.
I expect a large percentage of Arab immigrants to be uneducated, unskilled, to spend a long time (potentially their entire lives) unemployed and on welfare. Well, this guy was a doctor — okay fine, a psychiatrist, so barely a doctor, but at least it’s a well-paying job that kept him gainfully employed and interacting economically with the German public. He certainly doesn’t pattern-match to the average Arab in Germany; as @Walterodim points out, he’s more like the average educated Indian in Canada.
I expect large numbers of Arab men to fall into lives of crime, both petty and organized. Well, again, this guy does not appear to have any criminal record. He hasn’t fallen in with Arab gangs, he hasn’t become some listless glowering thug milling about the town square acting like a savage.
I expect some small number of Arab men to commit serious acts of terrorism, motivated by jihadist beliefs and by a hatred of their host societies. This is where we have to carefully discern what happened here. In pretty much all of the other terror attacks committed by Arabs in Europe, the ideological motivations were clearly religious and specifically Islamist in character. The Bataclan attackers, the guys driving their trucks into markets, the guys cutting priests’ heads off — they all make their Islamist beliefs very explicit. That’s not why this guy appears to have done what he did.
So, why did he? If we want to talk about ideology, his views are difficult to pattern-match to other large ideological trends. On the one hand, he was very consistent about Germany’s need to resist Islamization. In that sense, he aligns very strongly with the AfD and other right-wing nationalist groups. However, he also wanted more immigration of a very specific class of Arab Middle Easterners: ex-Muslim/anti-Islam refugees, and particularly educated women. In that sense he’s not only similar to the more moderate right (what wignats derisively call “the kosher right) but also to some of the more eclectic right-wingers who say the West should let in plenty of attractive female refugees, while cutting off all or nearly all male immigration. And of course his stated commitment to progressive values such as feminism and economic leftism puts him almost more in line with the sort of leftist terrorism Germany faced in the 70’s. (Although that terrorism had a strong pro-Palestinian valence, whereas this guy was a Zionist.) But in this case his choice of targets doesn’t really seem to align with any expected ideological movements. This was no act of right-wing nationalist terrorism — he’s no Anders Breivik or Brenton Tarrant — because his victims were (at least presumably) white Germans. He really did seem to resent Germany and to want to strike a blow against it on behalf of his in-group, but his in-group isn’t Arabs as a whole, it isn’t Muslims, and it isn’t even Saudis. It appears to just be “ex-Muslim apostates (especially women) fleeing the Middle East.” I was joking yesterday, “Is this the first Reddit Atheist terror attack?” Yes, he’s a brown Arab, but in terms of his worldview he’s got more in common with murdered Dutch anti-Muslim filmmaker Theo Van Gogh than with the Muslims who killed him.
So, in what ways is this guy’s terror attack similar to previous acts of Arab terrorism? What patterns does it match? Certainly in terms of its specific methodology it’s similar to other terror attacks we’ve seen in Europe, both with the use of a car driving through a Christmas market, and with the (thankfully unused) explosive device. But in terms of its motivations I think it’s sufficiently different from previous acts of terrorism that it’s not really instructive. While obviously there are genetically-influenced psychological differences between population groups, and Arabs are a population group with heritable traits, I don’t think anyone’s found any evidence for a “terrorism gene” among that population. If Arabs tend to be more violent than Europeans, it’s because they tend to be lower-IQ and to live in low-trust backward societies wherein violence is an effective and sanctioned way to obtain power and resources. It’s not because some voice in the back of their head, whispering to them like the Orc god Gruumsh, instructs them to drive their cars into crowds.
I saw some DR commentator (probably Captive Dreamer) say, “If that’s the model migrant, imagine how much worse the rest are.” This is probably effective propaganda, but it doesn’t seem very intellectually substantive. This guy’s pathologies, and the reasons he shouldn’t have been in Europe, were of a markedly different character from those of the true dregs of the Arab world which have been washing up on the shores of Europe. The “model migrants” in, say, Canada are problematic largely because they use their political power to facilitate bringing in more of their countrymen. In that narrow sense, this guy’s story is certainly instructive. It is true that his #1 loyalty was to his in-group, which did not include most white Germans, and that in the end he was willing to commit savage violence against his host country in order to (in some twisted, confused, politically aimless way) earn concessions for people like himself.
There are, though, two distinct sets of concerns when it comes to the immigration discussion - one is about the dangers presented by the importation of educated foreigners who will use political and cultural power to advocate for increased immigration, and who will dilute the political and cultural power of the native population. Whatever you want to say about these types of people, likelihood of committing terror attacks has simply never been a plausible vector of attack against them. This is, so far as I can tell, the first high-profile attack of this kind committed by a guy with this background and these specific beliefs, and I don’t think we’ll see many more examples in the future.
The other half of the immigration discussion is about low-skilled, unassimilable, criminally-inclined young, susceptible-to-jihadist-radicalization men and their welfare-dependent spouses. While this has largely been the story of Arab immigration to Europe (particularly post-2015) it is not this guy’s story. Whatever he is, he’s not an example of that. He did assimilate to an ideology with a lot of Western adherents; he was just willing to do what few of those Westerners would have done as a result of that ideology. (And I want people to be careful in their speculations about why he was willing to do so.)
People like Keith Woods would like to essentially merge these conversations and say that it’s all the same conversation: All foreigners in Europe are bad, none of them belong there, even the supposed best of them bring problems, they’ll never be assimilable, they’ll always work against us. And what I’m saying is that I don’t think this is credible. There are foreigners in Europe — for example, East Asian immigrants — who have not, so far as I can tell, created any problems for their host societies. If Germany let in 100,000 Vietnamese immigrants tomorrow, my prediction is that those immigrants would flourish, as they have in America. It’s not simply “being foreign” that makes Arab immigrants a bad fit for European society; it’s their specific traits, the specific beliefs they have, their lower IQ and lower impulse control, their hatred for Western norms, their parasitic dependency on the largesse of the welfare state, and the difficulty in integrating them into society. This guy’s problems don’t really map onto any of those concerns, except in a roundabout and strained way.
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I mean, the right wing normie answer is ‘people like that don’t belong in Europe’. And when pressed on ‘people like that’ they’ll eventually come down with ‘Arabs’ or ‘children of Muslims’.
As far as what his motivations are, I’ll point to A) him almost certainly having screws loose(see the mass murder, and also being a psychiatrist) and B) it’s entirely possible he doesn’t make much distinction between Christianity and Islam and just hates theists. Stranger things have happened. There was a mass shooter in the US who seemed to have new atheist motivations as well; it’s not an everyday occurrence but it’s happened at least once.
These Christmas markets are not theist occurrences in any meaningful way, and as he had been in Germany a long time he would know it. In fact, many of them have been renamed to Winter markets to be more inclusive (to the disdain of the defenders of the Christian Occident), and there is nothing specifically Christian about drinking Gluehwein, eating all kinds of food from food booths and shopping for overpriced small presents in the other booths. It would be like going after Coca-Cola for being Christian given that the central figure of Christmas is Santa Claus and ad spots by Coke have shaped the public image of Santa.
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The muslim angle is overrated. People wouldn't have been happier if the migrants were christians from Ethiopia. Muslim at this point means non Asian, non white immigrant. Islam is just an easy and relatively politically correct term to use. The basic premise holds regardless if he was muslim, Christian, athiest or Zoroastrian, MENA migration doesn't work in Europe.
The same people would not have been any happier to take South African Zulus but would have gladly taken South Africans of a Boer persuasion. Trying to own AfD by pointing out the specifics of a Saudi's religious beliefs isn't going to work because the AfD voters don't want mass immigration from MENA regardless of religion.
Eh, I think Maronite and Coptic immigration is mostly pretty uncontroversial in the societies to which they migrate.
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You really have to be kidding? The Right Wing argument is that he does not belong in Europe, no matter if he's a doctor or what he tweets, in a box or with a fox, not here or there, not anywhere in Europe. That argument can and should be used as a cudgel by the right wing, at least the Right Wing who acknowledges that this is about race and not merely about religion. The people who can't use this as a cudgel are those who pretend that this is just about Islam, and mass Arab migration to Europe would be fine if they just weren't Muslim. Is that an argument you accept Hoffmeister?
"Arabs don't belong in Europe." "But this Arab who slaughtered a bunch of Europeans tweeted pro-Israel stuff!" How could you think that's responsive at all to the argument?
How does a refugee slaughtering a bunch of people in a Christmas market not validate the anti-refugee political perspective? Because the refugee wasn't Muslim? That is just ridiculous.
Keith Woods is correct, and the Right Wing who pretends that mass migration from the third world is only a problem because of religious incompatibility do not form the ranks of the DR, and people like Woods have long made the argument that it's about race and not about religion.
If your argument is that absolutely no immigration should be permitted because there exists the possibility that the immigrant will commit a crime against the native population in the future, that should logically extend to white Europeans immigrating between European countries. As I said downthread, quite a few young English girls would have been spared rape and murder had the UK never permitted entry to Polish citizens. And though the history has been sanctified through assimilation, the passage of time, and Hollywood, German, Irish, and yes, Jewish, immigration to the US at the end of the 19th century brought with it significant violence against the "native" Anglo population, perhaps even a greater degree of violence per capita than that committed by non-white doctors in Germany.
Your logic is tortured and deliberately ignores the point.
Yes, the Ellis islanders brought violence and crime, and if we were smart we'd recognize that and avoid the mistakes of the past.
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My position is not quite that, but not too far from it. If we take the story that this is about his anti-Islam grievances at face value, it seems to me that it's an example of how importing people from places that have ethnic and religious conflicts that Westerners don't even understand results in importing their conflicts along with them. See also, the disputes with Sikh violence that have stirred up India-Canada tensions. I don't want Muslim immigrants from Saudi Arabia and I don't want anti-Muslim immigrants from Saudi Arabia in my country. I don't want to think about Saudi Islam anymore than strictly necessary for international relations. There are enough domestic tensions without needing to add Saudi conflicts to Germany.
Actually, I think the conflict in this case is easy for Westerners to understand. He was pro-Israel and anti-Islam; thus, his conflict was with most of his fellow co-ethnics. Had he not had what is likely a psychotic break, he would have spent the rest of his life in Germany feeling very at home among the right-wing and welcomed into their circles.
What about a non-Muslim politically neutral immigrant from Saudi Arabia? I understand the sentiment, but there's probably very little crime committed by doctors and other professionals from foreign backgrounds, including Saudi Arabian citizens, in Germany. And a logically consistent position would outlaw basically all immigration so that we avoid, to focus on the UK for a moment, poles killing English girls, Scots doing the same thing, and so on. Stories of Poles misbehaving in the UK have largely disappeared over the years, but it was a very big thing in the early 2000s and there were quite a few disturbing stories from the English countryside during that time.
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He attacked a Christmas market, does it matter if he secretly supports AFD? If he wasn't brought to Germany he wouldn't have committed this act. It really is easy for the right to portray it favorable terms. It is also gives leftists the opportunity to frame this of course in a manner that tries to deflect from it. I have seen both.
According to Keith woods he was a zionist leftist who wanted more muslim migration that commited this act because Germany is not doing enough to give asylum from Saudi Arabia.
If that is correct then this is a leftist but not Islamic, pro migration terrorism act. Exactly the opposite that is claimed bellow. If of course it is true.
Edit: Woods quotes the terrorist in 2023 saying that he will make the German nation pay the price of the crimes committed by the goverment against Saudi refugees. He also says that he will take revenge even if it costs him his life. https://x.com/KeithWoodsYT/status/1870428721632481719?t=TeBZdhjRJUJdWKMBMS-5nQ&%3Bs=19
It is certainly correct to limit people like this guy from coming to one's country.
Moreover, it seems almost everyone forgets that the biggest genocide commited by Muslims against Christians was not commited by the biggest muslim fanatics even though Islamism has been an element of this. I am talking about the genocide of Christians Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians, by the Muslim populations of Turkey. Of which secular Kemalists who also called for Jihad had been a core component as has been Turkish nationalism. The ethnic resentments of people like this, and not just any human capital problems is something that has been way too understated. A secular muslim might still carry both ethnic resentments related to his homeland or even the general Muslim population. Just like with other groups who aren't particularly religious but still are hostile foreigners.
Look, I'm not interested in defending this guy, but this is misleading. Based on the political sentiments he expressed - anti-Islam and pro-Israel (basically in line with mainstream right-wing parties in the West) - he is not advocating for Muslim immigration; rather, he's upset that, in his view, Germany is not doing enough to protect apostates, Saudi women who want to escape the country, political dissidents, and similar types of people. I don't see how you can call him a leftist.
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Was this man actively “treating” patients while saying all this?
Good Lord.
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I'm hearing that he was apparently angry about not enough being done for (presumably anti-Islamic) refugees:
https://x.com/banjawarn/status/1870393623210078601/photo/1
Too soon to be sure of course, there's no community notes or anything on this post. It does seem plausible, he was complaining about Sweden expelling this refugee.
https://x.com/DrTalebJawad
Other people have been going on about him retweeting Israeli military posts, apparently he has Zionist sympathies. There's truly something for everyone with this guy. He seems like a nut.
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But why couldn’t the AfD thing be the red herring itself? The entire thing makes literally zero sense. He’s an Arab Muslim committing a terrorist act because he doesn’t believe that Arab Muslims should be in Germany because they’ll commit terrorist acts, which he then did. The more plausible explanation is he’s an Islamic Jihadist who is either being misidentified as a supporter of AfD policies, or he was using that as a front to hide behind.
Or, uh, hear me out here, but the motivations of someone who committed mass murder don’t have to make sense, because he’s batshit insane.
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How many cases have there been where an Islamic jihadist commits a terrorist attack and pretends to be something other than an Islamist while doing so? Being open that you are, in fact, doing jihad has always been one of the points of the jihadists.
Sarah Adam’s is reporting that Hamsa Bin Laden is now commander of an Islamic Army that brings Aq isis and other groups under one command. Accomplished through him marrying into influential Islamist families.
She also reports that he and they are now less concerned with getting credit for terror and more concerned with opsec and covert tactics.
She seems credible.
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I guess we'll see if further details emerge. But to me this looks like someone utterly deranged, with no coherent plan at all. Maybe he had some recent health issue like Luigi, or maybe he cracked from the stress of working as a doctor for so long.
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Well, wignats will have a field day. (Maybe that was his objective?)
Certainly the more moderate right will find it uncomfortable. An educated, apostate Arab who's vehemently against the Islamification of Europe -- well, if Germany is anything like the USA, he'd be held up as one of the "good ones" and a solid ally. (The moderate right is of course desperate to latch onto any token PoC so they can assert that they're not racist!)
I don't think you can quite square this circle without accepting an ethnonationalist framing, so I expect this to be swept under the rug. It looks bad for Arabs, obviously bad for the pro-immigration left, bad for the moderate right; the only people who can point to this incident as confirming their priors are the ones saying these immigrants are fundamentally incompatible with Western civilization by virtue of their ethnicity, regardless of their professed views.
Assuming this wasn't some 4D double layered false flag: https://x.com/stillgray/status/1870306075695546383 (this reads like premium copium to me, but, I guess it's not impossible.)
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It seems the attacker was only a critic of Muslim immigration on unusually principled anti-religious grounds. Here he is in 2019 (fedora and all -- wow!) discussing his website for aiding the asylum claims from secular Gulf refugees. More recently, he accused the German state of conspiring against atheist Saudi asylees and threatened to fight and kill over this:
Rather than the hard right, it will be assimilationist centrists and center-rightists who want to make the problem of immigration to be about Islam who won't have much to milk out of this.
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Yes, excellent analysis. Thanks for laying out exactly what I was thinking in such agreeable prose.
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There was a similar attack like this in Germany a few years ago. An Iranian Muslim born in Germany became radicalized about mass immigration into Germany and committed a mass shooting targeting immigrants. It’s barely remembered now because the story got dropped like a hot potato, since it would have been extremely difficult for either side of the culture war to make hay out of it.
The terrorist has claimed in December 2023 that he will make the German nation pay the price for the crimes committed by its goverment against Saudi refugees. He also said in the quoted post that Woods Therefore this looks like a leftist terrorist attack of a Saudi Arab who sympathizes so much with Saudi Arabians that he wants to harm the nation of Germany.
https://x.com/KeithWoodsYT/status/1870428721632481719?t=TeBZdhjRJUJdWKMBMS-5nQ&%3Bs=19
So it would be exactly the opposite as the anti immigration narrative and really this should had been the more likely theory rather than him playing 5 dimensional chess.
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Toxoplasma quotient counterintuitively low.
What's the opposite of a scissor statement?
A null statement?
staple statement
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