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One of the reasons why it's easy for me to believe the perp is what he claims to be is that I actually know a local variant of this type. An immigrant from a Muslim-majority country, born a Muslim but now an atheist ex-Muslim, used to be on the left due to the association of secularism and leftism in the Middle East but left the left in a huff due to the lack of enthusiasm for his strident anti-Islam sentiment, has also burned briges with the other local ex-Muslims, now associated with the mainstream nationalist party though also critical of them for a variety of reasons including insufficient concentration on Islam, generally comes across as igh-strung and aggressive. (Of course he's not directly comparable to the terrorist in the sense that he hasn't threatened to kill anyone.) My guess is that there are more than a few ex-Muslims like this around. It's quite ironic that one part of the narrative that the Saudi terrorist was a secret Muslim practicing taqiyya comes from the claims of other ex-Muslims, the other ex-Muslims are reliable non-taqiyaish sources now?
It's been a perennial complaint of cycling activists that even normal, regular car accidents (in local news etc.) get reported as "car rammed into a person" or even as "a pedestrian/cyclist collided fatally with a car". There's something about cars that makes us conceive of them as autonomous objects, kind of like large animals or something.
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