Magdeburg

Whether or not the man behind the wheel in Magdeburg was Islamic or Islamophobic is hardly the real issue here. 

It could be that he really was an apostate, a godless fan-boy of Elon, ‘Zionist’ too…at a stretch.

Or this could all have been a smokescreen. He did shout Allahu Akbar when the police surrounded him, somewhat non-atheistically. 

It doesn’t matter. He’s a terrorist, period. A demented zealot. (Turns out that he was more of a shrink than an actual, Hippocratic-oath swearing doctor, which may explain things a bit.)

I don’t think any decent person really believes that the issues that have tended to emerge from migration into Western Europe from Muslim-majority nations are essentially the fault of the religion itself, per se. I have had Muslim school-peers, friends, acquaintances and work colleagues, all of whom I have implicitly trusted not to be fanatical crazies, not to turn out to be misogynistic groomers, Jihad-obsessed mass-killers and so on. Sometimes the nature/nurture thing can seem a bit chicken and egg, but I guess I’m with the eggs, or a least the baby chicks on this one. 

The issue is, as I have said before, one of comparative mentalities and socialisation. Palestinians are not loopy because they are Arabs or Muslim, they are the way they are because of the Hamas/UNRWA education system which is based on starkly totalist perspectives and weaponised resentment.

In today’s world (not the ‘Middle Ages’ or any other historical epoch) a subset of individuals born and raised in certain Muslim-majority countries — such as say, those which regularly behead or stone people to death — are perhaps a bit more likely to be beset by the kind of lifelong mentality which is at least partially incompatible with being a fully-integrated citizen in a diverse, pluralist, liberal democracy.

In much the same way that yesterday’s perp was ‘Anti-Islamic’, Tomás de Torquemada, first Castillian Grand Inquisitor of the Tribunal of the Holy Office — aka The Spanish Inquisition — was Anti-Judaism, very much so, and yet was himself born into a converso Jewish family. Similarly, Richard Dawkins is more broadly Anti-Religion, but was born into a strictly Protestant family and his atheist positions today bear more than a tinge of evangelical fervour and intolerance.

Ideologies become the cloak for deep-set mental commitments and can be swapped around without changing the potentially rather toxic underlying tendencies. 

That is surely the basic problem, and it needs to be freely debated without constant fear of smothering by shrill accusations of racism or Islamophobia. in much the same way America needs to openly address the seemingly unique circumstances of its trail of school shootings — and then take appropriate actions — Germany now needs to take an unflinching look at its Christmas market problem.

It’s very possible of course that the Saudi refugee responsible for yesterday’s atrocity will become a sort of hero of exactly the sort of Far Right ideologues which Elon Musk is now attempting to bolster in Germany, though perhaps this adulation will be more ‘underground’ than that of the equivalent fanbase of the Mangione phenomenon — because in Magdeburg the victims were more archetypally the undeserving sort. 

He may however be openly praised as someone who ‘started the conversation’ about Islamisation. 

Of course, targeted, premeditated murder is always wrong, whatever the motive — or indeed the target — the victims necessarily innocents. 

And, as a society we really need to keep this front of mind. 

One might argue that non-domestically, this position can become more nuanced, where national security might require greater ruthlessness, e.g. the death of a few to protect the many, but one retrofits this approach to the ‘home’ environment at enormous social peril.