On 25 July, Islamist Abdul Ballout drove a van into a Berlin Pride parade, killing a woman and injuring 29 others. It was a horrific attack.
Ballout – who was shot by German police on Sunday – had a history of Islamic extremism. In May this year, he was sentenced to a year and 10 months for ‘preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state’. He previously served a prison sentence in Lebanon for incitement to religious and sectarian conflict. In 2025, he tried to join the Islamic State in Syria.
Yet instead of criticising Ballout’s religious bigotry, activists immediately started looking for someone else to blame. One woman, speaking at the Berlin vigil in a now viral video, said she wished the attacker had been a ‘white Christian’ instead of an Islamist. Not because it would’ve changed a single thing for the victims or made the attack any less evil – but because it would have sat more comfortably with her tribe’s worldview.
One of the images from Berlin Pride that spread across social media afterwards showed an Antifa flag lying soaked in blood. It exposed a bitter, tragic irony. The people who wave that flag belong to the same political movement that has spent years dismissing concerns about Islamism – and its violent homophobia – as racism, Islamophobia or ‘far right’ fearmongering. Even the Berlin attack itself has been blamed by some on white conservatives spreading ‘hate’, instead of confronting the ideology that put the man behind the wheel.
Progressives have spent years trying to build one giant coalition of the ‘oppressed’. They decided that gays, women, Muslims, migrants and every other minority belong on the same team. But religions with illiberal views on women’s rights, free speech and homosexuality eventually collide with Western, European values. And when they do, someone has to lose.
When those contradictions become impossible to ignore, activists rarely confront them. They prefer to redefine the problem, change the subject or blame somebody more politically convenient.
We saw a stark example of this in 2022, when two gay men were brutally murdered by an Islamist in Sligo on the west coast of Ireland. A Dublin gender-studies professor memorably blamed the atrocity on gender-critical feminists. In a deleted tweet, she said:
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‘My anger at seeing the [gender-critical feminists] express sympathy at the horrific Sligo murders is off the charts. Their never-ending transphobia has played no small part in feeding into an increase in anti LGBT+ expression… You hurt one of us, you hurt all of us.’
That is a result of an ideology being built on a hierarchy of oppression. And when that hierarchy starts to crumble beneath the weight of its own contradictions, gays aren’t nearly as high up that ladder as we like to pretend. We’re expected to shut up and to accept homophobia if acknowledging it might make another ‘marginalised community’ look bad. Essentially, we are being sacrificed at the altar of suicidal empathy.
To these activists and politicians, gays aren’t people – we’re mascots, political footballs brought out for endorsement season. ‘We fought for your rights, now shut up and play your part’ is their implicit message.
Zack Polanski’s Green Party is a perfect example of this. Polanski never misses an opportunity to prance around surrounded by rainbow flags. Meanwhile, senior party figures have appeared on the Islamist 5Pillars network, which has published articles advising Muslims on avoiding Pride events and whose editor celebrated the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan. At what point do they cop on and see that these two worldviews don’t fit together?
Islam does not accept homosexuality, and probably never will. Yet left-wing identity politics demands that gays ignore this simple truth. You cannot spend Monday waving a Pride flag only to get up on Tuesday morning making excuses for the ideology that keeps producing attacks on gays, women, children and Jews.
No one summed it up better after Berlin than AfD politician Lena Kotré: ‘The LGBT scene doesn’t have to like us, the AfD, and we don’t have to become friends either. But we are the only guarantor of their safety.’ Whether you agree with her or not, the point is that millions of gays hear statements like that and think, ‘at least someone is acknowledging the problem’.
As a gay man, I’ve lost count of the abuse I’ve received for saying Islam is a greater threat to gays than conservatives are. Apparently, the real crime isn’t attacking gays. It’s pointing out who’s doing it.
If a homophobic attack is motivated by Islamism, say so. If the facts reveal contradictions in your politics, change your politics, not the facts. Because reality will catch up eventually, and when it does, it isn’t the activists, journalists or politicians who will pay the price.
Seán Atkinson is the former vice-president of Not All Gays.