{"id":138386,"date":"2026-07-31T16:28:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T16:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/138386\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T16:28:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T16:28:13","slug":"berlin-pride-attack-sharpens-debate-over-home-grown-islamist-extremism-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/138386\/","title":{"rendered":"Berlin Pride attack sharpens debate over home-grown Islamist extremism \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

A week ago, Berliner Tugay Sara\u00e7 was one of 200,000 people on the streets of the German capital for Saturday\u2019s Pride<\/a> parade with the motto \u201cTaking a Stand is Hot\u201d. A week later, Berlin<\/a> \u2013 and Germany<\/a> \u2013 are wrestling with a painful question: which stand to take?<\/p>\n

Like many, Sara\u00e7 was partying at the closing Pride concert at the Brandenburg Gate on Saturday evening when a white van raced at speed<\/a> into a crowd outside protective barriers in the nearby in the Tiergarten park.<\/p>\n

A 65-year-old woman died at the scene, 29 people were seriously injured; 20 hours later a 21 year-old Berlin man with reported Islamist motivations was shot dead by police<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"TugayTugay Sara\u00e7 at the Ibd Rushd Goethe Mosque in Berlin. Photograph: Derek Scally <\/p>\n

Police ordered the concert cancelled and the party area evacuated. Sara\u00e7 rushed north with the crowd, away from the crash scene with a sinking feeling that something terrible had happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was all very emotional and heavy, we were crying, I was trying to reach everyone I know,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

What emerged next morning was worse than even Sara\u00e7 feared. <\/p>\n

\"AbdulAbdul Ballout, suspect in Berlin van ramming <\/p>\n

The chief suspect, 21-year-old Berlin-born Abdul Ballout, had links to Berlin\u2019s extremist Salafist scene. <\/p>\n

The road to last weekend\u2019s tragedy is paved with red flags: parental neglect, school struggles, teenage delinquency, petty crime and, finally, his parents\u2019 separation. Ballout spread Islamist propaganda online and failed, twice, to join so-called Islamic State<\/a>. In connection with that, a Berlin court gave him one more chance before jailing him.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Why was Berlin\u2019s Pride attacker still free to strike?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Tugay Sara\u00e7 lost six years to Islamist extremism, triggered by a double catastrophe aged 13: his father\u2019s sudden death and the realisation that he was homosexual.<\/p>\n

Unlike Ballout, however, Sara\u00e7 escaped. His family accepted him and he is now a Pride parade committee member and head of queer community work at Berlin\u2019s liberal Ibn Rushd Goethe mosque.<\/p>\n

A week on from the attack, in the bright mosque prayer room where he married his husband a year ago, giant Pride flags still hang on the wall.<\/p>\n

Sara\u00e7 says he was still in shock last Sunday when he addressed a memorial service in Berlin\u2019s St Mary\u2019s church. <\/p>\n

With chancellor Friedrich Merz<\/a> in the front pew, Sara\u00e7 had two simple pleas: resist a negative framing of the tragedy to the detriment of the entire Muslim community; and stop playing down the risk of Islamist extremism in Germany.<\/p>\n

The congregation wept, applauded then joined him in a solemn procession to the crash scene. Along the route, Sara\u00e7 saw the chief suspect\u2019s face flash up on electronic bus-shelter displays.<\/p>\n

\"AA sign on a bus stop in Berlin last weekend shows a photo of ‘Abdul B’, the suspected perpetrator of the ramming attack. Photograph: AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n

On his way home, emotionally exhausted and head spinning, Sara\u00e7\u2019s phone buzzed to tell him that the 21-year-old had been shot dead.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t support the death penalty,\u201d he said, \u201cbut it was such a relief to know I wouldn\u2019t have to see his face again.\u201d<\/p>\n

A week on, however, Sara\u00e7 is depressed that many German politicians are ignoring his pleas.<\/p>\n

Merz and his Christian Democratic Union<\/a> are demanding electronic foot tags and expedited deportations for extremists, even though the suspect was born in Berlin.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, leftist progressive parties, he says, are so fearful of serving racist, anti-Muslim narratives that they struggle to acknowledge the Islamist motive of the attack and its roots in home-grown extremism.<\/p>\n

As a member of both queer and Muslim communities, with a detour into Salafist extremism, how does Sara\u00e7 view the attack \u2013 and its political framing since?<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe the majority of Muslims believe homosexuality is a sin but a terrible attack like last Saturday is not something that majority of Muslims would do,\u201d he said, drawing a clear dividing line between Muslims and the political ideology of Islamists, who use queer people as a \u201cvulnerable projection screen for their own hatred of the West\u201d.<\/p>\n

Has Sara\u00e7 reflected at all about the biographical echoes between the chief suspect and himself, who has experienced the slide into Islamist extremism?<\/p>\n

After all, both young men, from families with non-German roots, channelled their personal conflicts into a determination to be a \u201cbetter Muslim\u201d and both found the wrong company in Salafist \u201cbrothers\u201d, well able to manipulate their distress for their own, hateful ends.<\/p>\n

The 28-year-old speaks carefully, making clear that \u201cIslamists are perpetrators, not victims, and my primary thoughts are with the real victims here in Berlin\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the suspect was also a person,\u201d he said, \u201cand in some way I am just sorry he didn\u2019t live a life in which he could be happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Flowers,Flowers, notes and candles at a site near the scene where last weekend’s attack took place. Photograph: EPA <\/p>\n

After a hellish week in Berlin, Sara\u00e7 will attend Hamburg\u2019s Pride parade on Saturday and keep lobbying for a mature response to last week\u2019s attack. He wants more funding for extremism prevention work in schools; for German politicians to reach out beyond religious Muslim communities to civil society groups with more differentiated views; and for Germany\u2019s leftist-progressive spectrum to wake up.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t expect anyone to say that Islamism is a bigger problem than right-wing extremism but that it is recognised as an equally grave problem, said Sara\u00e7. \u201cWe need to find a way for conservatives and progressives to meet in the middle to address a real problem \u2013 Islamist violence \u2013 that affects us all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A week ago, Berliner Tugay Sara\u00e7 was one of 200,000 people on the streets of the German capital…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138387,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[99],"tags":[112,37936,235,190,4322,6420],"class_list":["post-138386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-berlin","tag-berlin","tag-christian-democratic-union","tag-friedrich-merz","tag-germany","tag-lgbtq","tag-pride"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/117015538038658093","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138386\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}