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\n The Brandenburg Gate, illuminated in rainbow colors, after a car plowed into a crowd on the outskirts of the Christopher Day Parade pride event in Berlin on July 26, 2026.\u00a0Photo: Christoph Soeder\/dpa via Getty Images <\/p>\n
\n The Brandenburg Gate, illuminated in rainbow colors, after a car plowed into a crowd on the outskirts of the Christopher Day Parade pride event in Berlin on July 26, 2026.\u00a0Photo: Christoph Soeder\/dpa via Getty Images <\/p>\n
On Saturday night, a man drove a van into a crowd near Berlin\u2019s Pride Festival, before getting out and stabbing several people, leaving one woman dead and dozens injured.<\/p>\n
The suspect, identified as 21-year-old Abdul Ballout, a German national and reported supporter of the Islamic State group, was shot<\/a> dead by police on Sunday following a daylong manhunt.<\/p>\n \u201cWe do not want this deed to be used for political ends,\u201d said the organizers of the festival<\/a>, also known as Christopher Street Day, in a statement on Sunday before the attacker had even been located. \u201cWe don\u2019t want any groups to be placed under suspicion for this. People are trying to divide our society and set some people against others. We will not allow this.\u201d<\/p>\n Amid the shock and grief, the organizers saw the immediate need to stop malign political forces using the horrific attack and the queer community\u2019s suffering to fuel Germany\u2019s already fervent<\/a> anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-immigrant<\/a> sentiment.<\/p>\n The far-right Alternative for Germany Party, or AfD, moved to weaponize the Berlin attack within hours.<\/p>\n They had reason for concern. The far-right Alternative for Germany Party, or AfD \u2014 which decries<\/a> trans people as a \u201ccult,\u201d opposes<\/a> marriage equality and gay adoption, defines a family as only \u201cfather, mother and children,\u201d and condemns so-called \u201cgender ideology\u201d \u2014 had moved to weaponize the attack within hours.<\/p>\n \u201cThe AfD has been warning for years: Islamism is and remains the greatest security threat to our country,\u201d said<\/a> AfD member of parliament Martin Hess in a statement. He remarked that \u201cwe also urgently need a genuine shift in migration policy\u201d \u2014 despite the fact that Saturday\u2019s suspect was born and raised in Germany.<\/p>\n The AfD, which is currently the most popular German party according to recent polls<\/a>, boasts numerous state-level branches classified<\/a> as extremist organizations by Germany\u2019s intelligence agencies.<\/p>\n Alliance for Bigotry<\/p>\n The party is using a familiar playbook. In 2016, the day after the deadly Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump called<\/a> for a total ban on immigration from Muslim countries. His two presidencies have since been dedicated to destroying both trans lives and Muslim lives with vigor.<\/p>\n Trump has sought to leverage attacks abroad, including in Germany, to his galvanize anti-Muslim base. The president was quick<\/a> to condemn the 2016 massacre at a Berlin Christmas market to double down, once again, on his Muslim ban plan.<\/p>\n So far, Trump hasn\u2019t said anything about the Berlin Pride attack \u2014 perhaps his demonization of Muslims has been so thorough that he no longer needs to feign concern about queer lives to gin up Islamophobia \u2014 but the alliances that inform these bigotries nonetheless remain a powerful political force.<\/p>\n Trump and his allies have long boosted the very German politics that is cynically leveraging the Berlin attack for political gains. <\/p>\n Last year, anti-trans zealot Elon Musk threw his support and his social media platform<\/a> behind the far-right party.<\/p>\n \u201cOnly the AfD can save Germany,\u201d he wrote on X.<\/p>\n The Right\u2019s Own Attacks<\/p>\n Day in and day out, meanwhile, it is the likes of the AfD and other conservative German parties, and the Republicans at home, who are assaulting the LGBTQ+ rights.<\/p>\n A spike<\/a> in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in Germany in recent years has been directly linked<\/a> to a rise in far-right extremism, including more than two dozen attacks at Pride events.<\/p>\n The attacks themselves, however, are only part of the story.<\/p>\n \u201cPoliticians are now shamelessly exploiting the suffering of the queer community for their own agenda, while cutting funding for queer organizations, aid projects, and cultural initiatives,\u201d wrote<\/a> Mohamed Amjahid, a columnist for German newspaper, Taz.<\/p>\n It\u2019s true. Germany\u2019s Chancellor Friedrich Merz\u2019s Christian Democratic Party, in its role in the coalition leading Berlin\u2019s municipal government, has cut<\/a> funding<\/a> for queer community programs in the city and banned<\/a> drag story hour readings in public libraries.<\/p>\n Of the perpetrators of Saturday\u2019s brutality, Merz said<\/a>: \u201cThey want to take away the most important things we have: our openness, our freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n This purported shared \u201copenness\u201d and \u201cfreedom\u201d had not been on display when Merz opposed plans to fly a rainbow flag atop the Reichstag Building to honor Pride last year.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Bundestag is not a circus tent,\u201d the conservative chancellor said<\/a>.<\/p>\n Just hours before Ballout rammed a truck into Pride attendees, Berlin riot police had focused<\/a> their energies on making arrests<\/a> and aggressing attendees at the explicitly anti-colonial, anti-capitalist Internationalist Queer Pride march<\/a> elsewhere in Berlin.<\/p>\n We\u2019re independent of corporate interests \u2014 and powered by members. Join us. <\/p>\n Join Our Newsletter <\/p>\n Thank You For Joining! <\/p>\n \n Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. <\/p>\n Will you take the next step to support our independent journalism by becoming a member of The Intercept?\n <\/p>\n By signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Use<\/a>.<\/p>\n Part-Time Solidarity<\/p>\n As Berlin-based journalist James Jackson noted<\/a>, Merz\u2019s statement on the attack, along with statements by three other senior conservative politicians, wholly failed to explicitly mention gay or queer people.<\/p>\n The statements defended \u201ctolerance\u201d and \u201cfreedom,\u201d but when queer and trans people are attacked and killed, it is not \u201cfreedom\u201d that is threatened in the abstract, it is specific forms of life \u2014 the very ways of being in the world that have been under assault by far-right politics and centrist complicity, across Europe and the United States.<\/p>\n On Sunday, thousands gathered<\/a> for a vigil in front of the Brandenburg Gate, which was lit up in rainbow colors by night.<\/p>\n \u201cLast year they refused to let us fly the rainbow flag in front of the Bundestag, because it\u2019s not a circus tent, after all,\u201d said one vigil speaker who identified as Muslim and gay. \u201cToday the flags are flying at half-mast. But solidarity shouldn\u2019t be a knee-jerk reaction after a tragedy.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a lesson that self-identifying allies in the U.S., above all Democrats who continue to fail<\/a> trans people<\/a>, would do well to learn, too.<\/p>\n
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