The Berlin Pride Attack was Already Political
The demand that followed the Berlin Pride van-ramming was as predictable as it was hollow: do not politicise the tragedy. Organisers, officials and commentators rushed to insist that the deaths and injuries must not be "instrumentalised," that society must not be divided, that the proper response is unity and silence on harder questions. Yet the attack itself was political from the first moment the vehicle accelerated into the crowd. When a man shaped by Islamist ideology targets people, he is not committing a random act of violence. He is enforcing a worldview that regards homosexuality as an abomination and Western liberalism as decadence worth punishing. We need not agree with this to see the human liberty and human rights issues here. What is freedom if it does not apply to those we might disagree with regarding life styles?
German authorities classified the assault as an Islamist terrorist attack. The suspect had a documented history of radicalisation and attempts to reach Islamic State. That fact alone places the event in a recognizable pattern: ideologically motivated violence directed at symbols of the open society. Pretending otherwise does not protect the victims; it protects the policies and assumptions that made such an attack more likely. Immigration from regions where large majorities hold profoundly illiberal views on sexuality, gender and apostasy is not a neutral demographic shift. Multiculturalism that refuses to demand full acceptance of the host society's core liberties is not a neutral ideal. Both have consequences, and those consequences sometimes arrive on four wheels at a Pride gathering.
The insistence on depoliticisation is selective. When violence is attributed to the far Right, politicization is not merely permitted; it is obligatory. Politicians, media and activists immediately connect the act to broader currents of "hate," demand crackdowns, and treat the ideology as the central issue. When the ideology is Islamist, the script flips. Suddenly the danger lies in public anger rather than in the ideology that produced the attack. Concern about failed integration, parallel societies or the import of attitudes hostile to gay people is reframed as the real threat to social cohesion. This double standard does not reduce division. It manufactures a different kind of division: between those allowed to name the problem and those ordered to look away.
The Berlin attack raises precisely the questions that the "don't politicise" chorus wants closed. How many people have been admitted whose moral universe is incompatible with the equal rights of homosexuals? What mechanisms exist to identify and remove those who actively reject the legal and cultural settlement of the country that took them in? Why is the defence of gay rights treated as non-negotiable when the threat comes from traditional Western conservatism, yet suddenly negotiable or unmentionable when the threat comes from imported religious extremism? These are not abstract culture-war talking points. They are practical questions about who is allowed to live in a society that claims to protect sexual minorities and on what terms.
Refusing to ask them does not honour the dead. It treats their deaths as an unfortunate weather event rather than the predictable product of policy choices. An open society has the right, and the duty, to defend the liberties that define it, including the liberty of people to gather in public without being run down for their sexuality. That defense requires clarity about the sources of the threat. The Berlin Pride attack was political because the ideology behind it is political. Pretending otherwise is not compassion. It is surrender dressed up as good manners.
https://spectator.com/article/we-should-politicise-the-berlin-pride-attack/
