A naughty van in Berlin

A naughty van in Berlin. By Douglas Murray in The Free Press.

By now it’s all starting to sound like a bad joke. An Islamist terrorist drives a van into a Berlin Pride parade, killing one person and injuring dozens more. And how is it reported? Much of the media went with the usual formulation: that the attacker might as well have been a self-automated vehicle. …

[THis] is best understood as the “naughty van” phenomenon. If a van or car is driven into a crowd by an Islamist, you can swiftly tell who the culprit is because the vehicle will be talked about as though it suddenly took on a life of its own and began a rampage.

The naughty van, after it crashed into a tree

 

The reality is even more repetitive. The perpetrator of Saturday’s attack was a 21-year-old called Abdul Ballout. Born in Germany, of Lebanese parentage, last year he reportedly went to Lebanon to try to get to Syria in order to join ISIS. Arrested in Lebanon, he served three months in prison for a range of offenses including incitement to religious and sectarian conflict.

On returning to Germany he was convicted of preparing a serious act of violence and endangering the state, among other charges, and was sentenced to less than two years in prison. However the court seems to have released him, and he was put into a course of “deradicalization.” He apparently went to two meetings. His third meeting with the Berlin-based Violence Prevention Network was meant to take place Monday.

The left hoped it was a white Christian man, and yet again are disappointed:

At this point, everyone in Europe knows which positions to assume. The organizers of the Pride parade gave a press conference in which they admitted that they had hoped the perpetrator had been a white Christian man. …

Across the political landscape and mainstream media in Europe, you can hear the same pining for a more politically convenient reality. …

Assimilation into white culture is flagrantly not happening for one particular group:

Beginning with Germany’s Gastarbeiter [guest worker] program in the 1950s, it was just presumed that the migrants — including from Muslim countries — would either leave after a time or settle and become as European as anyone else.

Of course, neither of these things happened. And it took until the 2010s for Europe’s leaders even to admit that nothing to do with postwar migration had gone according to plan. But by then Europe was faced with a problem it had no answer for: How do you integrate a community that doesn’t want to integrate? How do you stop people from hating the society that has welcomed them? …

The ideology runs strongly on the left, it does:

For those of us who have covered this story for years, none of it is shocking.

It is to be expected that Islamist terrorists will want to attack Christmas markets, pop concerts, Pride parades, and much more. It is to be expected that the media and many politicians will continue to try to put off the day that they actually acknowledge the problem that is facing them.

But what remains a marvel to some of us is that the moment of “waking up” never really comes. To put it another way, some people are so keen to remain in their delusion that they will deny the truth even as the weaponized vehicle accelerates toward them.

In the aftermath of Saturday’s attack, late in the evening, a reporter for the German broadcaster NTV told viewers watching live that “The queer community naturally feels threatened, above all, by right-wing forces.” By that stage in the day the perpetrator’s identity was known. His motives could be easily guessed at. But somehow it doesn’t fit to say that the queer community feels threatened by Islamists.

Globalist left and your wokie supporters: you broke it, you fix it.

(Fixing it will be ugly and involve hurting innocents. Let the globalist left wear the ignominy. If we do it, they will carp on forever about how superior and nicer they are.)

UPDATE: