Magdeburg revisited

ermany is working to Islamise Europe by welcoming jihadists, while neglecting the asylum applications and the needs of ex-Muslims like himself.

Prominent voices on the right of the political spectrum, assisted by some of al-Abdulmohsen’s acquaintances, collaborators and enemies in the German ex-Muslim community, are trying to construct al-Abdulmohsen as a jihadist sleeper agent. They obviously want to distance themselves and their cause from the Magdeburg attacker, but their arguments are not convincing.

At 7:07pm yesterday – three minutes after the 7:04 pm attack – al-Abdulmohsen posted four videos to his Twitter account in which he appears to expand upon his motivations. These videos frequently border on incoherence and suggest that the man suffers from paranoia and other psychiatric problems. He claims that Germans are like the Athenians who “a very long time ago … executed Socrates for his religional [sic] critique,” because Germans are “actively criminally chasing Islam critics to ruin their lives.” There follows a bizarre six-minute rant about a USB stick that he believes the Cologne police stole from his mailbox, and then finally remarks about his core grievance, which is related to a Cologne-based refugee organisation called Atheist Refugee Relief (ARR).

Some years ago, female Saudi refugees to Germany, who left Islam because they were inspired by the work of Richard Dawkins (I swear I am not making this up), ended up in the hands of ARR, who housed them with a male employee whom these women accused of sexual harassment or abuse. Al-Abdulmohsen spent years demanding that German police investigate, and when nothing happened he developed a murderous rage, concluding that “the citizens of Germany” were collaborating to persecute ex-Muslim Arabs in service of a broader plot to Islamise Europe. 

He'd been reported to the German authorities by a Saudi woman last year after he threatened to "kill randomly 20 German people", but nothing was done. 

After seeing the initial reports, and the enthusiasm with which the "far-right Islamophobic" story was embraced by the media and German politicians, I certainly had my doubts. Why a Christmas fair, for instance? But….who knows. Maybe we'll get no further than paranoid insanity as an explanation.

[Via this comment at b&w]