The (as one correctly added: suspected) perpetrator drove a car into a crowd at around 7:04 p.m. Information spread fairly quickly that the man was a fifty-year-old doctor (!) from Saudi Arabia who had been living legally in Germany since 2006. A video from a surveillance camera also emerged and was eagerly shared.
I myself am now completely jaded when it comes to such things. They no longer surprise, shock or shock me. It now feels like you're watching the umpteenth film adaptation of an old script. The process is always practically the same. The “messaging” on Twitter was unwound when an AI was programmed into it.
By this I don't just mean the statements from politicians whose “thoughts are with the victims” and which actually sound exactly the same as those formulated at ChatGBT's request:
By this I also mean the reactions from the right-wing spectrum, which are no less predictable.
We were already making fun of and indignant about the same hypocritical phrases and text modules from politicians who are responsible for the multicultural misery over ten years ago, even before the attack on Berlin's Breitscheidplatz, which not only provided the “template” for the current crime, but also for countless memes about the “Merkel bollards” that would not be necessary in happy, migrant-poor Hungary or Poland.
Taking advantage of the emotional shock while it is fresh, the influencers in our spectrum blasted their carefully prepared “talking points” about this “ethnic shock” onto the Internet, once again confirming that it is now finally rich that the last “migration fanatic” must wake up and realize that “remigration” is the only way and the only answer.
I do not disagree with this message. I just notice that in the great battle for media attention and sovereignty of interpretation, everyone begins to forge the iron while it is hot, playing their role, almost somnambulistically and as if at the push of a button.
This perhaps also applies to me, because a supporting role also reliably appears every time, the “conspiracy brother”, who believes that he can recognize inconsistencies and oddities in the narrative served up by the media.
Although I don't have a “conspiracy theory” about the attack (yet), I have noticed some extremely strange things.
The world reports that the perpetrator, a psychiatrist by profession and recognized as a “refugee” since 2016, is not a Muslim, but a Ex-Muslim was an “opponent of Islam” named Taleb Al Abdulmohsen, who campaigned for the AfD. In a 2019 FAZ interview, he described himself as the “most aggressive critic of Islam in history” and appeared with similar statements in the Mirror and on the BBC, where he campaigned for asylum for comrades persecuted by Islamism.
Taleb Al Abdulmohsen's Twitter profile (blue tick) appears extremely confused. Most contributions are in Arabic. Here are just a few fragments that I was able to find:
In June 2016 he writes: “I and AfD are fighting the same enemy to protect Germany.” In June 2024, after the assassination attempt on Michael Stürzenberger, he writes: “In my experience, the German police are the real drivers of Islamism in Germany .” They have been using “snarky tactics” against him and “other critics of Islam for years (…) to destroy our anti-Islam activism.” The left are crazy. We need the AfD to protect the police from themselves.”
He has attempted to interact with Martin Sellner, Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, Naomi Seibt and other usual suspects. He posted tweets from the infamous (and rather dubious) anti-multicultural account Radio Genoa. He also showed an affinity for Zionist influencers such as Arsen Ostrovsky and professed his love for Israel on several occasions. Nevertheless, in an interview on December 12th of this year, he clearly stated that he was not a “right-winger” but a “left-winger”.
His current profile picture was “Dr. Taleb” with a rifle and described himself as “Saudi military opposition.” He claims: “Germany is hunting Saudi asylum seekers inside and outside Germany to destroy their lives” and “Germany wants to Islamize Europe”.
Terror announcements had been made for some time, mostly in Arabic. The world found the following:
“I assure you that 100 percent revenge will come soon.” Even if it costs me my life.”(…) “Germany will have to pay the price. A huge price.” [Dezember 2023, wurde gelöscht, aber per Screenshot von einer Twitter-Nutzerin aufbewahrt.]
In May 2024, he posted on X in English: “I seriously expected to die this year.” Reason: I will seek justice at all costs. And the German authorities are blocking all peaceful paths to justice.” At that time, people wrote in Arabic about the “implementation” of an “operation.”
In August 2024, he posted in Arabic: “I assure you: If Germany wants war, we will have it.” If Germany wants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die or proudly go to prison. Because we have exhausted all peaceful means, we have only encountered more crimes from the police, the state security, the public prosecutor's office, the judiciary and the Ministry of the Interior. Peace is of no use to them.”
On Friday evening, timestamp “7:07 pm” (while the massacre was in progress or just over), several videos appeared on his account in English.
The story he wants to tell “began at least 2,400 years ago” when the Athenian sentenced Socrates to death “for his criticism of religion.” He sees himself as a persecuted critic of Islam in the same tradition, and holds “the German nation responsible for the killing of Socrates.” He explicitly names the “German citizen” as an accomplice, and “The Story of a Stolen USB” appears to him to be a significant indication of this persecution -Sticks from my mailbox.”
Al Abdulmohsen prefaces this with an excursus on “classical liberalism,” which he defines as the idea that the state does not have the right to infringe on the “life, liberty and property” of its citizens. In contrast to the liberal USA, the laws in Germany are based on socialism, which polices its citizens in a “paternalistic manner”.
In his case, the state sent an agent to steal the USB drive in question (evidence is a cut-open envelope), which was known to contain documents he needed for a criminal complaint he had filed. In a letter, the police told him that he was “confused,” which of course makes no sense, after all, he is a doctor in a state hospital.
He then boasted of his fight against the organization “Secular Refugee Aid,” which he accuses of corruption and abuse of women and which, in his opinion, is also under the protection of the state.
That was the last message that Taleb Al Abdulmohsen personally left on Twitter. It was published around the same time as the attack took place, apparently pre-programmed by him.
Although he accuses the “criminal” state of Germany and its citizens, he does not announce any act of revenge or retaliation. Instead, he goes into details about injustice that has happened to him or that is covered by the German state. As an accompaniment to a bloody, celebratory exit with a big bang, these videos seem strangely lame and unexciting, far from a “manifesto” or anything similar.
It is nevertheless obvious that it comes from a person who obviously doesn't tick the right way. The story with the USB stick in particular smacks of a paranoid psychosis along the lines of the Hanau perpetrator (the fact that Dr. Taleb was a psychiatrist by profession feeds my prejudice or disadvantage towards this profession). Accordingly, we would be dealing with an irrational, massacre-like collective retaliation against the German people, from the perpetrator's point of view due to illiberal repression by the German state against “critics of Islam”.
The picture that presents itself to us at the moment is a bizarre “clusterfuck”. Nothing seems to fit together.
What's strange is that Magdeburg happened while everyone on social media was waiting for it. For weeks, sarcastic jokes have been circulating about the security precautions at German Christmas markets, and the mammoth question is why such measures are not necessary in Budapest and Warsaw. A hair-raising video made the rounds in which a police patrol can be seen searching a grandma's handbag and confiscating a Swiss knife.
What is strange is that the police repeatedly stopped Dr. Taleb was warned, but still appears to have done nothing to thwart the announced act. She was probably busy kicking down the doors of citizens who politicians called “imbeciles” or “storytellers” (which somehow fits with the image that the committed doctor himself had of the German state.)
It certainly wouldn't be the first time that the authorities were aware of the potential danger of a perpetrator. This was the case in the Breitscheidplatz case, where there were also a number of inconsistencies and secret service connections (see here and here), and Vienna 2020.
The blatant contradictions in the perpetrator profile are strange. On the one hand, we are dealing with a self-declared liberal, Israel-friendly, right-wing populism-savvy “Islam critic” who sympathizes with the AfD and who complained about repression by a “socialist” state.
Such a perpetrator would correspond to the wet dream of the press if it were not a Saudi Arabian asylum seeker, which would significantly improve his potential for evaluation “against the right”. It is also embarrassing that he is exemplarily “integrated” by current standards, an educated doctor with a high social status, whose heroic and selfless work for refugees has even been discussed in some international mainstream media.
This “critic of Islam”, who considered himself a new Socrates, cultivated a militant rhetoric in the jihadist style and now committed a shocking act of bloodshed exactly in the pattern of Islamist attacks, almost like a “remake” of the Breitscheidplatz attack in 2016 the anniversary exactly. He killed and injured Germans indiscriminately because, according to his own statement, he felt the influence of the German state and identified Germany as an agent of “Islamization.”
Fight against Islam by killing innocent Germans according to Islamist style.
Did he think to himself, “I am now doing Anis Amri to protest against the suppression of critics of Islam”?
If it weren't so macabre, I would say: This is original. There's never been anything like this before. “Diversity” makes it possible.
There is no apparent political purpose. What remains after “Ockham's Razor” is that the alleged perpetrator, like the Hanau shooter, was probably clinically mentally ill, and it is therefore pointless to look for a coherent overall picture.
Not everyone will be satisfied with this explanation.
