I am a German. Not the kind the television panels in Berlin or the editorial boards in Hamburg like to parade about. I am one of the millions who still remember when this country possessed a backbone, when public order was not treated as a right-wing fetish, and when the word tolerance meant something other than compulsory celebration of every contradiction the establishment could invent. On the evening of 25 July 2026, near the Brandenburg Gate and the closing festivities of Christopher Street Day, a 21-year-old German citizen of Lebanese background named Abdul Ballout drove a rented van into a crowd of revelers, then went at them with a blade. One woman is dead. Twenty-nine others are injured. The Interior Minister called it an Islamist terrorist attack. The suspect had previously sought to join Islamic State, had been convicted of preparing a serious act of violence, and had been released on a suspended sentence only weeks earlier, after a juvenile court showed the usual tender mercy. Police later shot him dead when he charged them with a knife. That is the bare sequence of facts.
What followed was entirely predictable. Politicians, who for years have insisted that mass immigration from culturally incompatible regions is an enrichment, issued statements of solidarity with the rainbow flags. Activists who spend their days demanding ever more aggressive affirmation of sexual minorities suddenly discovered that “hate has no place here,” as though the problem were an excess of Christian conservatives rather than a young man steeped in a doctrine that regards homosexuality as an abomination punishable by death. And the same media that spent the previous decade lecturing us about “Islamophobia” now tiptoed around the motive while searching for any detail that might dilute it. One activist at a vigil was even overheard hoping the attacker would turn out to be a white Christian – an aspiration so revealing of the ideological hierarchy that it needs no further commentary.
Let us speak plainly. The German establishment has spent years simultaneously promoting two projects that cannot coexist without bloodshed. On one side stands the relentless elevation of gay pride and LGBTQ rights into a quasi-state religion. Rainbow flags fly from government buildings. School curricula introduce children to gender ideology before they can properly multiply. Corporate Germany and the public broadcasters treat any hesitation about the latest orthodoxy as moral failure. On the other side stands the equally relentless importation and accommodation of large numbers of people from societies in which Islamic doctrine remains a living force, not a museum piece. In those societies, same-sex relations are criminalized, sometimes lethally. The Quran and the hadith are not ambiguous on this point. Yet our elites insist that the second project is an unalloyed good and that any acknowledgment of the tension is “hate.” The result is not harmony. It is a controlled explosion waiting for a trigger.
I am not an enemy of homosexuals. Consenting adults may arrange their private lives as they wish; the state has no business in the bedroom. What I reject is the political project that has turned a demand for legal equality into a demand for cultural supremacy, and that has done so while importing populations statistically far more hostile to that equality than the native population ever was. The same politicians who criminalize “homophobia” when it comes from a Bavarian pensioner or an East German truck driver grow strangely silent when the hostility arrives with a prayer rug and a migration history. They will fund Pride parades with public money and then express shock when the parade becomes a soft target. They will lecture us about “diversity” while diversity produces body counts.
This is not an abstract philosophical contradiction. It is policy. For years the security services have tracked Islamist networks. Deradicalization programs have been funded, monitored, and repeatedly shown to be inadequate. Ballout himself had been in such a program; staff reportedly judged his cooperation “fake.” He had drawn official attention through radicalization and criminal offenses. Yet he was free. The pattern is familiar: soft sentencing, optimistic assessments, and a political climate that treats robust enforcement as more dangerous than the threat itself. After every such attack the ritual is the same. Candles. Speeches about cohesion. Promises of reviews. Then the next influx, the next soft release, the next body.
Meanwhile, the same establishment that cannot bring itself to name the cultural source of the violence has found the energy to wage war on ordinary speech. Germans are being investigated, fined, and in some cases raided by police for online remarks that in a healthier democracy would be dismissed as political invective. Calling a minister a “Schwachkopf,” posting a Pinocchio meme about the chancellor, mocking a politician’s name – these now trigger Section 188 proceedings. Official figures show thousands of such cases in 2025 alone, a sharp rise. The United Nations has taken notice. And so bad has the situation become that the British Free Speech Union, an organization founded to defend expression in the United Kingdom, is now in talks to establish a branch in Germany. When a foreign free-speech group feels compelled to set up shop in the land of Kant and Goethe because citizens risk state punishment for ridiculing their rulers, something fundamental has collapsed.
The irony is almost artistic. The same political class that demands we celebrate every sexual identity and every imported cultural practice will not tolerate criticism of its own competence. You may wave a rainbow flag and declare that gender is a spectrum; you may not point out that large-scale immigration from regions where that spectrum is rejected as Western decadence creates predictable friction. You may demand ever more elaborate hate-speech laws to protect minorities; you may not notice that those laws are applied with far greater zeal against native dissenters than against the actual sources of violence against those same minorities. The result is a society that polices memes more vigorously than it polices known Islamists who have already demonstrated intent.
I hear the counter-arguments. “Not all Muslims.” Of course not. Individual variation exists. Many immigrants and their children integrate, work, and reject theocratic politics. That is not the issue. The issue is aggregate patterns, doctrinal content, and political refusal to confront them. When official statistics, crime data, and repeated terror incidents show elevated risks from certain communities, pretending otherwise is not compassion – it is negligence dressed up as virtue. When gay people in Berlin report feeling less safe, and when the response is more rainbow branding rather than honest diagnosis, the establishment is protecting its ideology, not the vulnerable.
The free-speech crisis compounds the problem. A society that cannot discuss the trade-offs of its policies cannot correct them. If pointing out the incompatibility between progressive sexual politics and certain strains of Islam is treated as hate speech, then the only permitted conversation is one that leads nowhere. If insulting a politician is a police matter while preparing jihad earns a suspended sentence, priorities are inverted. The British Free Speech Union’s interest in Germany is not an accident: it is a diagnosis. When speech that challenges the ruling consensus is criminalized, the consensus hardens into dogma, and dogma eventually collides with reality in the form of a van and a blade.
I am exasperated because the pattern is so clear and the refusal so stubborn. We are told that openness is strength, that borders are outdated, that cultural confidence is bigotry. We are told that the solution to every failure is more of the same policies that produced the failure. After the blood is washed from the streets near the Tiergarten, the same voices will return to their pulpits and warn against “instrumentalizing” the attack. They will insist that the real danger is the far right, even as the far right grows precisely because the center has abandoned realism. They will fund another round of deradicalization seminars and another Pride security detail, and they will act surprised the next time.
Germany does not need more lectures about tolerance from people who cannot tolerate disagreement. It needs the recovery of elementary distinctions: between legal equality and compulsory celebration, between immigration and invasion of incompatible norms, between free speech and state-enforced silence. The dead woman near the Brandenburg Gate is not a symbol to be appropriated for the next campaign. She is the cost of policies that refuse to see what is in front of them. Until the establishment admits that promoting gay rights and importing large numbers of people from societies that reject those rights is not sustainable without coercion or violence, the cycle will continue. Candles will be lit. Speeches will be made. And ordinary Germans who notice the absurdity will be told to keep quiet – or face investigation. That is the real insanity. Not the existence of disagreement, but the determination to suppress it while the contradictions keep producing casualties. I am tired of it. Millions of us are. And no amount of rainbow branding or speech policing will make the facts go away.
This article was originally published by the Free Speech Backlash.
