In the newspaper the dictate of topicality applies. Something happens, there are reports, there are news tickers, live blogs, a little later the analyzes and comments come. What is called a debate takes place, at best. And then the next thing happens again. Actually, according to media logic, now would be the wrong time to write about the attack on the Berlin CSD three weeks ago. Everything has already been said, some smart things, a lot of stupid things. At some point what has been said begins to repeat itself, both the clever and the stupid. People finally want to hear something different again. You can't blame them.
When Berliner Abdul Ballout drove a white minibus into the crowd around the CSD, drove into a tree, got out and attacked passers-by with his machete, I was trying to cross the Alps on foot with my girlfriend. I went to sleep early and the next morning I saw all the messages on my phone asking if I was okay. Of course I was fine, I was just sore as fuck. And then I started sending these messages myself to all the friends and acquaintances who were or might have been there. Everyone answered. Everyone was fine. At the same time, of course, nothing was wrong.
The CSD in Berlin was not a random target
Nothing has actually been okay for a while. I thought of the CSD three years ago in Vienna, where I was with a friend and that same evening it was said that the Austrian state security had arrested three suspects, IS sympathizers, from whom sabers, axes, gas pistols and knives had been confiscated - apparently an attack on the CSD could be prevented at the last minute. I also thought of the Islamist knife attack on the gay couple in Dresden in 2020, of Thomas L., who was killed then, and Oliver L., who was critically injured. Of the many IS videos in which gays throw themselves from rooftops. About Iran, where homosexuals are hanged from construction cranes. To the queer refugees who had to be accommodated separately because they were not safe in the shared accommodation. And that “Against the Rainbow Ideology” was one of the main topics, if not the topic at all, of Islamist accounts on Instagram and Tiktok before October 7th.
The CSD Berlin was not a random goal, that much is clear. So it wasn't an attack on all of us, as it was immediately said, unless you understand "all of us" to mean the free, open society. But I don't want to hear such nonsense from politicians who a few years ago spoke of homosexuals as a "shrill minority", who back then vehemently opposed marriage for all and recently against the hoisting of the rainbow flag on the Reichstag on the grounds that the Bundestag is not a "circus tent".
Because anyone who believes in a free, open society should fully commit to it. And while I still regretted that Klöckner ordered the mourning flag to be at half-mast after the attack, but only the German flag was visible on the Reichstag and not the rainbow flag, those voices had already gathered in my timeline that warned against exploiting the attack.
Of course, this attack - like the Islamist attacks before it - was heavily exploited ("deportation", "remigration", "knife migrant" etc.). But the warning voices focused primarily on the anti-queer sentiments of conservatives and the right-wing, and in doing so gave a conspicuously wide berth to the I word – Islamism. It's as if this wasn't an IS supporter who went hunting for people armed with a minibus and a machete. In this examination, the act is cleared of its ideological background, depoliticized and declared a tragedy. But an Islamist attack is not a tragedy.
Another interpretation, in which at least the I word was mentioned, goes like this: Islamism is a right-wing extremist ideology. The attack in Berlin is another right-wing attack on queer people. A rhetorical back door is being built here so that Islamism does not have to be clearly identified. And of course: Right-wing extremists and Islamists have a lot in common: group thinking with the exclusion of all those who do not belong to the people or the Ummah, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism, anti-queer sentiment. But this equation falls short.
You can be lucky not to be accused of racism
It is striking that those who avoid the I word in the CSD attack manage to clearly name right-wing extremism in right-wing extremist attacks. With everything that goes with it. The ideology is rejected and so are the ideologues – “intellectual arsonists” who do not take up arms themselves. The AfD, for example, is described as what it is: a right-wing extremist party. Nobody who still has all the cups in their cupboard would come up with the idea of calling Björn Höcke a “nationalist-conservative”. When it comes to Islamists without explosive belts, you often hear “Islamic-conservative.” The victims of right-wing violence are met with solidarity, as it should be. But the same voices that always uphold solidarity so much have never meant the Yazidis, Druze, Christians and everyone else who has long suffered from the terror of these Islamists. And they are conspicuously quiet, even though in this country there is agitation against queer people, Jews, Druze and Yazidis in mosques, on the streets or online. You can be happy if they keep quiet and don't immediately accuse those who talk about it of anti-Muslim racism.
If something like the attack on the CSD happens, there will also be a run on social media. Who will post first? Who speaks with what credibility? Everyone speaks. A lot is said. And after a few days it's over again. The conversations should then really begin. An attack like this is the outbreak of violence, but it started much earlier. The attacker was known to the security authorities for a long time, but the attack could not be prevented. And also far away from this attack: In Berlin there have recently been increasing reports of gay men who arrange a date via Grindr and are beaten up at the meeting point. At the Carl Bolle School in Moabit it became known last year that an openly gay teacher was massively bullied and insulted by Muslim students. Islamism and LGBTQI hostility are and have never been out of date.
