I felt many emotions as news of an attack on Berlin’s pride celebrations broke on Saturday night.
The first, quite naturally, was sadness. Once again, people having fun, celebrating and being authentically themselves had been mown down. One Polish woman is dead, and 31 others are injured after the culprit rammed their car into the crowd and continued the attack with a machete.
My initial sadness was shortly followed by visceral anger that someone should do such a thing.
At no point, though, did I feel surprised. Not when we first heard of the attack, and certainly not as we have learned more details about the suspect, who was shot dead by German police on Sunday.
That man’s name is Abdul Ballou. He is understood to be a German citizen with Lebanese roots and, per the Associated Press, is said to have travelled back to Lebanon last year, aiming to cross into Syria and join the Islamic State. Furthermore, German publication Bild reported on Monday that in a video found on a phone, Ballou claims responsibility for the murderous rampage and pledges allegiance to IS.
Well, well. Who’d have thought it?
And that brings me back to my anger. The protests began almost immediately after the atrocities of October 7, before Israel had even mounted any substantial response and while the Hamas attacks were still unfolding. Yet huge swathes of the LGBT community joined demonstrations at which Israel was already being accused of genocide and protesters openly called for its destruction.
Solidarity for Palestinian civilians, a desire for them to live in safety and prosperity, is entirely legitimate. Anything resembling solidarity with Hamas, or a movement seeking to eradicate Israel, is not. LGBT people may have thought they were participating in these anti-Israel hate rallies as an expression of solidarity with Palestinians: one oppressed group standing up for another, but that naively ignores the extremist elements involved in them and the original cause of this awful war.
It is, bluntly, deluded. The Berlin attack proved once again just how deluded, and it made me furious that these self-identified “good people” still could not see it.
Gay Jews have repeatedly told other parts of the LGBT community that they are aligning themselves with people who do not like them or care about them. They have warned that Israel is fighting murderous Islamist extremists who want to kill gay people as much as they want to kill Jews.
Worse than simply falling on deaf ears, the argument that Israel is the only country in the Middle East with gay rights and pride parades, a haven for LGBT people in a region that is often dangerous, sometimes fatal, for them, is met with dismissive comments and eyerolls.
Highlight the examples of Amir Ohana, the Likudnik speaker of the Knesset, and Sharon Afek, a former member of the IDF’s general staff and now deputy attorney general, who show that openly gay people can operate at the highest levels of Israeli public life, and you are accused of “pinkwashing”. This is the foul idea that Israel only respects its gay citizens as a way of covering up its supposed crimes.
Of course, Israel could never actually want to offer gay rights simply because it is the right thing to do. There must be some other malevolent reason.
However, if you have had the chance to stand, as I did last year, in Tel Aviv as she prepares for pride, you know that Israel is a country that showers love on its LGBT community and that protects and respects it. (Sadly, I could not enjoy the celebrations as war broke out with Iran before they could fully get under way.)
I guess this is the point for the inevitable caveats. Some of the extremist political elements in Israel are now at the heart of the government. They are no friends of the LGBT community. The country needs to take care that it does not go backwards on these issues. LGBT people from elsewhere should be standing with their Israeli brothers and sisters to make sure that never happens, not calling for their demise by chanting “from the river to the sea”.
Perhaps we will learn about some mental health or other issues affecting the perpetrator, alongside his fundamentalist beliefs. Either way, the most vocal parts of the absurd Queers for Palestine crowd will once again find a way to dismiss what happened as an isolated event.
It isn’t. The Berlin pride killing was an attack by an Islamist on LGBT people, a direct result of the same worldview that inspired the likes of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to maim, rape and murder on October 7.
It is high time anti-Israel LGBT activists listened to the warnings of gay Jews. They need to consider the company they keep and the people beside whom they march. Last weekend showed that serving as the Islamists’ useful idiots offers no protection.
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