Martin Suchanek
The murderous attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg on 20 December has so far claimed the lives of five people, with 41 seriously injured, 90 somewhat less seriously and 80 slightly.
Our sympathy and sorrow goes out to the bereaved and victims. They are people, employees and visitors, who were either going about their business or just wanted to celebrate. There is no justification for their murder. The outrage, grief and anger of their relatives are only too understandable.
The perpetrator and his reactionary conspiracy theory
The perpetrator, Taleb Al A., drove a car into the crowd on Friday evening, killing and injuring people at random.
Initial speculation was rash and, following a racist stereotype, assumed that it was an Islamist attack. But it certainly was not. Taleb Al A. was, in fact, an avowed anti-Islamist and atheist. The 50-year-old doctor has been living in Germany since 2006, works as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, and has a permanent residence permit. He worked as a people smuggler, sharply criticised the extreme oppression of women in Saudi Arabia, and in a 2019 interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) called himself “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history”.
At the same time, the Magdeburg attacker seems to have developed his own increasingly reactionary delusions, giving the right-wing ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory his own spin. According to the FAZ, Taleb Al A. from his account on X, spread the thesis that Germany is seeking to Islamise Europe. Furthermore, “In a video interview published eight days ago on an anti-Islamic US blog, the alleged perpetrator expounds crude theories for 45 minutes. The German state is said to be conducting a ‘covert secret operation’ to ‘hunt down and destroy the lives of Saudi ex-Muslims worldwide’”.
In other posts, the attacker made positive references to the racist populist Alliance for Germany (AfD). In June, for example, he shared statements on the attack on an AfD politician in Mannheim by Alice Weidel, co-chair of the party and commented on them, according to the TAZ, with the words, “In my experience, the German police are the real drivers of Islamism in Germany”. And, further, “We need the AfD to protect the police from them”.
Why he chose a Christmas market as his target seems puzzling in this context. But whatever led him to choose this target is entirely secondary. In the assassin, outrage over extreme oppression and right-wing, reactionary irrationalism apparently combined to create an extreme murderous delusion.
Racism and hypocrisy
However insane the background to the act may appear, however much it may also show signs of individual mental illness, it also points to a real social context. The theory of the alleged threat of ‘Islamisation’ of Europe or Germany is part of the standard repertoire of the right and the far right in the Western world. Taleb Al A. did not invent it, but, like other right-wing attackers in recent years, linked it to his own experiences and imagined constructs. In this respect, he resembles the Norwegian Anders Breivik, Brenton Tarrant the shooter at the mosque in Christchurch in New Zealand or the killers in Halle or Hanau.
The obvious proximity of Taleb Al A.’s conspiracy theory to the ideology of the AfD and other right-wingers has not, of course, prevented them from combining their expressions of sympathy with the victims of the attack with racist demands. The fact that the attacker was obviously politically close to the AfD is of no concern. Hannes Gnauck, the head of the youth organisation of the AfD and a member of parliament, demanded: “Enough! Deport them all!”
The bourgeois mainstream is still comparatively restrained, expressing anger, outrage and sympathy. But its expressions of grief cannot hide the fact that they too ignore, or are obliged to ignore, the social background to a terrible crime. For it is the increasing racism, the socially and by no means merely individually generated irrationalism, that is discharged both in attacks by insane and terrorist lone perpetrators, but even more so in the advance of right-wing ideologies and political forces.
The Magdeburg victims are also victims of this seemingly unstoppable shift to the right. If we really want to prevent further attacks of this kind, we cannot remain silent about the social causes behind this development. Only by trying to understand them can we fight them.