Against Islamobsessives

I wasn’t planning to write about the Magdeburg attack again. (My first piece is here.) Unfortunately, an hour on social media presented me with such a miserable onslaught of irrationality that I couldn’t help returning to my keyboard.

First, there are the left-leaning commentators who are insistent on presenting the alleged attacker as “far right”. “In case it’s not obvious,” writes Paul Mason:

… the far right narrative on Magdeburg switched overnight from Islamophobia to anti-asylum. No matter that the alleged perpetrator looks to be a Musk/AfD fan - radicalisation is never their fault.

The alleged attacker was an asylum seeker who hated Germans for their alleged crimes against asylum seekers. Classic “far right”! They’re always doing that.

Yes, al-Abdulmohsen, the suspect, might have vaguely admired Elon Musk or the AfD for things they said about Islam. But his ethnic and religious hatreds preceded that and his interests lay — in his own warped and counterproductive sense — with Saudi ex-Muslims. To frame someone who was so resentful towards native Germans that he is alleged to have mown them down at a Christmas market as being “far right” in the European sense is farcical.

But I have to take a few shots at the right here as well. Some conservatives, libertarians and reactionaries have convinced themselves that pathological violent behaviour is always — or almost always — reducible to Islam. So, the attacker must have been a secret Muslim.

I can’t say it’s impossible. I’m not in his head. But precisely no good evidence has been presented. One popular video from an ex-Muslim puts forward context-severed quotes which need perhaps tedious unpicking. For example, it quotes this tweet:

Now, why would a Hamas fan be using the return of Hamas to Gaza as a threat? Well, perhaps because he was arguing with an opponent of Israel who might nonetheless have been at risk if he or she was living under Hamas rule. After all, one can find numerous tweets where al-Abdulmohsen praises “Israel’s modern human rights culture”, and numerous tweets where he condemns Hamas.

The woman, Maral Salmassi, also mentions that al-Abdulmohsen behaved disgracefully towards ex-Muslims. It certainly seems so! But anti-communists have behaved disgracefully towards anti-communists without being communists. People contain multitudes.

You need to have better evidence than this to make what is a fundamentally tough argument to chew: that instead of being a tireless ex-Muslim campaigner for years, al-Abdulmohsen was just pretending to be an ex-Muslim. Sorry, but quite apart from anything else, I don’t think Islamic extremists are such masters of cunning. You’ll often find them running about screaming “Allah Akhbar” and making violent scenes. In a way, Islamobsessives are paying them too big a compliment.

Joel Berry of Babylon Bee suggests that al-Abdulmohsen was posing as a “model migrant”. A model migrant? Posting various tweets, going back to 2023, about his plan to seek vengeance against Germany and Germans is certainly an interesting way to present himself as a “model migrant”. Do these people hear what they are saying?

Ah, but what about taqiyya, Ben? Yes, there is an Islamic doctrine which holds that believers are entitled to be deceptive about their beliefs in certain circumstances (I’m not going to pretend to be enough of an expert to know what they are). I’m sure there are Islamic extremists who are deceptive about their beliefs. (This is of course the case with extremists of all stripes.) But it just seems very, very hard to believe that a radical Muslim would be so shameless and scheming that they would obsessively post about how Muhammad was a homosexual for no reason at all.

Ex-Muslims who throw around accusations of “taqiyya” seem especially unwise given that they could be accused of using “taqiyya” as well. Why not, if the obsessive advocate of the idea that Muhammad was gay was using it?

Perhaps I am breaking a butterfly on a wheel here but I really think a lot of right-wingers have a big problem seeing the world in different textures and shades. If a migrant has been violent it must be Islam. Never mind that acknowledging the existence of different cultural and psychological pathologies strengthens rather than impairing the restrictionist argument. It has to be Islam. The world is too damn complicated to think about otherwise.

To be clear, I would oppose misinformation if it was ideologically inconvenient. I hope I would oppose it if a violent person claimed to have been inspired by Ben Sixsmith and his plucky little Substack THE ZONE. The truth matters more than the respectability of our preconceptions. But the fact that what appears to be the truth isn’t inconvenient makes these claims all the more baffling.

This is not of course to say that there are not serious problems with Islamic radicalism. There certainly are. (I’ve written about them many times.) But there are a lot of different problems in the world. Some of them are common and predictable. Some are strange and surprising.

Get used to it!