Fariborz Pooya writes:

The Saudi Arabian doctor and psychiatrist Taleb A., who carried out an attack on the Magdeburg Christmas market on Friday evening, has terrorized the Central Council of Ex-Muslims and the Secular Refugee Aid for several years. He apparently shared beliefs from the far-right spectrum of the AfD and believed in a large-scale conspiracy aimed at Islamizing Germany. His delusional ideas went so far that he assumed that even organizations critical of Islamism were part of the Islamist conspiracy.

“The news of the attack on the Magdeburg Christmas market has shocked us!” said Mina Ahadi, chairwoman of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims, on Saturday morning. “The attacker Taleb A. is no stranger to us, because he has been terrorizing us for years. At first we suspected that he could be a mole in the Islamist movement. However, I now think that he is a psychopath who adheres to ultra-right conspiracy ideologies. After many years of experience, I can say: The Magdeburg attacker doesn’t just hate Muslims, but everyone who doesn’t share his hatred!”

Taleb A. criticized the “left-wing” humanist orientation of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims and the close friend Secular Refugee Aid, which specifically supports non-religious migrants from Islamic countries. “By no means all people who flee Islamic countries are Muslims. As an organization, we are explicitly critical of religion, but we don’t fight against liberal Muslims, but for them, because they are particularly often the victims of Islamism. This really upset Taleb A.!” says Mina Ahadi. “When he realized that his hatred of everything Muslim was not going down well with us, he started to publicly defame individual activists from the Secular Refugee Aid.”

Suspected motive: hatred not only of Muslims, but also of German authorities

Activists from the Secular Refugee Aid took action against the slander by Taleb A. In August 2023, it was ruled in court that Taleb A. must refrain from the slander, against which the Saudi doctor appealed. In the appeal hearing at the end of October 2024, it became clear that Taleb A. would not win the case, which prompted him to give an angry speech in court. He stated that he would save Europe from Islamization, something the German courts were not capable of doing.

Taleb A. had already indicated several times before that he wanted to make the Germans pay for ignoring the danger of Islamism. By mid-2024, his belief in right-wing conspiracy theories had become so entrenched that his hatred was no longer directed only against “the left,” but also against German authorities. In June, for example, he wrote on the X platform that, in his experience, “the German police are the real drivers of Islamism in Germany”: “We need the AfD to protect the police from themselves!” Following his posts on social media, an activist from the Secular Refugee Aid filed a criminal complaint against Taleb A. last year and warned the police of an attack that he was preparing. However, the State Criminal Police Office of Saxony-Anhalt concluded in its assessment that Taleb A. posed no concrete threat – wrongly, as the fateful attack in Magdeburg showed.

“Taleb A.’s terrorist act shows us that it is not only Islamists who attack Christmas markets with vehicles, but also right-wing conspiracy fanatics,” explained Michael Schmidt-Salomon, who, as board spokesman for the Giordano Bruno Foundation, oversaw the founding of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims and the Secular Refugee Aid. “For many years we have been pointing out how much Islamic fundamentalism and right-wing Islamophobia feed off each other. This has created a climate of hatred from which secular and liberal Muslims in particular suffer, as they are threatened not only by Islamists but also by right-wing ‘Islam critics’. I think it is high time to overcome the false identity perception patterns that underlie this hatred: There is no such thing as ‘the Muslims’, ‘the refugees’ or ‘the Islam critics’! At least this is what we should learn from the Magdeburg attack: Who in political Berlin would have expected that a doctor from Saudi Arabia and AfD sympathizer could carry out an attack on a German Christmas market in order to counter Islamism? The world is much more complex and crazy than is generally perceived.