Around 10 p.m. on Friday night in Berlin's Tiergarten park, a white van plowed into a crowd gathered for an LGBT pride festival. The vehicle struck several people before slamming into a tree. Then the driver got out and started stabbing anyone and everyone.
The suspect, Abdul Ballout, was already known to police and had documented connections to radical Islamic networks in Berlin. This wasn't a random act by an unknown loner. Authorities knew previously convicted Ballout for traveling to Lebanon and trying to join ISIS last year.
Multiple people were stabbed in addition to the people the terrorist hit with his van. One person was killed in the attack, another 29 injured.
Ballout was a German citizen, born to Lebanese immigrants who had emigrated to Germany and obtained citizenship. After the attack, police performed a massive manhunt, they located Ballout in a suburb of Berlin, where the attack took place. Ballout was shot and killed in a confrontation with police when he pulled "a sharp object" on them.
The method Ballout used in his attack, a vehicle ramming followed by a bladed weapon attack, follows a pattern that European security services have been tracking for over a decade. It's the same playbook used in Nice. In London Bridge. In the Berlin Christmas market attack of 2016.
The Associated Press, in its early coverage, described the attacker's connections as "Islamic" networks. Not "far-right." Not "anti-government." Not any of the usual qualifiers Western media reaches for when the attacker's background complicates the preferred storyline.
Now watch the coverage calculus. A pride festival is, in the Western media framework, among the most sympathetically covered events possible. An Islamist attacker is, in that same framework, a story that creates unsolvable editorial math. You cannot simultaneously hold that pride events deserve unconditional celebration and that any critical examination of Islamist ideology is bigotry. Those two positions just crashed into each other at highway speed in a Berlin park.
The question that European leaders have refused to answer for a decade remains the same one sitting on the table this morning. Germany's domestic intelligence services track Islamist networks. They catalog members. They monitor communications. And then a cataloged, monitored, known member of one of those networks drives a van into a crowd and starts stabbing people, and the conversation resets to zero. New calls for vigilance. New promises to review security protocols. Same result.
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