The Saudi-born man arrested for Friday’s vehicular attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany was – somewhat surprisingly – not an agent or freelancer for ISIS, Al-Qaeda, or any other terrorist movement but in fact described himself online as a former Muslim and posted support for the country’s Reich-y far right nationalist party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the AP reports.
The man, identified by local media only as Taleb A due to German privacy laws and described as having worked in either psychology or psychiatry, is a prolific tweeter who posted or shared dozens of anti-Islamic tweets a day and constantly accused German officials of failing to push back on what he called the “Islamism of Europe,” up until the attack that killed four and injured dozens.
British-based think tanker Peter Neumann, an expert on terrorism in modern Germany, was shocked by Taleb’s flip, tweeting “After 25 years in this ‘business’ you think nothing could surprise you anymore. But a 50 year-old Saudi ex-Muslim who lives in East Germany, loves the AfD and wants to punish Germany for its tolerance towards Islamists – that really wasn’t on my radar.”
Is it really that surprising though? Not just in the way that a Saudi-born extremist simply wore a different jersey to his cowardly act of savagery toward civilians but, from an American perspective after seeing so many members of non-MAGA demographics and political/cultural stripes put on their red hats – like literally the natural-born children of illegal immigrants among them – gravitating toward the far right and its orange-skinned leader for whatever stupid reasons, not especially.
Having seen a Bay Area hippie get Q-pilled and smash in Nancy Pelosi’s husband’s head in the name of Trump, Taleb’s path to mass murder is somewhat surprising in the context that it seems he’s probably the first modern German Muslim to Nazi convert, but far short of a black swan overall.