We Don't Know Whether the Christmas Market Murderer was Islamist or Far Right, Because Even He Didn't Know
By Ed Dutton
On Friday, December 20, 2024, a car plowed into a crowd at a Christmas Market in Magdeburg, East Germany. About two hundred people were injured, 40 of them critically, and five people were killed, including a nine-year-old German boy. Clearly, the massacre had the modus operandi of a Jihadist. Religion-of-Peace bollards have been erected in numerous Western European cities to thwart fundamentalist Muslim attempts to weaponize motor cars against their hosts. But the killer in this instance, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, was unusual. A Saudi psychiatrist who had lived in Germany since 2006, he claimed to be an ex-Muslim, had fled Saudi Arabia because it was a fundamentalist Islamic regime and he had criticized the government, and had expressed support on social media for Germany's anti-Islam party “Alternative for Deutschland” (AfD).
This led to two narratives on Twitter, one from the left and the other from the right, both of which, I’d argue, were equally misguided. For leftist commentator Owen Jones, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen was a dangerous, far-right extremist who only served to underscore the clear and present danger of the AfD. Presumably, in Jones’ mind, al-Abdulmohsen chose to murder Germans to punish them for their decadence in allowing people like him, or at least allowing Muslims, into their country. The alternative narrative was that al-Abdulmohsen was a crypto-Muslim who had expressed anti-Islamic views to throw the German security services off the scent, better permitting him to massacre German infidels. Known as Taqiyya, being a crypto-Muslim is a known Islamic tactic.
However, I suspect the solution is far simpler: He suffered from something like Borderline Personality Disorder, apparently combined with manic depression. As I have discussed in other articles, Borderline Personality Disorder is characterized by highly unstable and extreme moods, poor emotional regulation, a fundamental fear of abandonment and of being alone, pronounced feelings of shame, intense and unstable relationships, and unstable goals and even sense of identity due to being plagued by intense negative feelings (such as shame, anxiety, self-loathing, and self-doubt). It is also characterized by a weak sense of self. A radical identity change, from one extreme to another, would potentially exemplify this condition.
Sufferers have a weak sense of self in the sense that our personalities sit within various ranges on scales, such as high to low psychopathy. Most people operate within relatively narrow ranges, depending on environmental factors, on these scales. A person with a weak sense of self will, especially under stress, dramatically swing to the extremes of these scales, meaning that they will seem like they are different people at different points; histrionic at one point, entirely avoidant a few days later. About 20% of sufferers also have bipolar depression, where they swing from mania to profound depression. Those who have both conditions have even more extreme BPD symptoms.
In that sufferers from Borderline Personality Disorder cannot regulate their emotions, they cannot regulate their self-esteem; so it may swing between grandiose Narcissism (believing one is perfect, superior, and entitled) as an attempt to suppress their fears, and feelings of abject worthlessness and self-loathing. For the same reason, their identity and goals can radically change in accordance with these swings in self-esteem. Due to their fear of abandonment, such people tend to idealize those with whom they have relationships. This is a way of suppressing their anxiety about potential problems in the relationship that may cause it to end. It evidences their relatively immature way of seeing the world and their desire for someone to fill the void of emptiness and meaninglessness which they often feel. In other words, they cannot cope with their extreme negative feelings, so they create a fantasy world which produces positive feelings; this perfect person being their rescuer. However, an element of their development is stuck at a child-like stage: people are either “good” or “evil” and they may adopt very different selves – very loving or very hateful – to deal with people accordingly. They can easily decide that a previously “good” person is “evil,” and they can enter paranoid psychosis if they feel severely threatened.
Now, what do we know about the killer? The Saudis had warned the German authorities of his “very extreme views,” consistent with mental instability. In 2013, Abdulmohsen was fined for “breaching the peace” by making various threats. In 2014, he threatened to act in a way that would elicit “international attention” if he didn’t get what he wanted. In 2015, he made threats on a hotline that he would obtain a gun and take revenge on the judges involved in his previous court cases. One man who interviewed him for a German newspaper described his “manic” personality. Sometimes, in his own writings, he loathed Saudi Arabia and other times Germany.
Someone with a personality disorder of this type, especially if combined with bipolar disorder which renders it very extreme, would be perfectly capable of oscillating between different identities: idealizing Germany and promoting the AfD but then abominating Germany, perceiving it as a malevolent force that has persecuted him. All it would take would be for this to tip over into psychosis and an overwhelming desire for vengeance, and you have this man deciding to massacre Germans, with an obvious tactic in the newspapers which he can copy. Germans, after all, are "Other;" he is not one of them and, from the perspective of Genetic Similarity Theory, where we cooperate with the genetically similar to pass on more of our genes, he should be expected to feel less empathy for German strangers than a German would.
I have met two people very similar to this man. In both cases, they would be fundamentalist Christians or Marxists depending on the day of the week. Such people are paranoid, dishonest, thoroughly dangerous, and capable of doing great harm. One of them ended up going to prison for his threats and deceit. Such people are even more dangerous if they are foreigners and turn their tendency to feel extreme hatred and paranoia against the native population that they may previously have idealized. Hopefully, the party Abdulmohsen claimed to support will soon be in a position to ensure that such massacres – in which being foreign and mentally disturbed intersect – are less likely to occur in the future.
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It is hard to make sense of. The closest thing to sense I can make of it involves the quote from the film Four Lions: “Bomb the mosque and radicalise the moderates.” Albeit in a the glove is on the other foot fashion.
Have you seen his Twitter posts? And his BBC interview? It makes more sense than you might think. He was a Muslim apostate who started an NGO dedicated to helping Saudi women flee Saudi Arabia and Muslim social norms. Over the years he grew increasingly irate at the German government for allegedly helping the Saudi government chase these women down abroad (don’t know what he meant by that specifically). He decided to draw attention to himself by taking his anger out on the German public.
I haven’t checked on this story in a few days and am flabbergasted to learn that some in the media are portraying him as “far right”. That is an insanely dishonest take.