German terrorist attack conspiracy theories fanned by far right

All the evidence points to the suspected attacker in Germany being an anti-Muslim far right sympathiser - yet far-right lies are on the rampage

We know that the suspected murderer, indeed terrorist, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, who ploughed his vehicle into a crowd of people at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany was anti-Muslim and a cheerleader of far right movements and personalities.

We know this because had a Twitter account with over 120,000 tweets posted over the course of 8 years, in which he made clear his strident anti-Muslim views and flaunted his support for Germany’s far right party, the AfD, and the likes of far right Dutch leader Geert Wilders, who he called a hero, as well as citing Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson as inspirations.

We know that he advocated imprisoning or executing former German Chancellor Angela Merkel for supposedly helping Islamise Europe.

We know that he was a committed supporter of Israel.

We know that his Twitter profile denounces Germany for wanting to in quotes “Islamize Europe”.

We know he appeared in a BBC documentary discussing his atheism, and that his work focused on getting other non believers from the Middle East to come to Germany.

And yet. When the attack first happened, Islamophobic right-wing accounts went into overdrive, seizing on the attack as yet more fodder for their anti-Muslim crusade. You might think the overwhelming evidence would lead them to discard their mistaken premature conclusion. Think again. Instead they are doubling down and pushing a conspiracy theory that in fact he is a secret Islamist.

Let’s start, shall we, with John Aziz, who presents himself as a sensible centrist moderate. He posted footage of the suspect being apprehended by gun wielding police officers. He writes:

Here is a question:

If the suspect in the Christmas market attack is an ex-Muslim and an atheist then why was he screaming "Allahu Ukbar" (at 17 seconds into this video) when he was being arrested??

Visegrad 24 - a far right account - posts:

The “Islamophobic” and “ex-Muslim” Magdeburg terrorist shouts “Allahu Akbar” during his arrest.

This claim has now spread across twitter like wildfire, pushing by various far right and anti-Muslim accounts.

But the footage shows this is an unhinged lie. He didn’t say “allahu akbar”. As German speakers have pointed out, he said “alles klar”, meaning “understood” in response to the police saying “keine bwegung” or “don’t move”.

Underlining how Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a engine of far right disinformation, he has tweeted about the terrorist suspect: ‘the atheist angle was a scam to avoid extradition’

So what is the claim here? He spent years constructing a fake persona backed up by his actual activity of getting atheists out of the Middle East, and had spent 8 years promoting anti-Muslim right-wing politics on Twitter so he could stage an attack in which he wouldn’t even state the supposed real reason for the attack. How does that make sense?

It doesn’t make sense, of course, and there is no evidence for it, unlike all the evidence that the attacker was a fan of Elon Musk, which he made very clear indeed on his actual Twitter account.

He also promoted a video claiming that he was practising a supposed tenet of Islam, ‘taqiyya’ - of supposedly practising deception to advance the religious cause - which isn’t actually a tenet of Islam and which scholars (and indeed Muslims) point out is completely unknown to most Muslims. Again, if you believe he subscribes to a warped and heretical interpretation of Islam that justifies ploughing a vehicle into a Christmas market, how does that make sense if you don’t make clear that’s your motive, and leave people with the impression you’re an anti-Muslim atheist?

This baseless conspiracy theory is just that - baseless. There is no evidence for it. Literally zero. It is a fantasy. But Elon Musk shared that fantasy, stating:

Wtf is the German press saying?

Most people in Europe still think the legacy press is real, when it is pure propaganda.

Please send them links to X, so they know what’s actually going on.

So he’s openly admitting here that he sees Twitter as an engine of misinformation to convince people of lies in order to promote hateful political causes. In this case he is asking people to treat the truth as lies, and embrace deceit as the truth, offering Twitter as the key source of the latter.

Indeed he’s shared a tweet from the account ‘End Wokeness’, which screenshotted media headlines noting that the suspect is Islamophobic, which has the caption ‘we really don’t hate the media enough’, adding ‘legacy media lies again’

It’s notable that the suspect’s twitter account was suspended, and when it was reinstated, all posts from before November 2024 had been deleted, and the search function on his profile was disabled, in an effort to erase his actual views.

Indeed, after years of relentless anti-Muslim bile, of demonising Muslims, of portraying them as innately violent - even as Western powers have slaughtered predominantly Muslim citizens in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine - and with Twitter now in the hands of an extremist, this lie is being lapped up by extremists, who willingly embrace an alternative reality.

One far right account has screenshotted me discussing how the terrorist suspect is a far right anti-Muslim pro-Israel extremist, adding “this aged” well Owen’, with a frown emoji and a clown emoji.

This tweet has amassed 15,000 likes. These people are so radicalised, so convinced of total lies, that they believe that those who work on the basis of what the actual evidence says are delusional and indeed the real liars.

Leo Kearse, a so-called comedian and presenter on the hard right GB News channel, refers to my factual description of the politics of the suspect, by stating:

This is a genuine tweet by a journalist for the Guardian, Britain's leading left-wing newspaper.

The Guardian quit Twitter recently because of "bias" and "misinformation". Yes, really.

What is he talking about? Where is the misinformation in my tweet? What’s fascinating here is he portrays literally spelling out a summary of the public record of the suspect’s belief system as ludicrously false .

On his GB News show, the panel indulges doubt in the facts. Strikingly, the panel all agree with each other, expressing disbelief that the attacker could possibly be anti-Muslim. Before GB News was launched, we were told that our broadcasting rules would prevent a British Fox News. And yet here is a panel with no pretence of balance, pushing viewers to indulge a baseless conspiracy theory.

The panel can’t seem to compute that far right violence is a real thing, which is quite the position to take given the attack happened in Germany, a state which produced the worst example of far right violence ever seen. They also seem unaware of precedent: one of the worst ever terrorist attacks in Europe was in 2011, when a far right terrorist slaughtered dozens of young socialists on the grounds they supported mass immigration and thus the Islamisation of Europe. There is an uncanny echo in the German attack.

Indeed what we know about the suspected terrorist’s belief is that he had convinced himself that Germany had abandoned so-called Western values and was pursuing Islamisation. That is the basis of his radicalisation.

Kearse states that “people are so quick to blame the far right because he’s tweeted ins support of the AfD” - that is, Germany’s far right party. Yes, I would say that’s pretty compelling evidence, actually!

And then a panel member named Nicholas De Santo, also a right-wing comedian, although I looked up his “work” and it is some of the most embarrassingly weak material I’ve ever had the misfortune to listen to, says we “should judge him by what he’s done not by any presumably pro-AfD previous tweets”.

What does this even mean? Firstly they’re not “presumably pro-AfD” tweets, they are straightforwardly pro-AfD tweets. In terms of what he has done, we know that the suspect is alleged to have committed an act of terrible violence. That doesn’t tell us motive. That’s why we have to work on the basis of his stated beliefs. And as it happens we had hundreds of thousands of words going back years - until Twitter conveniently erased them - which tells us what they are.

Look, it’s very clear what’s happening here. A wave of far-right extremism is being propelled by lies, naked, shameless lies. Those lies are succeeding in radicalising significant numbers of people. It doesn’t matter what the actual truth is. They will embrace every lie that justifies hatred and bigotry. With Elon Musk as king of twitter, there is a hugely powerful means of radicalising ever more recruits, who increasingly live in an alternative false reality, convinced that those who speak the truth are dangerous hateful extremists. Which is why it’s important that the rest of us tell the truth as loudly as we can.