When a Saudi Arabian national was accused of ramming a car into a German Christmas market, members of the frequently anti-Muslim European far right said it proved their point. The deadly incident in Magdeburg was another example of Islamist terrorism, they said — and a result of the mass immigration they so vehemently oppose.
Except it wasn’t that simple.
The suspect, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, 50, was in fact scathingly critical of Islam and immigration, according to his past posts on X. He aligned himself with the far-right, anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is endorsed by Musk and monitored by German intelligence agencies for suspected extremism. While authorities say the motive is not yet clear, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said the suspect “was obviously Islamophobic.”
Al-Abdulmohsen’s complex worldview, in which he criticized the Saudi Arabian government but also Germany’s alleged failure to protect Saudi immigrants from the Middle Eastern kingdom’s repression, has muddied attempts to use his alleged killing of five people and injuring 200 others as an anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim cautionary tale. It comes at a time when immigration is the most polarizing issue in Europe, where far-right parties are surging on a wave of discontent, and immigrants are blamed for job scarcity, housing shortages and cultural changes.
There has been “zero” contrition from those on the right who sought to capitalize on the incident, said Hans-Jakob Schindler, the senior director of the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit international group focused on radical ideologies.
Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, who has backed far-right figures in Europe, wrote on X that the “legacy media lies again” when news outlets, including NBC News, reported that officials described the suspect as Islamophobic.
Other figures who were quick to interpret the attack have since kept quiet.
“They despise our values,” Dutch anti-Islam leader Geert Wilders posted Friday on X. “This is our land, our freedom, our life. And we’ll defend it and never surrender.”
However, it later emerged that the suspect was a fan of Wilders, having previously called him “a true hero” on X. Wilders has not posted about it since, as of 7 a.m. ET Monday.
AfD co-leader Alice Weidel, meanwhile, did continue to comment but instead focused on the suspect’s immigrant background rather than his political and religious beliefs. On Monday night during a rally in Magdeburg’s cathedral square she called for change “so we can finally live once again in security,” Reuters reported. Members of the crowd shouted “deport them” punctuated her speech.
Al-Abdulmohsen entered Germany in 2006 — almost a decade before then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “open-door policy” that saw 1 million asylum-seekers enter the country and, critics say, foment much of the political disquiet experienced today.
“When everyone, including myself, thought this was an Islamic State attack, these accounts were all posting Islamophobic stuff, then a couple of hours later, when it turned out this guy is Islamophobic himself, these right-wing social media feeds seamlessly switched to migration,” Schindler said.
Other organizations the suspect previously interacted with are now trying to distance themselves.
An ultra-conservative American blog called the RAIR Foundation USA interviewed al-Abdulmohsen just eight days beforehand, profiling him as a former Muslim whistleblower “exposing” Germany’s attempts to “Islamize the West.”
After the attack, the foundation updated its interview page.
“If these reports are accurate, it appears we and other media outlets … were misled regarding his true intentions,” it stated.
Meanwhile, far-right X account Radio Genoa shared a video of his arrest and described him as an “Arab Islamic terrorist.” This, despite some commenters noting that al-Abdulmohsen himself had regularly reposted Radio Genoa’s own racially charged criticisms of Islam and immigration.
Musk’s comment deriding the media’s reporting of the suspect’s past and beliefs came just hours after the South African-born billionaire doubled down on his support for the AfD party. This support comes amid a series of other positive comments from Musk boosting parties on the populist and nationalist right, having successfully backed President-elect Donald Trump’s win in the United States last month.
It’s not only this that’s alarming more mainstream European officials, but also what they see as a lack of regulation on Musk’s X platform, which the suspect allegedly used to issue threats ahead of Friday.
These kinds of “weirdo, individual, radical, conspiratorial worldviews” are “a phenomenon that has been rising steadily since the coronavirus, since we all moved our lives online and on social media,” Schindler said.
He said this does not absolve German authorities, who were given an unspecified warning about al-Abdulmohsen last year. Musk posted that he “should never have been allowed to enter Germany” and “should have been extradited.”
NBC News emailed X requesting comment about the criticism of Musk’s remarks, as well as accusations that X failed to act on violent posts from the suspect, but the company did not respond.
The competing narratives over al-Abdulmohsen’s acts and beliefs look set to continue this week, with the AfD holding a memorial service for the victims, which some critics have derided as insensitive political opportunism.
“A bloody act like the one that occurred yesterday in #Magdeburg must never be repeated!” the local AfD X account posted. “Let us ensure that Magdeburg and Saxony-Anhalt become a place of carefree coexistence again.”
