The Lebanese father of the suspected Islamist terrorist who understood to have attacked the Berlin Pride Parade before being shot dead by police has insisted that his family are moderate Muslims who oppose jihadists like ISIS, throwing into question the efficacy of assimilation in modern Germany.
The multicultural project that is Berlin was again marred by tragedy on Saturday, as Abdul Ballut, a 21-year-old German-born, Lebanese heritage Islamist was said to have used a van to mow down revellers at the Christopher Street Day Pride Parade, leaving one dead and 29 injured.
Ballut was known to police at the time of the attack, after having been held in juvenile detention following his imprisonment in his ancestral homeland for attempting to join the so-called Islamic State terror group in Syria.
Due to his being a German citizen, Abdul was deported back to Germany, where he faced terror charges. Despite clear signs of radicalisation, he was set free in May on probation while attending “deradicalisation” courses, the next of which was scheduled to take place today, Monday.
The attack has raised questions over the efficacy of the system in place to deal with extremists. However, perhaps more fundamentally, the case has cast doubts about the country’s ability to effectively assimilate some groups into German society.
Tawfik, the father of the man shot dead by police, told Der Spiegel on Sunday afternoon that his family is “not extremely religious” and that they were Shiites and therefore do not support the Islamic State, a Sunni terror group. He claimed that Abdul had personally told him that he thought ISIS were “bad”.
In the interview held before his son was shot and killed by police in a standoff following a near day-long manhunt in Berlin, Tawfik added that while his daughters wear hijabs, he would not allow Abdul to wear a long beard, as he felt it was a sign of radicalisation.
Tawfik went on to claim that his son was “generous, emotional, loving,” and had the “heart of a child.” Thus, his only explanation for why his son would commit an atrocity was that he must have been “subjected to brainwashing”.
“His mother is losing it. I haven’t slept or eaten anything since I heard the news,” he said, adding that the last time he spoke with his son was on the day of the attack: “He called me, and we talked normally, like every day. He said he misses me and wishes he were with us in Lebanon right now.”
Many on the globalist, open borders side of the debate have attempted to argue that importing millions of Muslims into the West would not dramatically alter society, as they would assimilate over time. While this is doubtless true of some, research has indicated that second and third-generation Muslim migrants are more radical than their parents.
For example, an IFOP survey conducted in France last year found that nearly six in ten young Muslims in the country (15-24) believe that Sharia Law should outweigh the secular rule of the French Republic, while four in ten said that they were supportive of an extremist Islamist group. This was significantly higher than older groups of Muslims and critically of previous generations of young Muslims surveyed decades ago.
The pollsters said their results ran counter to the “conventional narrative of secularisation supposedly underway.” They said that their results exceeded the “most pessimistic estimates” of the prospects for integration when the survey began in 1989.
This came in the wake of a French government report which found that the Muslim Brotherhood has been waging a decades-long “conquest strategy” across Europe with the aim of subverting the West by ensuring that young Muslims adhere to hardline Islamist interpretations of the Qur’an.
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