GB News didn’t cause the Berlin terror attack

There are many questions to be asked after Saturday night’s terror attack at a Pride event in Berlin. One thing that does seem pretty clear is the cause. Everything we know about the culprit, 21-year-old Abdul Ballout, points to the fact that his crimes were motivated by his Islamist beliefs.

Yet far too many in Europe’s political class refuse to attribute the attack to its Islamist perpetrator. For them, the ‘real’ culprits are populist political parties, commentators and critics of all things woke.

In Britain, Labour MP Kate Osborne has tried to pin the blame for the attack in Berlin on Reform UK and GB News. She claims that the likes of Nigel Farage and Patrick Christys have used ‘language that attacks and vilifies the LGBTQ+ community’, and that this ‘escalation of hate against gay people’ has now become a ‘catalyst for real-world physical violence’. It was this, apparently, that caused Ballout to drive a white van into a crowded gay-pride parade.

Other responses to the attack – which killed one woman and injured 29 others – were equally dishonest in seeking to obscure Ballout’s Islamist motivation. Speaking at the scene of the attack, German chancellor Friedrich Merz blamed ‘intolerance, exclusion, discrimination, stupid remarks, bad jokes’. His words were vague but the implication was obvious. He was blaming anyone critical of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, or anyone critical of ‘diversity’.

One of the more remarkable comments was made by a speaker at a vigil for the attack. The LGBT activist said she hoped the attacker was ‘a white Christian person’. She was seemingly more worried about the perpetrator’s identity causing a ‘backlash’ against Muslims than she was about tackling the Islamist roots of yet another terror attack on German soil. No doubt, there was a similar reasoning at work when one of the organisers at Berlin Pride said the attack must not be used for ‘political ends’.

All of these responses willfully hide what we know about the suspect. We know that, in May 2025, Ballout travelled to Turkey via Lebanon in an attempt to join the Islamic State. In May of this year, he was sentenced to 22 months in prison for ‘preparing serious acts of violence against the state’. Instead of serving his prison sentence, he was released under the supervision of a parole officer. Despite being a known Islamist – other reports say he belonged to Islamist ‘circles’ in Berlin – and being convicted of planning terror attacks, the German authorities granted him the liberty to live among the community. And a lethal terror attack was the result.

If politicians and pundits really want to apportion further blame for Saturday’s attack, they could point a few fingers at the German state. Ballout clearly should not have been given the opportunity to act on his convictions. But as serious a state failure as this was, it was not the cause of the attack.

The cause they dare not name is Islamism – and the deep hatred of the ‘decadent’ West, including its liberated gays, that it fosters in the hearts of its adherents. Unless we face up to the Islamist threat in our midst, we will be powerless to prevent further atrocities.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.