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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Kenan Malik

Was the Magdeburg market attack the inevitable product of an anti-politics age?

A cyclist in hi-viz clothing stands outside a church looking down at a huge area of flowers ringed with candles.at the site of the Magdeburg massacre in Germany.
A makeshift memorial for the victims of the car-ramming attack, which took place on 20 December 2024 in Magdeburg, eastern Germany. Photograph: Jens Schlueter/AFP/Getty Images

Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, the alleged perpetrator of the horror attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg, does not, Germany’s interior minister, Nancy Faeser, observed, “fit any existing mould”. He had acted in “an unbelievably cruel and brutal manner, like an Islamist terrorist, though he was clearly ideologically hostile to Islam”.

Faeser is not alone in her confusion about how to understand Abdulmohsen.

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