Hours had passed since the parade went by. Tiergarten lay in the bright darkness a Berlin July night has, and people were still standing in the grass.
Then came the van. It ploughed into the people on the path, throwing bodies aside, and when it finally stood still, a young man jumped out of it with a machete in his hand and began hacking at those who were still on their feet.
A person who had come to dance never left the park again. Twenty-nine others were carried out of it with wounded and crushed bodies.
The man who got out was not one of the many who have been let into Germany over recent decades. He was born there.
He was German.
Or. No.
Wait.
Let us return to that later.
Abdul Ballout came into the world in Berlin in 2005 as a German citizen from his first breath. He received everything the integration idea has to give at all. Birth in the country. Passport. School, language, welfare. And when he began to slide off course, the state followed all the way - with surveillance, with intelligence, with sentences and with programmes. There was not a single point in his life where anyone forgot to do something. Everything was done.
And yet his accumulated choices tell one coherent story, if you roll it up in the order it came to be.
First the violence and extortion that made him known to the police, long before anyone spoke of terror. Then the decision last year to reach the Islamic State, where he got as far as Lebanon before he was arrested and sentenced to three months by a military court. Then the homecoming in November, where German police stood ready already at the airport and placed him in custody. Then the sentence, on 12 May this year, one year and ten months' youth punishment for preparation of a serious act of violence endangering the state.
And then the decisive thing - the court lifted the arrest order the same day and postponed the decision on whether the sentence should even be served, for six months, to give him the chance to show that prison was not necessary.
Convicted of terror preparation on 12 May.
At liberty on 12 May.
He was given a supervisor and a deradicalisation course, where he managed two conversations and had the third waiting in the calendar on Monday.
This is not the story of a person nobody reached. This is the story of a person who was reached, again and again and again, by sentences, by walls, by programmes, by outstretched hands, and who each time answered back with the next link in the chain -
"I do not belong with you."
You cannot understand that answer if you do not understand that two incompatible worldviews and views of Man stand opposite each other, and that they are not variants of the same.
The Western order rests on a particular idea about Man - that each individual human being carries a dignity no one has given it, and no one can take from it.
Hence Freedom. Hence Conscience, the right to believe, the right to doubt, the right to leave one's faith, the right to love the one you love, and the right to dance in a park on a Saturday evening in July. The order does not demand that you love it. It demands ONLY that you let the others be free in it. That is the entire price of membership.
That was also why the court in May let him go. It treated him as what our order insists every Man is - a free will that can choose differently.
The order Ballout gave his loyalty to is built in reverse.
There Man is not free, but subjected, and dignity does not follow from being human, but from submitting correctly. That order kills for far less than what he did on Saturday. For leaving the faith. For loving wrongly. For a word about the prophet. For burning a book.
The people who stood in the grass in Tiergarten were in its eyes not victims. They were the crime itself.
That is what is so essential to understand, if you want a grip on what is going on.
It is also why integration is not a technical problem. Language can be learned, work can be found, courses can be completed, and none of it touches belonging, because belonging is not determined by what you receive, but by which view of Man you serve.
The two Orders cannot both be right about what a Man is. You can live in one and belong to the other, and that was what he did, his whole life, with an address in Berlin.
That was what I postponed saying at the beginning - he had a German passport, but he was never GERMAN - because what determined belonging lay elsewhere.
We live under the assumption that the great majority of those who came here from the Islamic world have chosen the Western order's frame. They live in Freedom, some of them precisely because they fled from the opposite, and they should not carry his deed. But that makes the question sharper, not milder. Because what remains are those who live in here together with us - but who serve over there, and whom no effort in the whole world has been able to move, because it was never a question of effort.
Today the police found him in an allotment garden in Spandau. He attacked the officers with a stabbing weapon and was shot. So there will be no trial. There will be no sentence. The story is finished and complete now, as regards him, from his first day to his last, from the maternity ward in Berlin to the allotment garden in Spandau - and at no point between the two could everything we built for trillions reach him.
The surveillance saw him. The sentences hit him. The programmes waited for him. And the only thing that finally stopped him was not the system, but a service pistol.
The state never broke his belonging. It only ended it.
Think for a moment about how deep that cuts into Man. He lived his whole life here. He walked on the same streets as everyone else, was handed the same opportunities, the same rights, the same freedom, every single day for twenty-one years. And yet he lived somewhere else.
Because what determines which world a human being lives in is not the address and not the opportunities, but the inner picture of what a Man is, and what it owes to whom.
His picture was not ours. So while his body moved through Berlin, he lived in another reality, with other laws, other heroes and another judgment on the people he passed on the street. Two realities can share a pavement. They cannot share a world.
So now we stand with the question, which is no longer about him. It is about the next ones, those who live among us with the same belonging, and for whom we have now seen the entire course, from start to finish, without being able to point to one place where more of the same would have made the difference.
EITHER we find a way to crack that code, so a person who lives in Freedom also comes to belong to it. OR we must admit that there are people we cannot reach, and dare to think the thought of another path for them, to the end.
What we cannot do is what we do now - let the answer wait for the next van.
Can we?
❤️🔥🪽
Have a good last week in July, friends. ☀️
