Is the occasional massacre of gay people worth it to have more Muslims in your society?
"On July 25, 2026, 21-year-old Abdul Ballout drove a van into the crowd at Berlin Pride, killing one woman and injuring 29 people.
Three days later, I listened to The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, speak at a vigil for the victims, held by London’s LGBT community. Khan began by saying that he was honored to be there, but devastated, because he had stood in that very spot four times before, at four other vigils for murdered gay people. He listed them, year by year. Pulse was on the list. Oslo was on the list. Khan urged unity. He reminded us to face hate with love.
I wished I could not believe my ears: A European leader preaching acceptance of the people who murder gay people, to gay people, at a vigil to commemorate the murders of gay people, by the very people European leaders accepted!
In 1999, a neo-Nazi named David Copeland bombed the Admiral Duncan, a gay pub in London, killing three people
The day after it happened, every politician, every newspaper, every institution in Britain named the ideology, named the group, and named the pipeline that produced Copeland. Nobody stood at that vigil and told victims they needed to welcome more neo-Nazis. There is no policy by which Britain actively imports more neo-Nazis. No politician calls welcoming them a moral duty, and nobody gets called a bigot for noticing what neo-Nazis believe.
The opposite is true when the mass-murderer is a Muslim. Pulse, 2016: Forty-nine dead, killed by a man who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State as he fired. Oslo, 2022: Two dead, twenty-one wounded outside a gay bar the night before Pride, by a man convicted of aggravated terrorism on behalf of the Islamic State. Berlin, 2026: One dead, 29 wounded by an attempted ISIS convert who had been convicted by a German court just two months earlier of preparing to commit terrorism.
And at every one of these vigils, the same speech: Hate has no place here. Love wins. We stand together. Each time a condemnation carefully engineered to have no object of condemnation.
What is the function of a condemnation that names nothing? Who is it for?
One of my favorite phrases is POSIWID, or, “the purpose of a system is what it does.” Not what political leaders say it should do, not what it might one day live up to, but what it does.
Let’s apply POSIWID to Germany...
The court deferred the decision on suspending the sentence for six months, lifted the arrest warrant over prosecutors’ objections, and sent him home under the conditions that he book a careers-counseling appointment and attend 26 sessions of deradicalization counseling. No, that is not a joke. It is a German court ruling.
This was not a man who slipped through the cracks. In January 2026, Berlin police formally classified him as a Gefährder: Someone capable of committing politically motivated violence. His phone was monitored. His case was discussed at Germany’s Joint Counter-Terrorism Center. As a condition of his freedom, he was ordered into a deradicalization program. That’s right: Who needs to put ISIS members in jail when we have talk therapy? He attended two sessions. The program’s own advisers described him as “friendly” and “compliant,” though “inscrutable,” and were planning to notify the government of their worries on Monday. (Even stopping a terror plot won’t get Europeans to work weekends.)
Let’s take a moment and think about how many opportunities there were to stop a man already convicted of attempting a terrorist attack, of attempting—who would have guessed!?—another terrorist attack. The courts knew—they convicted him. The police knew—they classified him as dangerous. The counter-terrorism apparatus knew—they had a dedicated file on him. The therapists knew—they were going to report him. And the sum total of all this knowing was a suspended sentence and a counseling schedule.
So here is the question, and please sit with it rather than reach for your tribe’s answer: What is the purpose of a system when its stated understanding is, “This man is dangerous” and its revealed action is, “No further action required”?
I recently wrote about the Barista Fallacy: Reasoning about a population from the friendly individuals you happen to know. Sadiq Khan is the most extraordinary case study of that fallacy I have ever encountered, because he commits it against himself.
When Khan, a Muslim, voted for same-sex marriage in 2013, a mufti in Bradford issued a fatwa declaring him an apostate. He received death threats. These are his own words, to a gay magazine: “I did need to discuss with my daughters issues around police protection, and there are still people who don’t talk to me because of these issues.”
In that same interview, Khan was asked about the 2016 ICM survey (the most comprehensive face-to-face poll of British Muslims ever conducted). It found that 52% of British Muslims believe homosexuality should be illegal—in Britain!
Khan’s response to the poll: “[It] doesn’t represent the people I know.”
A man who required police protection from Islamist rage over gay rights, who paid the price in his own family’s safety, is shown data describing the belief system that threatened him, and he answers with his personal acquaintances, his “lived experience.” Unfortunately, his lived experience was insufficient to shield from Islamist violence the 15 people who were murdered and 134 people who were injured in London during his tenure as mayor.
I don’t know why he does it. Maybe he genuinely doesn’t accept the data. Maybe he accepts it and calculates that saying so would do more harm than good. Maybe he’s afraid. Maybe it’s a noble lie he considers the price of social peace. But notice that every one of those explanations is deepening public distrust because each one means the person in Britain with the best evidence, both anecdotal and data-based, cannot honestly state the conclusion that the evidence supports.
Attitudes are not violence. The overwhelming majority of the people captured in that 52 percent will never hurt anyone. But massacres are not committed by averages. They are committed by the tail of a distribution, and the size of the tail scales with the size and shape of the whole. A country that admits a population admits its distribution of belief, and not for one generation, but for all of them. You can vet an immigrant. You cannot vet her unborn children. Ballout was born in Berlin. Mateen was born in New York.
According to a German newspaper, Abdul held only German citizenship, attended local schools, played football in neighborhood youth competitions, and grew up in the multicultural district of Tiergarten. He was as German as a child of immigrants can be. That didn’t deter him from attempting to mass murder his countrymen.
Which leaves exactly two honest positions.
Position One: The risk is unacceptable. Ban all immigration from populations whose belief distributions include a violent tail, because no downstream benefit justifies the recurring murder of your own citizens.
Position Two: The occasional massacre of gay people is worth it to have more Muslims in your society. Millions of peaceful people get better lives; a wealthy society can absorb rare atrocities the way it absorbs highway deaths: As a known cost of a policy it has chosen with open eyes.
This position carries a corollary: You must manage the tail. Ruthlessly. If you have knowingly accepted that some people are just going to be mass-murdered in the streets with semi-regular frequency and that’s a price you’re willing to pay, then the question is simply how many and how frequently. You have the responsibility to ensure the scale and frequency of those mass-murders are both as limited as possible. This means you cannot do things like giving convicted terror aspirants suspended sentences because you want them to have talk-therapy instead.
Arguably, reasonable people can hold either position. What nobody can honestly hold is Position Three, which is the one that European elites actually hold: Deny that a disproportionate share of recent Islamist-motivated murders and anti-gay hate attacks exists, preach “welcome” as a moral axiom rather than a policy with costs, call anyone who notices Muslims killing people a bigot, and then, when the population tail arrives driving a van into a Pride parade, hold a vigil and condemn “hate.”
I have one last question:
What would that vigil speech have sounded like if it were written by someone whose actual goal was preventing the next vigil?"
