The suspect in the deadly Berlin Pride attack that left one person dead and 29 injured was shot and killed by police during a confrontation on Sunday in a suburb of the city, authorities said.
Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, was killed following a search that lasted nearly 24 hours after the attack in downtown Berlin. Prosecutors said he had previously sought to join the militant Islamic State group.
Ballout was suspected of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride festival Saturday night before apparently stabbing others with a machete in what authorities believe was an Islamic extremist terror attack.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the attack occurred a few hundred meters (yards) from a party near the Brandenburg Gate that was supposed to close out the city’s Pride festival.
Ballout was tracked down around 6 p.m. Sunday at a garden in Spandau, a Berlin suburb, the city’s police department wrote on X. They said he apparently ran toward officers with a sharp instrument, and police fired at least one shot. He died at the scene.
Ballout was born in Germany, the minister said. His mother was naturalized in 2002, three years before he was born.
Ballout was born in Germany, the minister said. His mother was naturalized in 2002, three years before he was born.
So this reminds me of something I learned growing up in an area with a lot of Latino gang violence.
The people with these angry disillussioned attitudes were never first generation immigrants who have just arrived. Those are generally polite law abiding citizens who are glad to have gotten somewhere safer.
The people inovled with gangs were second and third generations who were caught between the culture of their parents and the culture of the nation in which they now live.
It was theorized to be related to feelings of isolation. Isolated from the world their parents come from, and through racism and discrimination, isolation from the world they exist in now. Two different worlds pulling at them and they don’t feel like they belong in either world.
So they seek out others like themselves, and like many lost young men, they begin to radicalize.
It doesn’t help that wahhabist extremists are spreading their vile shit too. It makes it too easy for these young kids to turn into mindless weapons for hateful people.
It’s a mixture of exactly what you described and the inequality that forms through the socioeconomic background. Your law abiding first gen immigrant parents probably don’t have a lot of money and don’t know the language well. That makes it a lot less likely for you to succeed academically. Not impossible but a lot less likely. Yet the expectation is a lot higher than it was for your parents.
So you’re in between cultures, tribeless and feel like a failure because you didn’t become a doctor or engineer. Prime candidate for radicalization.
There’s also a fuck ton of pressure from first gen parents to perform above and beyond what you think yourself capable of. They expect you to work twice as hard as they did because you have a real shot of leapfrogging economically and socially. For a lot of kids it has the opposite effect where they become shut ins or join gangs where they feel like they can get the approval of someone they respect and who’s opinion they value.
I can’t even conceptualize the word “naturalization”. When we really mean to say “citizenship”.
Anyway let’s talk about the actual bigot here, instead of the anecdotal one. I wonder which would be stronger here: his religious extremism, his psychopathic inclination and/or his religion and culture presenting a possible relief vector for his inclination.
Naturalized is the verb form. It means “to become a citizen”. It’s not bigoted, it’s describing a status equivalent to someone born in the country. You become “native” or “natural” to the country.
I disagree. You become a citizen, you acquire citizenship. The right to participate in civil society.
A natural doesn’t acquire citizenship, it’s innate. A natural is a citizen, but a citizen doesn’t need to be a natural.
You cannot change your nature, your past, your beginning to somewhere else.
I mean you can disagree all you want, but that’s the literal definition of the term. It’s officially called “naturalization”, and I gave you the reasons why they called it that.
I disagree the sky isnt blue it’s technically cyan
Yeah, no. In this case it is much more likely a failure of the parents, prolly cos they didn’t bother to integrate and learn the native language, leading to the fact that at home the perpetrator didn’t learn to speak german and likely only learned it when he got into school. Of course then making friends is a lot more difficult, and so the foreign kids stick with oneanother, and not talking german between them, making learning german and integrating even more difficult.
You can literally see this in a lot of elementary schools where the proportion of migrant kids is really high.
IDK man I spent less than 2 years in Germany, age 6, ostracized and bullied as an immigrant. I was fluent in 6 months.
That’s a failure on the part of the schools/Kindergärten. Children start attending government institutions at between two and four years of age. It should be perfectly possible for nonnative speakers to master German as well as any other student there, and it’s not hard as a teacher to mix students up and give them a chance to gel with new classmates.
Teaching children a language other than the main spoken one in their country gives them a huge benefit towards general language ability. The teachers and schools just have to consider it when planning lessons, but with a little attention, a four year old spending six hours a day in a language bath is going to learn the language. Then they’ll have two different ways of thinking about communication from the start, whereas other students might wait until they’re 8 to begin learning their second language.
