In July 2026, someone drove a rented vehicle into the Berlin LGBTQ+ Pride parade. According to current causality counts, this man - Germany’s interior minister identified Abdul Ballout as a primary suspect - killed one woman and injured 29 people. Ballout (who was convicted in 2025 of trying to join ISIS) was killed by the police during a confrontation in the Berlin suburbs.
In the aftermath, the LGBTQ+ community is grappling with profound loss - and another reminder of why LGBTQ+ safe spaces matter. At the same time, queer and trans people of the Palestinian, Lesbanese, and Iranian diaspora along with their allies are urging their community members and outsiders not to use this tragedy as justification for anti-Muslim hate and continued military violence in Lebanon, Iran and Palestine.
Since reports about Ballout’s Lebanese heritage came out, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz began calling for tightened domestic security laws. These attacks sparked discussions about migration to and from Europe, but quer activists like Ayman Eckford - a trans Ukrainian asylum seeker - published a powerful piece two weeks ago in the Washington Blade urging people not to scapegoat refugees.
As Eckford wrote, “now even queer people are attacking refugees and Muslim communities online, while the German government is introducing more draconian measures against those groups.” Just like in past LGBTQ+ tragedies, the LGBTQ+ community is turned against itself, instead of recognizing how systems of oppression - including racism, homophobia, and sexism - are all interconnected.
We should be fighting collectively against these systems, against the very people who argue that the “enemies” are inside our own communities, rather than each other.
An important argument at the heart of Eckford’s piece was rejecting collectivism, or the reduction of a community to one representative. Ballout, if he was responsible, is not representative of the beliefs of all Muslim people.
According to data collected by the Pew Research Center, Muslim communities are just as homophobic as other religious groups, and younger Muslims are more likely to affirm queer identity compared to older generations. As modern Muslim scholars argue, strict homophobic laws in the modern Muslim world are largely the result of penal codes imposed during European colonization; prior to European colonization, Islamic communities had strong LGBTQ+ representation in society and in art. Queer and trans Muslim people exist and projects like The Queer Muslim Project showcase how they find strength and solidarity within their faith.
As many queer and trans activists of color have argued, Zionists use pinkwashing, or superficial symbols of support for LGBTQ+ rights without tangible action, to argue that Israel is LGBTQ+ affirming and queer folks are safe as opposed to Muslim-majority countries. This argument claims that people fighting against military violence and genocide in Palestine and Lebanon approve of the extremist religious beliefs that condemn LGBTQ+ people. This conflation is not true; the same false argument could be used against anyone advocating for military action against the United States, which has received a red flag for anti-trans legislation and violence from the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention.
The queer community should remember how collectivism was used against us, from Charlie Kirk’s death to the 2005 Annunciation Catholic Church shooting, and how that has fueled anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes.
Because, as queer and trans people know, this collectivism only goes one way. While shootings by white supremacists are said to be the result of “lone wolves” acting alone, any shooting by a person of color is instead considered representative of a larger systemic issue - further fueling bigotry. Similarly in the case of Ballout, he is considered representative of all Muslims (which is untrue), while a White man who drove a car into a protest at Charlottesville is considered an outlier - and “very fine people on both sides,” Trump said.
Many queer and trans people are concerned following this weekend’s attack that we will witness a repeat of what happened after the Pulse nightclub shooting, when the morning after the shooting Rep. Peter King told CNN that the shooter “was from Afghanistan and had weapons training.” Not only did later reporting show this was incorrect, but it inflamed anti-Muslim bigotry inside of the LGBTQ+ community.
Furious and grieving the people we lost, some members of the community turned their anger inwards instead of focusing on the very politicians that reject gun reform, the very politicians whose actions inflamed anti-LGBTQ+ violence and could have prevented the tragedy in the first place. What happened in Berlin is not the result of failing to keep refugees out of Germany - that wasn’t the problem.
We, as a queer community, grieve our dead and injured - we always have, even when the US government purposefully turned its back on funding research, providing healthcare, and exerting leadership during the HIV/AIDS crisis. But as we are witnessing, current calls for anti-Muslim violence, military violence in Lebanon (and Iran and Palestine by extension) were never about the queer lives lost - but about weaponizing a tragedy for American expansion, for Christian nationalism - to fuel the very movements that threaten our lives on American soil.
What happened this past month is a great tragedy; it is symptomatic of and part of systemic anti-LGBTQ+ violence targeting safe spaces across the world, especially during the rise of Christian nationalism in Europe and the United States. And, our fear, rage, and sorrow should not be weaponized against members of our own community and other marginalized communities.