Munchausen Bi-Proxy ☪️🏳️🌈
They told you it was the Jews. They showed you who it actually was. They are still telling you it was the Jews.
If you’re new here, most of my writing lives in shorter Notes throughout the week.
Once a week, I share something different.
A piece of a book I’m writing in public.
One clarification before the argument begins.
This piece is not about Muslim people. It is about a political ideology that uses religion as a conquest vehicle and has been doing so for fourteen centuries. The average Muslim family in Berlin, in Dearborn, in East London, is not ISIS. The distinction matters. I am making it exactly once and moving on.
On the evening of July 25, 2026, a van was driven into a crowd gathered for Berlin’s Christopher Street Day, the city’s annual Pride celebration in the Tiergarten. One woman was killed. Twenty-nine people were injured, several critically. The driver fled on foot. A manhunt was launched. The following day, police tracked the suspect to a garden in the Berlin suburb of Spandau. When officers moved to arrest him, he charged at them with a knife. They shot him. He died at the scene.
His name was Abdul Ballout. He was twenty-one years old.
He was not Lebanese. He was not a refugee. He was not an asylum seeker. He was not radicalized in a foreign prison or a camp on the border. He was born in Germany. He grew up in Germany. He went to school in Germany until the tenth grade. He worked in Germany as a security guard and a hired driver.
In June 2024, he was posting Islamic State propaganda on Instagram. In 2025, he traveled to Lebanon with the intention of crossing into Syria to join ISIS. He contacted people he believed were ISIS members. Lebanese authorities arrested him. He was repatriated to Germany in November 2025 and arrested at the airport.
In May 2026, a juvenile court in Berlin convicted him of preparing a serious act of subversive violence. He was sentenced to one year and ten months. The court then suspended the sentence, crediting time served in Lebanon and pre-trial detention, and because he told the court he had distanced himself from ISIS. Prosecutors appealed, seeking a longer sentence.
He was released under sporadic observation, allowed to return home to live with his mother and two sisters. No ankle monitor. No continuous surveillance. A watchlist and a deradicalization program.
The Berlin-based Violence Prevention Network evaluated him twice. Staff reported he was displaying fake cooperation, giving evaluators the answers he thought they wanted to hear while remaining highly radicalized. They were preparing to formally notify authorities.
A final evaluation was scheduled for the Monday after the attack.
On July 3, 2026, police searched his apartment on suspicion of violating Germany’s weapons laws. They found a toy gun. The case was dropped. They left.
Twenty-two days later, he rented a van under his own name. He recorded an allegiance video to ISIS on his phone. Then he drove into the parade.
Germany’s Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt stated: everything we see here indicates that this was an Islamist terror attack. Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he wanted to know how the attack could have been prevented. Security experts called the decision to let him walk free a fatal mistake.
The ideology did not come from Lebanon. It found him in Germany. It finds people where they are. That is what ideologies do.
Abdul Ballout is not an anomaly. He is a data point in a documented pattern.
Second and third generation Western Muslims being radicalized by Islamist networks online, in mosques, through recruiters who know exactly which vulnerabilities to find and which promises to make, is one of the most extensively documented radicalization phenomena in European security literature.
The ideology travels through screens and networks. It does not need a passport. It does not need a refugee camp. It needs a young man with a grievance, a need for identity, and access to a framework that pre-installs its enemies before he has done anything to deserve the designation.
The enemies are pre-installed. The van comes later.
Fourteen months earlier, on the evening of November 7, 2024, Israeli soccer fans attending a UEFA Europa League match in Amsterdam between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax were hunted through the streets of the city.
It was not spontaneous. Dutch authorities established that the attack had been meticulously orchestrated via WhatsApp. The group chat called for a Jodenjacht. A Jew hunt. Messages the night before confirmed the plan: tomorrow after the game, at night, part 2 of the Jew Hunt. Attackers’ own videos showed Israelis scrambling for safety, hiding for hours, jumping into canals to escape the mob.
It happened on the eve of Kristallnacht. The first pogrom on European streets since the Second World War.
The mob that organized the Jew Hunt was not Israeli. They were not Jewish. They were waving Palestinian flags and chanting Free Palestine while hunting people through the streets of Amsterdam.
The queer community was largely silent.
Now hold both of those facts and look at where the Western queer movement has been standing for the last three years.
They marched for Gaza. They called Israel an apartheid state. They disrupted campus events, defaced buildings, occupied university halls, and built encampments with signs reading Zionists not welcome. They declared that you cannot call yourself a queer activist unless you stand with Palestine. They made solidarity with Hamas-governed Gaza a precondition for membership in the movement.
Hamas governs Gaza under an interpretation of Islamic law that treats homosexuality as a criminal offense. In practice it is often worse than imprisonment. Iran, the primary state sponsor of Hamas and Hezbollah, executes gay people by law. Iranian penal code defines sodomy as a capital offense. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, human rights organizations estimate thousands of individuals have been executed for crimes linked to sexual orientation. The Boroumand Foundation documented at least 107 executions on homosexuality-related charges between 1979 and 1990 alone. In January 2022, two gay men named Mehrdad Karimpour and Farid Mohammadi were hanged in a prison in northwestern Iran after six years on death row. Confirmed by Iran Human Rights, the Oslo-based human rights organization. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and most of Israel’s neighbors impose criminal penalties for homosexual activity ranging from flogging to death.
ISIS, the ideology that radicalized Abdul Ballout in a German suburb, did not hide what it did. It posted the photos itself. In Mosul, in Raqqa, in Aleppo, ISIS militants took men accused of homosexuality to the roofs of tall buildings, read the charges aloud to the crowd gathered below, and threw them off. If the men survived the fall, the crowd stoned them. The United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da'esh, which briefed the UN Security Council on its findings before closing its mandate in September 2024, documented the pattern formally and found reasonable grounds to believe the crimes amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. ISIS published the executions in its propaganda magazine under the heading: Implementation of the Punishment of Those Who Have Committed Acts of Homosexuality.
This is not disputed. It is documented by the UN, by Human Rights Watch, and by ISIS itself.
The movement that just killed one woman and injured twenty-nine at a Pride parade is the same movement the Western queer movement has spent three years defending.
There is a psychological condition called Munchausen by Proxy.
The caregiver, usually a parent, induces illness in the person under their care, then presents themselves as the devoted protector of the patient they are poisoning. The patient, who is genuinely sick, often defends the caregiver. The bond deepens through the illness. The patient cannot see that the hand bringing the medicine is the same hand causing the disease.
The Western queer movement has a version of this.
The ideology tells them: we are the oppressed. We are colonized. We are the victims of Western imperialism and Zionist aggression. Stand with us. March with us. Tear down the symbols of the people who are really doing this to you.
The movement believes it. They march. They chant. They hold signs. They make the case on behalf of an ideology that, given power, would imprison them, flog them, or kill them. The ideology is not hiding this. It is in their founding documents. It is in their legal codes. It is in the videos they post themselves.
And then a man born in Berlin drives a van into a Pride parade.
The queer movement has a word for what Israel is doing. They call it genocide. They call it ethnic cleansing. They call it apartheid. They march with signs. They disrupt events. They demand that every queer person declare where they stand.
Here is the question they will not answer.
Show me the Israeli terror attack on a Pride parade. Show me the Jewish van. Show me the IDF soldier who drove into a crowd of gay people celebrating in the streets. Show me the Israeli law that criminalizes homosexuality. Show me the Jewish religious text that calls for the execution of gay people.
It is not there.
The movement has a ready answer for what I am about to say.
They call it pinkwashing.
The argument, popularized by the BDS movement, is that Israel promotes its LGBTQ record as a propaganda strategy to deflect attention from its treatment of Palestinians. That Israel is, in their words, exploiting gay rights to whitewash its crimes.
Sit with what that argument requires you to believe.
It requires you to believe that 250,000 people celebrating on a beach in Tel Aviv every June are doing so as a government public relations exercise. It requires you to believe that decades of Israeli LGBTQ activists fighting in courts, in the Knesset, and in the streets for their own rights are actually propaganda assets. It requires you to believe that the rights Israeli gay people have won for themselves, through democratic struggle against religious opposition and conservative governments, are not real rights but marketing material.
And it requires you to hold those beliefs while the government that actually executes gay people gets a solidarity march in your city.
The pinkwashing accusation is not a political argument. It is a mechanism for making sure that no positive fact about Israel can ever be allowed to count.
The ADL put it plainly: those making the accusation refuse to recognize any positive Israeli attribute and willfully ignore the realities of the country’s vibrant democracy to justify their attacks. Israeli LGBTQ activists themselves have said it directly: accusing us of pinkwashing reduces our hard-won rights to public relations. It tells us our rights only matter when they can be used against Israel.
Name the logic. Then look at who is running it.
What is there: Tel Aviv Pride. Two hundred and fifty thousand people on the Mediterranean beachfront every June. The largest LGBTQ event in the Middle East. In June 2026, Israel hosted Pride Land at the Dead Sea, four days, fifteen hotels, the largest LGBTQ festival in Middle East history. Israel’s military has openly gay soldiers. Israel has anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people. Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly in favor of LGBTQ rights.
Israel is the only government in the region that actually protects the lives of gay people.
The movement that claims to stand for queer lives has decided that government is the enemy.
Abdul Ballout was not Israeli. He was not Jewish. He subscribed to the ideology they told you to fear least and support most.
He was born in the same country where he killed a woman at a Pride parade. The ideology did not travel with him from somewhere else. It found him at home, in Germany, the way it finds people everywhere it reaches. Through a screen. Through a network. Through a framework that pre-installs its enemies before you have done anything to deserve the designation.
The enemies are always the same ones.
It is not Israel driving vans into Pride parades. It is not Jews organizing Jew Hunts in Amsterdam. It is not Zionists posting videos of executions of gay men and calling it justice.
But the movement told you it was.
They told you to march against the country with the Pride parade on the beach. They told you to stand with the ideology that executed people for attending one.
The caregiver told the patient the neighbor was poisoning them.
The patient believed it.
The patient is still in the hospital.
Twenty-nine others are with them.
And the caregiver is already preparing the next dose.
If this resonated, you can follow the full arc as it unfolds.
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