The deadly truth plows through the delusions of Pride for Palestine

The rainbow flags were still hanging over Berlin when the celebration broke into screams. Christopher Street Day, one of Europe’s largest Pride events, was winding down near Tiergarten when a rented van was driven into the crowd. Police said the driver then got out with a bladed weapon and attacked more people. By the end of the assault, one woman was dead and 29 people were injured.

The suspect, 21-year-old Abdul Ballout, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, was later shot dead after police said he advanced toward officers with a bladed weapon. Germany’s interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt, said the evidence indicated an Islamist attack.

Berlin’s attack was a security failure, a human tragedy and a political gift to the German far right. It also cut into one of the most fragile coalitions in Western progressive politics: the alliance between Pride activism and pro-Palestinian solidarity.

For years, rainbow flags, transgender flags and Palestinian flags have often been seen together, flying at marches in the United States and Europe. The humane argument is obvious: Palestinians do not lose their rights because Palestinian society is socially conservative, and queer Americans can oppose civilian suffering in Gaza without endorsing Hamas.

What happened in Berlin this weekend highlighted the delusion inside the slogan Pride for Palestine. The movement only works if it can separate Palestinian civilians from Hamas and admit that the Islamist tradition cited by the designated terrorist organization is hostile to the freedoms Pride movements hope to defend. Too often, the movement has only done the first part.

The Collision Pride Could Not Ignore

The attack struck a Pride event and German authorities said the suspected motive was Islamist terrorism.

That combination turns an abstract debate into a concrete one: What happens when a movement organized around individual freedoms treats Palestinian “resistance” as an uncomplicated sister cause while avoiding the illiberal ideas carried by Hamas and other Islamist movements?

It must be made clear, given the apparent lack of proper education surrounding very specific terms: Hamas is not Palestine and Muslims are not Islamists. Palestinians are a people, Islam is a religion, Islamism is a political project and Hamas is a specific Palestinian Islamist movement. When those categories are collapsed, it produces bigotry in one direction and denial in the other.

M. Zuhdi Jasser, co-director of the CLARITy Coalition and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, framed that distinction as the central ideological issue.

“This is not a right-versus-left story,” Jasser said to Newsweek. “The conflict, as our CLARITy coalition has said for decades, is between universal human rights, individual rights and Islamism. Islamists are Muslim theocrats. They are misogynists, homophobic, against free speech and are for the killing of apostates.”

The question is whether Western progressives can defend Palestinians while speaking plainly about Hamas because, too often in Pride spaces, the language of liberation has slid from protecting civilians into romanticizing armed movements. Once Hamas is treated mainly as the armed expression of an oppressed people, its religious authoritarianism becomes an awkward footnote rather than a central fact.

Jasser was more direct about the ideological connection.

“Hamas is not a Palestinian liberation movement that happens to have retrograde views on gay people,” he said. “Anti-gay violence is native to the global Islamist ideology from Hamas to the IRGC, to ISIS and the Wahhabis, and every Islamist movement across the planet which radicalizes them.”

This further complicates the idea that Pride politics and Hamas-adjacent “resistance” politics can be fused without contradiction.

The Strongest Case for Pride for Palestine

Queer Palestinian activists have long argued that Israel and its supporters use LGBTQ rights to soften or distract from the treatment of Palestinians. Critics call that “pinkwashing,” and queer Palestinian voices have argued during the Gaza war that Israeli invocations of gay rights do not answer questions about occupation, bombardment, displacement or Palestinian deaths.

American activists have also put Palestinian solidarity inside Pride’s protest tradition. ACT UP New York, founded during the AIDS crisis, has worked with Jewish Voice for Peace and incorporated Gaza activism into Pride-season actions.

It argues that Pride began as a rebellion against state and police power, and that queer politics should therefore align with other people facing state violence.

A similar defense appears in the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights’ “Palestine as a Queer Struggle,” which quotes Ghaith Hilal of AIQaws, a Palestinian organization focused on LGBTQ+ rights, as saying, “You cannot have queer liberation while apartheid, patriarchy, capitalism and other oppressions exist,” and argues that queer and trans Palestinians face overlapping forms of oppression from occupation, militarism, patriarchy and anti-LGBTQ prejudice.

There is a coherent moral claim there. At its clearest, a gay man in Gaza may face homophobia inside Palestinian society and danger from Israeli military action. In that same vein, a Palestinian child is not responsible for Hamas and a Muslim American shouldn’t be asked for answers about ISIS.

All that being said, another fact needs to be pointed out: Hamas, ISIS and the Iranian regime are enemies of gay freedom and rights. Saying that is not anti-Palestinian or anti-Muslim or anti-anything; it’s just honesty required following an alleged Islamist attack at a Pride event.

“Solidarity with a people is not the same as deference to the armed faction that tyrannizes them, and confusing the two is how well-meaning Americans end up chanting for their own executioners,” said Jasser.

The problem with “Pride for Palestine” is not the concern for Palestinians. The problem is the occasional refusal to say which Palestinian forces are being defended, which are being excused and which must be opposed.

The AfD is Part of This Conversation

The far-right “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) belongs in this story because the Berlin attack goes beyond exposing a contradiction inside Pride for Palestine. It reveals those who are waiting to profit from that contradiction.

AfD has built much of its modern appeal on its claims that mainstream parties are afraid to speak honestly about Islam, immigration and public safety. A suspected Islamist attack on a Pride crowd gives the party exactly the example it needs.

The AfD can point to Berlin and argue that liberal Germany celebrated diversity while failing to protect the people gathered under its banners.

The AfD has not become a pro-Pride party. In fact, its tune has not really changed. Berlin has offered it a new arrangement.

The party presents Islam as a political-cultural threat while distinguishing individual Muslims who accept Germany’s constitutional order. Its 2025 program calls for tougher action against Islamism and migration, but also rejects gender identity politics and frames family around mother, father and children.

The AfD discusses with gay voters protection from Islamist violence while asking them to accept a party hostile to much of the contemporary LGBTQ+ agenda.

Alice Weidel, the party’s openly lesbian co-leader, makes that contradiction harder to dismiss and easier for the party to exploit: Her presence allows the AfD to say it is not anti-gay in any simple sense, though its platform, critics say, is no friend of Pride.

The Berlin attack gives the party a usable truth: Islamist anti-gay violence is real and some progressives remain reluctant to say so. If mainstream parties cannot separate criticism of Islamism from bigotry against Muslims, the AfD will do it for them in a cruder and more sweeping way.

For voters frightened by Islamist violence, that may be enough.

The American Lesson

The Berlin attack matters to American readers because the same fight is already happening inside U.S. Pride politics.

The United States is not Germany and American Muslims can’t be treated simply as ideological imports from Gaza, Tehran or Raqqa. It’s clear that American political culture changes immigrants as much as immigrants change American politics, but the coalition fight is something that’s happening on this side of the Atlantic as well.

Jasser argued that the issue should be understood in terms of individual liberty rather than party politics.

“The key is the defense of individual freedoms and the social contract which is the essence of the west that has prioritized the right of the individual over the rights of the tribe,” he noted.

The lesson from Berlin is not about choosing between Palestinians and Israelis. It is about whether liberal democracies can still make difficult moral distinctions: defending Palestinians without excusing Hamas, condemning Islamist violence without vilifying Muslims, and protecting LGBTQ+ rights without assuming every political ally shares those values.

Those distinctions have become politically uncomfortable, but abandoning them creates a vacuum—and history shows that vacuums rarely stay empty. When mainstream leaders appear unwilling to acknowledge uncomfortable realities, parties and movements at the political extremes step in with simpler, more absolute answers.

As Jasser put it, “You cannot treat a disease you refuse to name.”

That is Berlin’s warning for America.

If liberals keep treating Hamas as the one subject that Pride cannot name, the right will name it for them and might use the truth like a weapon.