Magdeburg, in Saxony-Anhalt, is the new scene of a massacre which, at the moment, involves 70 people (2 dead and 68 injured) hit by a car which intentionally entered the Christmas market area to sow death and pain. The attacker was identified as a fifty-year-old of Saudi origins, Taleb Jawad Hussein al Abdulmohsen, who, at the end of the criminal action, stopped the vehicle to go down to the street and kneel down.
It's difficult to get more news, difficult to understand more about someone in these first hours after the tragedy. According to what emerges from social media, it even seems that the attacker, an atheist, accuses Germany of wanting to “Islamise Europe”, not sufficiently opposing the Wahhabism of Saudi Islam. Therefore a terrorist action which would be an expression not of jihadism, but of an obscure “Saudi liberal opposition”. Whatever one thinks on the basis of this fragmentary and provisional information, the fact remains that the gesture follows a script already seen many times in this first part of the century and which raises tormented but inevitable questions.
Cultural issues: the West refuses to address the hatred that pervades many sectors of fundamentalism towards what the West itself is, towards what the West advocates as values and self-definition. Joseph Ratzinger often repeated that the greatest risk that the European continent would run in the new century would be that of a conflict between opposing extremisms: the extremism of culture wokewhich exasperates the founding values of Europe for a barbaric crusade to exterminate everything that is identity and religious, against the extremism of religions, Islamic and not only, which despises those values and considers them an impious degradation of humanity and faith .
Radical Islam, and if the hypotheses were confirmed, even its fanatical enemies, attack to condemn, attack to make us atone, attack to redeem us. In the eyes of these men, the citizens of Magdeburg are a symbol, they have no stories or friends, they have no desires or families: their death is a sign of purification and a powerful call to conversion. Ignoring this cultural issue, as has been happening systematically for two decades, means not recognizing the problem, ignoring that two opposing hatreds, that of the fanatics who tear down the statues of Columbus and those of the fanatics who destroy families at the Christmas markets, incriminate what we are and we have laboriously built this in almost three millennia of civilization.
All this leads to a question of political order: attacks like the one in question exasperate the perception of a fragile and impotent democracy, incapable of defending its citizens and of mobilizing so that these phenomena are eradicated at the root. They therefore fuel the idea and suggestion of quick, thoughtless solutions, the result of indiscriminate condemnations of Islam and immigration. Therefore short-sighted solutions, devoid of perspective and planning. One could say, with a chilling slogan, that we are faced with gestures of extremism that ignite reactions from extremists and which increasingly put into suffering the popular and social democratic traditions of the continent that guided the long season of peace after the Second World War .
Finally there is a human question that has its roots in the solitude in which the continent drowns. We are incapable of being together, of doing things together, of building pieces of life together, whether they are called “marriage” or “party”, “school” or “association”: our social dimension is compromised by a world that has become Like this on demand who no longer understands the meaning of limits, of rules, of the presence of the other's face as a barrier to my selfishness and my greed. The terrorists find themselves faced with a void, they no longer encounter civilization, bonds, a strong desire for the common good. They themselves perhaps partly grew up in such a context, a set of ideas and thoughts that cannot compete with the true strength of all fundamentalism: the promise of good through belonging. “If you are one of us, if you defend our ideal, then your life will be less alone, better, saved”. Christianity has always called belonging with a revolutionary name: communion, that is, the bond that each person has not with the others who belong to the community, but with He who is the founding and living presence of that community.
Tam Pater nemo, Maximus the Confessor said, “no one is as father as God”. Because He is not a prophet who founds a society with the task of conquering the world, He is a Father who guides forever – as the Risen One – a community capable of reaching the borders of every land, where land, in the biblical world, is human desire. It is by loving that one converts, it is by loving that one purifies oneself, it is by loving that one redeems oneself. The West is a place without love, where the seeds of a hatred take root that generates more hatred and which – just as Ratzinger said – can lead to nothing but destruction.
What can we do when faced with the crazy devastation of a street market in Magdeburg? Going back to living together, doing things together, building bonds and not ideas, relationships and not feelings. Giving life to a web of relationships which, like a net on a football pitch, manages to block every malicious shot it receives. Even the senseless one of a man who believes he can change the world by killing the stories that inhabit it. Just before Christmas, just a moment before celebrating the only reason we have – that baby in Bethlehem – to stop believing that anger is the fuel for freedom.
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