In Berlin and New York City: Three attacks, one ideology

I know this ideology by its footsteps. I’ve heard it in the “boos” aimed at a group of Jews marching at World Pride. I’ve felt it in the friendships that quietly ended once I refused to stop being a Zionist.

So when the same ideology showed its face three times in one week, on two continents, I didn’t need convincing. What I needed was for the rest of us, especially my own community, to finally say its name.

Here’s what happened, in order: On July 23, on New York City’s Upper West Side, a man named Raul Morales allegedly stabbed a 57-year-old man from behind while shouting, Allahu Akbar. Then, Morales stabbed a 50-year-old Jewish man in the chest with a screwdriver as the man left synagogue in his kippah, with Morales shouting: “Justice for Islam.” Morales is now charged with attempted murder and hate crimes.

Two days later, in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, a pro-Palestinian rally called “Internationalist Queer Pride for Liberation” drew about 10,000 people and collapsed into clashes that injured 17 police officers and led to 57 arrests. A few kilometers away that same night, at the city’s main Pride celebration, a van rammed into the crowd, and the driver then attacked those nearby with a machete. One woman is dead, and 29 people are injured. Germany’s interior minister called it exactly what it was: an Islamist terrorist attack.

My condolences go out to every victim in both cities. What happened was terrorism, plain and simple, and deserves to be named as such without hedging.

Read separately, these are three news items a week apart. Read together, they’re one ideology showing up three times in seven days: against a Jewish man leaving synagogue, against gay people celebrating and as antisemitic hostility marching under a banner of “liberation.”

Kreuzberg wasn’t a one-off. “Queers for Palestine” disruptions have become nearly routine at Pride events across the West: These activists blocked New York City’s march in 2024, shut down the one in St. Louis, halted Philadelphia’s and got Ottawa’s canceled outright in 2025. Berlin was the same pattern, arriving the same weekend an Islamist terrorist attacked the Pride march a few blocks away.

What struck me most wasn’t the attack itself. It was what came after: how Berlin’s own LGBTQ institutions responded. CSD Berlin, which runs the parade, asked the public not to let the attack be “instrumentalized for political ends.” LSVD+, Germany’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group, said only that the community was “simply stunned.” Neither said the word “Islamism.”

Jewish readers will recognize that language: Don’t generalize, don’t inflame, don’t let this reflect on anyone but the individual attacker. We watched the same reflex in New York that same week, when the New York City Police Department’s first statement mentioned only that “mental health may have been a factor” before hate-crime charges followed once the evidence became impossible to ignore.

It went further at the vigil marking the Berlin attack, where one speaker, an LGBTQ+ activist, admitted to the crowd that her first instinct on hearing the news was to hope the attacker would turn out to be “not an Arab-Muslim, but a white Christian person.” Sit with that for a second. Not a hope the attack hadn’t happened; a hope it had come from someone else, someone who fit a tidier story. Jews know that instinct intimately.

None of this is a coincidence of rhetoric. In more than a dozen countries under Islamist law, being gay can mean prison or execution. In Hamas’s own worldview, Jews occupy a comparably central place as an enemy to be destroyed. These aren’t two unrelated hatreds that happen to travel together. In their Islamist form, they frequently share the same texts and the same movements, which is why they keep surfacing in the same cities on the same weekends.

Per the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s March 2026 monthly report, researchers tracked 767 antisemitic incidents worldwide that month—up 32.5% year over year: 19.8% Islamist-inspired, 57.5% far-left, 10.2% far-right. Other months saw Islamist-inspired and far-left incidents run nearly even. None of that erases far-right antisemitism, which is real and documented. But Islamist-inspired violence against Jews is one of the biggest drivers of antisemitic violence being tracked today in the same countries, sometimes the same cities, where LGBT people are attacked, too.

Per the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch project, nearly $80 million in federal Department of Health and Human Services funding flowed to 14 Islamist and terror-linked organizations, led by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. One recipient, ICNA Relief, has a president on record vowing the group will not “justify LGBT issues” and will say “no to those perverted attitudes.”

Organizations receiving taxpayer money have, in their own leaders’ words, embraced the same posture that animates violence like Berlin’s.

“Queers for Palestine” is not a contradiction to the people who march under that banner. It should be.

This is the same activist current that has drawn scrutiny in past years for excluding LGBTQ Israeli and Zionist symbols from its marches while welcoming Palestinian ones. It is a movement claiming the language of liberation while aligning with forces hostile to both Jews and gay people, on the very weekend an Islamist killed a member of their own community, two days after a man shouting support for the same cause stabbed a Jewish man leaving synagogue in New York.

I opened this piece by saying I know this ideology by its footsteps. Here is what I meant:

I was at World Pride in Washington, D.C., in 2024 when the group of Jewish people I was marching with was physically attacked, booed, and screamed at—simply for being visibly Jewish at an event meant to celebrate everyone. I documented it in real time, and it drew wide broadcast and print coverage. I’ve felt that same hostility marching with a Jewish contingent at NYC Pride in 2024 and 2025, and at Capital Pride in 2025.

I’ve faced verbal assaults and open hostility at LGBTQ conferences and events in different cities for being a Jew and a Zionist in spaces that claim to welcome everyone. I’ve lost most of the LGBTQ friends I once had, who have taken up an anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist stance I believe is deeply misguided, and who no longer see room in their activism for someone like me.

I share this not as a plea for sympathy but because it’s the clearest evidence I have that none of this is abstract. It’s what happens when a movement refuses to know the difference between criticizing a government and delegitimizing a people. It is the same failure of nerve that turned Kreuzberg and the Berlin Pride attack into one story instead of two.

I write all this as a gay man, a Jew and someone who has spent years building bridges between these two communities around shared values, not despite the fact that we’re both frequent targets of the same ideology but because of it.

Let’s be clear about where the responsibility actually lies: not with Jewish communities, which have spent decades naming antisemitism precisely, at real cost, while being told they were overreacting. The responsibility lies with the progressive left and LGBTQ institutions themselves: the ones who had every opportunity, in the immediate aftermath of an attack on their own people, to name Islamist extremism plainly, and to chose vague language about “division” and “instrumentalization” instead.

It lies with activist movements that march under the banner of “liberation” while aligning with an ideology that criminalizes the very people they claim to represent.

Recognizing a pattern is not the same as being responsible for it. Jewish communities have a right to point to what we recognize. We are not the ones who owe anyone an apology for staying silent.

What we can rightly ask for is this: That LGBTQ leadership hold itself to the same standard it asks of everyone else. That naming Islamist extremism after an Islamist attacks your own community not be treated as betrayal, but as basic honesty. And that the parts of the progressive left still marching as “Queers for Palestine” reckon with what it means to claim solidarity with a cause aligned against the very communities doing the marching.

Three attacks in one week, on two continents, were not a coincidence of timing. They were one ideology, showing its face. It is long past time for the people it targets, and the movements that claim to speak for them, to say so plainly.