No discernible shift among progressive LGBT activists, groups on Islamist threat after Berlin attack, experts say

In June, participants at a Pride event in San Francisco told Scott Wiener, a Jewish California Democratic state senator, that he has “been terrible on Gaza” and that he “stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel.” They did so even though the politician, who is gay, as accused Israel of commiting “genocide.”

Weeks later, an Islamist attacker killed a woman and injured 29 people at a Berlin Pride event. Officials have identified the attacker as Abdul Ballout, a German citizen of Lebanese descent who officials say tried to join ISIS and published terror propaganda on social media. Police shot and killed Ballout.

Experts told JNS there doesn’t seem to be a shift since the attack in the ways that progressive LGBT activists and groups view the threat of Islamism.

“Maybe individuals, but publicly not at all,” Deborah Lipstadt, a former U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat Jew-hatred and current Dorot professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, told JNS.

“There’s long been what scholars call and analysts call a ‘red-green alliance,’ an alliance between the Muslim world (green) and the far-left (red) world,” she said.

“They agree on nothing,” she told JNS. “Think about it. Feminism, type of government, economy. But the one thing on which they march in lockstep is Jew-hatred” and “hostility and opposition to Israel as a Jewish state.”

“It’s an absurd coalition but a very dangerous one,” she said. “It reeks with self-righteousness and a sense of shared victimhood.”

JNS asked Lipstadt what it would take for there to be a shift. She said that she thinks back to how both “Islamist jihadists” and the “Iranian liberal left” welcomed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s return to Iran in 1979.

“They were sure that with the arrival of the ayatollah, in fact he promised them as such, there would be freedom and liberty the way there wasn’t under the shah,” she told JNS. “Look who they’re murdering on the streets now. Look who they’re hanging.”

“At the very, very most generous, I would say the naivete of the LGBTQ community is astounding,” Lipstadt said.

Luke Moon, a visiting fellow for the Heritage Foundation’s national security and foreign policy institute, told JNS that he has observed “the shifting of blame leaning into the same old-school white supremacy trope” and people saying “this is not what Islam is.”

“The problem is, I think they’re just too committed to the ideology,” he said. “It could take a bunch more of these kinds of things” before there is a change, he added.

David May, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JNS that the organizers of the Pride parade in Berlin “specifically called out Islamist terror following the deadly attack.”

“But this is rare among LGBTQ groups, which have largely avoided calling out homophobia within Muslim communities, reluctant to challenge seemingly oppressed groups or to fracture coalition unity,” he said. “Left-wing activists have adhered to an intersectionality framework, which maintains that all injustice is interconnected.”

“This framework prioritizes certain perceived injustices over others,” May told JNS. “LGBTQ rights take a back seat to the Palestinian cause.”

According to May, the “pro-Palestinian union” between Islamists and the far Left has “relied on obfuscating the truth about homophobia among Palestinians, or on subordinating gay rights to Palestinian advocacy.”

“This was evident in 2025, when pro-Palestinian demonstrators shut down Ottawa’s Pride march rather than allow Jewish and pro-Israel participants to join,” he told JNS.

Max Abrahms, associate professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston, also told JNS that no minds have changed after the attack.

“So-called ‘progressive’ groups which claim to value inclusion, tolerance and liberalism uncritically back Islamist extremists who hate them and their values,” according to Abrahms, who studies terrorism and the Middle East.

“Meanwhile, Jews led the civil rights movement and the minority groups Jews elevated led the global intifada against them after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led terrorist massacre,” he told JNS. “This is why many Jews who traditionally voted Democrat turned to Trump in the last election.”

Alfonso Pantisano, the inaugural queer commissioner of the Berlin state government,” said during a July 28 appearance on the news program “Democracy Now!” that there is “a huge problem worldwide with radical Islamistic groups” and “a huge problem with religions in general, who do not accept queer life at all, some more, some less.”

“At the same time, we have to look at how political parties and how governments are now destroying everything that we, as a queer community for decades and decades, have fought for in order to be treated equally,” he said. “The far Right here in Germany is of course waiting for an attack like this one to use it in order to highlight that the foreigners are the problem.”

“By doing so, they completely forget, and avoid to look at, how much queerphobia there is in this country in all various levels of structures, in schools, at the workplace, in churches, on the streets, in sports and in so many other places,” Pantisano said.

Moon told JNS that Pantisano’s comments were “very on-brand.”

He cited a recent instance, in which the website for a Muslim congressional candidate running in Washington omitted references to her support for LGBT rights out of concern that they would alienate the Muslim community.

“She’s like, ‘Yeah, but it’s OK because we’re on the same side’ kind of thing,” he said. “They’re compartmentalizing these issues for sure.”

Lipstadt told JNS that Pantisano should have stopped after his “absolutely correct” remarks on Islamic extremism and religion.

“There’s no need to qualify it,” she said. “Yes there’s a problem on the Right. Yes we know there are those who want to take away hard-won rights in this country and other countries, but the attack should be seen as an attack.”

“There’s no ‘but’ after gender-based violence. There’s no ‘but’ after rapes. There’s no ‘but’ after driving a car into a demonstration,” Lipstadt told JNS. “The minute you add that ‘but,’ you’re qualifying it. There is no ‘but’ after that kind of violence.”

A social media account under the pseudonym “the saviour,” whom the Jewish Chronicle identified as Josh Kent-Smith, posted a meme in response to the Berlin attack suggesting that Israel is behind Islamic extremist terror.

May, of FDD, told JNS that “some have promoted conspiracy theories blaming Israel for the Berlin attack.”

“Leading human rights groups have sold a narrative of boundless Israeli evil, so it is unsurprising that crackpots would engage in their own perversions to vilify Israel,” he said.

Lipstadt told JNS that “they’re blaming Israel for the Berlin attack.”

“They’re blaming Israel for the 65,000 people who tried to make it into Spain. They blamed Israel for 9/11. They blamed Bondi Beach on Israel. Give me a break,” she said. “There’s no end to the matter of what can be blamed on Israel.”

Moon told JNS that “Israel is the ultimate scapegoat always.”

“There’s so many ridiculous things that Israel gets blamed for that obviously have nothing to do with Israel, but honestly it’s pure laziness on the part of these people talking like that,” he said.

Get the latest updates in our WhatsApp group.

Test yourself on one question pulled from JNS reporting. New puzzles daily.