The recent terror attack on Berlin’s pride parade highlights anti-LGBTQ+ hate within Islamist extremism.

In its coverage of the attack, Deutsche Welle (DW) interviewed ISD’s Jakob Guhl, who explained that the LGBTQ+ community is not a surprising target.

“The ideology is deeply homophobic and hostile to the queer community. The ‘Islamic State’ terror group, when it held territory in its so-called caliphate, executed people it accused of homosexuality.”

Jakob also noted the connections between far-right extremist movements and Islamist extremism, as the ideologies strengthen each other and profit from one another.

“In the view of the Islamist extremists, right-wing extremists are representative of Germans as a whole, and on the other hand the right-wing extremists say that Islamist extremists essentially represent Muslims,” Guhl said. “There is an attempt to split society into two camps.”

DW highlighted a 2018 ISD-Germany in a 2018 study, in which Jakob and others described how both ideologies promote social divisions that foster extremism.

The full article is available on DW.