When news broke late yesterday of a terror attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, no doubt many assumed that this would be another Islamist perpetrator. Earlier attacks by Islamists had focused on Christmas markets, and other attacks had also used cars to kill bystanders and pedestrians. Given the sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents over the past 14 months in Europe and the US, it seemed natural to assume this attack would fit the same pattern.
Except that it didn’t. Police arrested the 50-year-old perp on the scene where at least five people were murdered and over 200 injured, and he indeed turned out to be a well-known activist-turned-terrorist — but maybe not in the way one might expect, as the Wall Street Journal reported this morning:
Yet the suspect’s profile that began to emerge hours after the drama painted a surprising…
