Shooting in Munich Shopping Center

[Peter Lemkin]

Now said at least three gunmen wearing masks, at least six dead so far. All three gunman reported to be on the loose, so all transport in city stopped - helicopters with sharpshooters over city. Police asking all persons to stay indoors and not leave or enter entire city center; also not to take mobile phone images of police actions.....things ongoing with three suspects on the loose with high powered weapons. No mention of number of injured yet, but TV images of bodies lying outside of the Mall in the street can be seen on any news station now. How iconic - the shooting started at a McDonalds and then moved to a Shopping Mall.

...these sort of things are becoming as common as the U.K. rains.....

[Tracy Riddle]

What's dismaying is that here in the US, a lot of people instantly rush to judgment and scream "ISLAMIC RADICALISM!" before they even know what happened. It doesn't even matter to them what really happened; it's only the political narrative, the constant drumbeat of TERROR TERROR TERROR, that counts.

[Peter Lemkin]

As it now turns out [apparently], there was but one man with a gun and he killed himself after he killed ten and wounded about twenty. There were no others and none had gotten away. He was not wearing a mask as reported. He seems to have been an 18 year old German-Iranian man. Little more has yet been reported about him. The lockdown of Munich was unnecessary. That said, ten innocent lives is a very sad event indeed.

Yes, the reflex reaction created by all the propaganda now is to assume 'Islamoterrorism' even before any investigation is done. Never does anyone except we on the 'fringe' ever think along the lines of people who may have in some way be instigated or led by intelligence/police/investigative/government authorities/entities to commit such acts - or of being just mentally unbalanced - or having other issues.

[David Guyatt]

As it now turns out [apparently], there was but one man with a gun and he killed himself after he killed ten and wounded about twenty. There were no others and none had gotten away. He was not wearing a mask as reported. He seems to have been an 18 year old German-Iranian man. Little more has yet been reported about him. The lockdown of Munich was unnecessary. That said, ten innocent lives is a very sad event indeed.

Yes, the reflex reaction created by all the propaganda now is to assume 'Islamoterrorism' even before any investigation is done. Never does anyone except we on the 'fringe' ever think along the lines of people who may have in some way be instigated or led by intelligence/police/investigative/government authorities/entities to commit such acts - or of being just mentally unbalanced - or having other issues.

Another dead perp. Another case of no trial, no questions.

Charlie Hedbo has a lot to answer for.

[Peter Lemkin]

Weird! The Munich Police just gave a press conference. The 18 year old had been treated in the past for depression and currently undergoing psychiatric treatment [won't look good for his doctor...]. He was a 'student' of mass shootings, with a library about all the major ones. He used only a Glock pistol for the shootings. He put a Facebook invitation to come to McDonalds for free food as a trap. He chose the day to 'commemorate' the 5th anniversary of the Breivik shootings in Norway. He acted alone and had zero interest in IS or any similar philosophy. He committed suicide when the police approached. His parents, whom he lived with have not yet been questioned out of respect for their loss. His computer has been seized, but not yet analyzed. Sadly, he seems to have been a very troubled youth who idolized Breivik.

[Magda Hassan]

DW media are saying he may have recently converted to Christianity. Which is doing nothing for the 'he's a Muslim terrorist!' set because he was heard saying Allahuakhba. Which means nothing really as people revert to their first language when stressed. I remember the Cantor at the synagogue one high holiday nearly dropped the Torah and exclaimed 'Jesus Christ!' No one accused him of being Christian though.

[Peter Lemkin]

Not sure about his religious 'identity', but it seems not to have played any part in this. However, we never hear of Christo-terrorists when Christians commit mass murder! Most Iranians are Muslim [not all], but they are NOT Arabs. The police say they have yet to interview the parents [giving them a few days to grieve - something that would never happen in the USA..]. His fascination seems to have been with mass killing events, and he is reported to have had a library of them in his room. He was seeing a psychiatrist [who is going to be in deep trouble for not warning of this, even though German law strictly forbids telling anything about patients]. The Police have hinted that the issue of mass killings was likely one of the topics the therapy focused upon. He did not have legal right to buy nor have the pistol nor ammunition and one wonders in Germany, with such tight control of guns and ammo, how he got it, when he got it, and how his parents, who he lived with, didn't know...or did they? Anyway, the MSM in the US and even in Europe to a lesser extent will spin this as they prefer - rather than follow the apparent facts (if the police reports are correct). It seems he was obsessed with the Breivik killings in Norway and chose the exact 5th anniversary for his own small version - if what we are told by the police is true [that they found lots of material on the Norway killings in his room]. He was not an immigrant, and he grew up with a self-identity of a German. His parents had come from Iran in the 1990s and were given asylum in Germany.

Ali David Sonboly, 18, launched his killing spree in the Bavarian city in an apparent revenge attack for being bullied. It is now thought he targeted youngsters of "Turkish and Arab" origin, having claimed those groups had picked on him in school.
Sonboly, who killed himself at the end of the attack, had set up a fake Facebook account using the identity of a pretty teenage girl.
Using the name "Selina Akim", Sonboly posted a message hours before the attack saying: "Come today at four o'clock to McDonald's at OEZ [shopping centre]. I am giving away anything you want as long as it's not too expensive."

Among those he murdered were a group of four children aged 14 and 15 who were mown down at the table where they were eating.
The teenage friends comprised two boys of Turkish origin and two girls from Kosovan families, bolstering the theory that Sonboly chose his victims as he rampaged through McDonald's and into a busy shopping centre. In all, seven of his victims were teenagers and the oldest was a 45-year-old mother of two of Turkish descent.

The massacre in Munich took place on the fifth anniversary of the Norway attacks and Sonboly had recently changed a profile picture on an online messaging service to one of Breivik.
Sonboly also had documents relating to a gun attack on a school in Bavaria in 2009 in which 16 teenagers were killed as well as a book called Why Kids Kill: Inside The Minds of School Shooters.
On the day of the attack, according to the newspaper Bild, Sonboly told associates via a computer game message: "Come to the McDonald's and I will come and get you and shoot you."

The German-Iranian student lived comfortably in a fifth-floor apartment in the middle class Munich suburb of Maxvorstad with his parents, one of them a taxi driver and the other a department store worker.
Thomas De Maziere, the German interior minister, said Sonboly's parents were asylum-seekers from Iran who came to Germany in the late 1990s.

[Magda Hassan]

Interesting analysis. Via Facebook Alex Shams (Iranian born living in UK)

It appears that David Ali Sonboly, the German boy of Iranian heritage who killed 10 people in Munich yesterday, was influenced by the writings of right-wing, Islamophobic European extremists and was distinctly full of hate toward immigrants in general and Turks in particular.

Of the nine people he killed, three were Turks, three were Kosovans, and one was Greek. It appears he was specifically targeting Muslims and immigrants.
Many are now asking how a child of Iranian immigrants could have become infatuated with people like Anders Breivik, a right-wing Christian extremist who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011 in a terror attack targeting "multiculturalism."
Some Iranians - particularly in the Diaspora - subscribe to the "Aryan" racial theory promoted by European thinkers in the earlier 20th century. This combines with their dislike for their own government - which too often translates into rabid Islamophobia, as they are unable to distinguish between the actions of the Iranian government and Islam as a whole - to emerge into a disgusting mix of pseudo-scientific racial ideology that sees "Iranians" as "Aryan brothers."
Adopting this weird ideology is fundamentally an attempt by Iranians in the Diaspora assimilate, to distinguish themselves from other immigrants by claiming to be as close to Europe and Whiteness as possible. It is pathetic, stupid, and all-too-common in late-night chatboards frequented by depressed 18-year-old Iranians in Diaspora, i.e. people like David Sonboly.
Although it was largely abandoned in Europe after being put to use by Hitler in the Holocaust, in Iran (and India) the idea that Indians, Iranians, and Europeans shared a genetic Aryan lineage and that this lineage distinguished them from "mongrel" Turks, Arabs, and "Muslims" as a category more broadly still holds certain sway.
Right-wing European extremism intersects perfectly with this Aryanist theory - popular among young, diasporic Iranian men who spend too much time trolling people on the internet - in its flagrant and violent Islamophobia, where hatred for Islam, for Arabs, for Turks, and for all others who don't fit into the "Aryan theory" all come together in a disgustingly racist maelstrom.
This is a wake up call for the Iranian diaspora: ENOUGH with these bullshit pseudo-scientific racialist theories, ENOUGH with this Islamophobia disguised as critique of the Iranian government, ENOUGH with these attempts to assimilate by aiming to prove our whiteness by all means possible.

[Drew Phipps]

Kind of reminiscent of the right-wing attitude of both the expatriate White Russian community, and the Cuban exiles in the 60's, both of whom were displaced by leftist coups. The Iranian "exiles" were also displaced, but by Islamic fundamentalists.

[Magda Hassan]

Well, this is interesting...