Here we go again – but this time, Je suis Berlin

Well the year isn’t finished, but thanks to what looks to be the combination of the world’s most peaceable religion, a truck and a temptingly bustling Christmas market in Berlin I’m going to have reprise my most frequently written piece of recent years. So here we go again.

On Monday night a truck was driven into a busy pedestrian area in Berlin. In the immediate aftermath the media were understandably wary. It could be a Glasgow-like accident or it could be a deliberate act. Struggling with this conundrum the BBC plumped for ‘Lorry kills nine at Christmas market.’ Naughty lorry.

To date the attack still doesn’t have a hashtag that’s stuck. There was an early push for ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’, but for some reason it didn’t catch. Perhaps it would be better to simply add Berlin to that growing list of cities we are meant to urge other people to ‘pray’ for (Paris, Brussels, Paris again, Orlando, etc, etc.)?

Happily for some, there was a glimmer of hope on Monday night when it transpired that the guilty truck had a Polish number plate and a Polish registered driver. But then it turned out that the Polish truck appeared to have been hijacked and the driver was lying dead in the truck with a bullet wound to the head among other mortal injuries so he couldn’t easily be blamed. You almost felt bad for all the ‘anti-fascist’ groups gearing up to blame all Poles, white people in general or perhaps Donald Trump supporters in particular for their nascent racism, poor driving and the like. Alas they had to look away. For it soon appeared that the suspect was a Pakistani migrant who arrived in Germany last year.