Christmas Market in Germany Cancelled due to Islam

This is what i think too....

The true reason this year’s Christmas market has been cancelled in Overath is because of unaffordable expenses for mandatory anti-terror measures. Last year's deadly attack on a Christmas market in Germany was carried out by someone who was anti-Islam.

Germany’s alleged Christmas market attacker was steeped in far-right ideology.

Al-Abdulmohsen consistently expressed views inspired by the counter-jihad movement, a loose network of bloggers, thinktanks and organisations promoting anti-Muslim and often far-right ideas. He considered Islam to be a dangerous, violent and totalitarian ideology, not a religion. He described Muslims and Arabs as intellectually primitive, promoted conspiracy theories about the “Islamisation” of Europe and justified discrimination against Muslims.

He also supported international far-right figures promoting counter-jihad ideology, including Dutch politician Geert Wilders. In April 2019, he retweeted a post in which Wilders justified revoking Muslims’ freedom of religion. In 2020, he shared multiple tweets by Wilders that said “Stop Islam” or “Stop Muhammadanism”. In August 2024, he shared a post calling Wilders a “hero”.

...indiscriminate attacks by far-right perpetrators on German festivals are not unprecedented. In 1980, a far-right extremist attacked the Oktoberfest, killing 13. And in recent years, the alleged attacker increasingly directed his anger towards Germany, accusing the German state of supporting Islamist extremism while persecuting ex-Muslim asylum seekers.

This headline isn't accurate and the source is incorrect here--my group was just there in Overath very recently on a joint German-French mission team-up and the actual reason is much more prosaic, ie. just that Overath is right next door to Cologne that has a very large Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas market), one of the largest in Europe in fact, and it's redundant and costly to have a separate one in Overath when most residents of the city head to Cologne next door anyway. That's it, and really isn't anything new, it's a case by case and year by year decision for the smaller or medium sized towns, and in some cases here Overath has had its own festival while in other cases mostly deferring to Cologne or other neighboring cities, without doing a formal one of its own (although smaller decentralized markets still take place). And inflation and cost increases have been a general issue causing Christmas market adjustments and cancellations, including in the U.S.

We've been learning too of dozens of Christmas market cancellations all over the United States from our affiliate churches there mostly due to cost (and cost-of-living) and affordability challenges too. Yes, security does figure into such cost calculations--that's always a cost consideration for any festival, as law enforcement and private security need to be contracted (we're quite literally tackling this now for one of our own upcoming events. And we among other groups have been heavily involved (and lately seen historic success) in welcoming former Muslims into the church, who often come to us in fact as part of the process of embracing their new countries and their centuries of history, with roots in the church and the word of the Lord in the heart and soul of the society itself. On this particular point nevertheless, this really isn't the issue at all. Large open markets are always quite expensive to run, and not just due to security costs, and with Overath so close to Köln, it often makes little sense to hold a separate event, in this and in many previous years it just makes more sense to merge and hold the main event in Cologne.

And just to add a word to the wise on this to be wary of any news or information made from AI, and check all news sources carefully as some lean towards the sensationalist. This has come up with mission materials but too with any apparent news, even the better AI software unavoidably hallucinates by design. We recently averted a near fiasco with some outreach information we were posting as both print and online--the AI started out fine, but eventually began just making up addresses and apparent recent events out of thin air, in a way that was hard to catch. We barely did so (some other missions were not as lucky), and now have a strict no-AI use policy for all mission work or news updates. It's just too much of a hazard for inserting misinformation, something churches have been careful about for centuries with good reason, and one of our communications tech advisers advised us that the newer AI tech paradoxically gets worse on this. (The AI's take in more of what they put out before as they train, and start to break down in his description)

But they had the budget for Octoberfest I bet