Far-Right voices falsely blamed Muslims for Dortmund bus bombing

German police have charged a 28-year-old German-Russian national, identified as ‘Sergej V.’, on suspicion of carrying out the attack on the Borussia Dortmund football team on 11 April.

Three explosives were detonated that evening as the team was en-route to the home stadium, resulting in wounds to one player and a policeman who had been escorting the bus.

As news of the attack broke around the world anti-Muslim activists were quick to pounce and spread unsubstantiated rumors that the perpetrator was Muslim. Based on no evidence whatsoever they took to social media to spread their prejudiced assumptions.

However, it has now emerged that rather than being an Islamist the attacker’s intention was likely to lower the club’s share value, so as to profit from options on the club’s stock which he had purchased prior to the attack.

While letters suggesting the attacks had an Islamist motive were found at the site of the attack, their authenticity was doubted by state prosecutors; doubts that anti-Muslim activists willfully ignored.

Paul Joseph Watson, the British-based vlogger and editor-at-large for US fake news and conspiracy site InfoWars, tweeted the following tying the attacks to Islamic refugees:

Leave.EU, whose founder Arron Banks was a major UKIP donor and is a current general election candidate for Clacton, shared the following image clearly attempting to maintain the attack had an association to Islam:

Similarly, Pamela Geller, a leading American anti-Muslim activist, predictably leapt on the attack and published a fake-news story titled ‘Jihad link to football team bus bombing: “In the name of Allah”’.

It opened:

“In case you missed the bombing in Dortmund, and if you aren’t reading Geller Report, you missed it because the enemedia censors, whitewashes, and under reports acts of jihad terror and Islamic attacks.”

Meanwhile the leading ‘counter-jihad’ website Gates of Vienna offered a conspiratorial explanation for the attacks, positing that they could have been an “elaborate false flag operation […] designed to revive the flagging fortunes of the CDU” (Chancellor Merkel’s party) and to justify a crackdown on the anti-Muslim AfD party.

These are just a few examples of the many available and offer a valuable insight into the modus operani of the anti-Muslim movement. They presume based on prejudice first and have a willful disregard of contradictory evidence. These activists are driven by a desire to attack Muslims not by the truth.