The Wrong Extremism

A gunman opened fire near the Olympia shopping mall. Nine people died. And in the hours before anyone knew a name, the city's nervous system had already filled in the story — the same story it had been rehearsing all summer. Paris. Nice, thirteen days earlier. Brussels. The template was loaded and waiting: this is what they do to us now. Police chased phantom reports of multiple attackers. Commentators reached for the word that had become reflex. Everyone knew what they were looking at before they looked.

They were looking at David Sonboly. Eighteen. Born in Munich to Iranian parents. And what he actually believed turned the reflex inside out. He admired Hitler, claimed kinship with the "Aryan race," wrote anti-Turkish messages, and timed his attack to the fifth anniversary — to the day — of Anders Breivik's massacre in Norway. Seven of his nine victims were Muslim. Most had immigrant backgrounds: Turkish, Roma, Sinti, Kosovan, Greek. He had not come to wage the war everyone was watching for. He had come to hunt the people that war's imagined enemy is supposed to threaten.

Here is the mirror, and it is not flattering. The recognition machinery failed twice, in opposite directions, and both failures ran on the same wiring.

First it failed the crowd. A name like Sonboly, a mall, gunfire in the summer of 2016 — the pattern-matcher fired instantly, confidently, and wrong. Not because people are stupid. Because that is what pattern-matchers do: they resolve ambiguity fast by reaching for the most available script, and the most available script that season had a specific shape and a specific villain. The facts had not arrived yet. The story had.

Then it failed the professionals — and here the case fights back against my own argument, which is exactly where it gets interesting. For three years, German authorities filed the attack as an Amoklauf — a rampage. A troubled kid, bullied, obsessed with school shooters. Apolitical. Just sick. And that reading was not baseless: Sonboly was genuinely a hybrid. The racist, anti-immigrant ideology was real, but so was the Columbine fixation, so was the profile of the bullied, grievance-soaked loner. His was not a clean far-right attack that dim officials simply refused to label. It was a mixed one. But that cuts deeper than a tidy story of ignored evidence, because the template does not need a shortage of information to win. It needs ambiguity — and then it resolves the ambiguity in its own favor. A far-right terrorist is supposed to look a certain way, and a bullied teenager with an Iranian surname and a school-shooter obsession offered the classifiers just enough noise to file the far-right signal under "rampage" and keep it there. It took until 2019 for the official label to catch up to the political half of the evidence. The mixedness was not the template's obstacle. It was the template's opening.

That is the uncomfortable part. We tell ourselves our fear is a response to reality — that we brace for what is actually dangerous. Munich shows the bracing runs first, ahead of the facts, and then bends the facts to fit. We did not misjudge Sonboly because we lacked evidence. We misjudged him because we had already decided what danger's face looks like, and his did not match — first too much, then not enough.

The extremism was real. Nine people are dead of it. But it wore the wrong costume for our expectations, and so the machinery that is supposed to protect us by seeing clearly did the opposite: it saw what it expected, both times, and mistook that for knowledge.

And notice that these templates are not neutral wiring. The Islamist-terror script was loaded and waiting that summer because media and political systems with their own interests had spent years rehearsing it — foregrounding it, giving it a face, keeping it one headline from the front of every mind. The far-right script was under-installed for exactly the same reason, running in reverse: institutions slower to see it, slower to name it, slower to file it. A pattern-matcher reaches for the most available script — but availability is manufactured. Someone benefits from which monster the public is primed to see, and someone pays for which one it is trained to overlook. The reflex feels like nature. Its shape is politics.

You do this too. Not about terrorism, probably. About the coworker whose tone you have already interpreted, the stranger whose intentions you have already assigned, the argument you have already narrated before it finished happening. The Munich reflex is only the civic-scale version of the thing your nervous system does every day — resolve the unknown into the familiar, fast, and mistake the speed for accuracy. The difference is that at civic scale, someone chooses which familiar you reach for.

The threat was never that we would fail to see a monster. It is that we are so certain we already know its face.