The Citizens’ Pride Association, which advocates for the defense of republican, universalist, and secular values, calls not to euphemize the breeding ground of the deadly anti-LGBT attack that targeted Berlin’s Pride on July 25.
Berlin, July 25, 2026. A van mowed down the crowd of Christopher Street Day, which gathered hundreds of thousands of people near the Brandenburg Gate, killing a 65-year-old woman and injuring dozens. This date will be etched in our memories, when the celebration of love and liberty abruptly ended in fear and blood.
Once again, we want to tell our LGBT+ brothers and sisters in Germany and their loved ones that we are thinking of them, and that our full support is theirs to draw on to weather this sorrow and pain that we share.
From the outset, we must name the evil: this is an Islamist and LGBT-phobic attack, as there have unfortunately been many others. The hatred of sexual and gender minorities on religious grounds is not new, and we know that it is particularly virulent among those who promote radical Islam.
We cannot close our eyes or indulge in euphemisms in the face of this deadly danger, which has claimed lives, continues to claim lives today, and which, without a wake-up call, will tomorrow claim more victims, in France as well as, even more so, in many Muslim-majority countries where LGBT+ people are among the most persecuted in the world.
Our responsibility is to face the evil head-on. Too many of us refuse to name it for fear of appropriation, or even cowardice. The fight against homophobia and transphobia that erupt on religious grounds must not be a blind spot in our battles, nor be abandoned to those who instrumentalize them for the benefit of a xenophobic agenda. The far right mobilizes for our rights only when the hatred comes from a Muslim or an immigrant. Do not give them a monopoly on reality.
This fight, we must wage with determination, by rallying all those who believe in our republican model, in our society’s ability to secularize, and in France’s emancipatory dynamic.
Our greatest asset is secularism: the bulwark that, without any wavering, forbids any religious norm from decreeing who we have the right to be and who we have the right to love. The same secularism protects as much the person who loves freely as the one who decides to leave their faith. It is our best weapon against all obscurantisms, whether one has faith or not, LGBT+ or not.
And to Muslims, more particularly, we say: do not be afraid. Stand by our side against this evil that claims to speak in your name: we will fight it together. Silence is poison; only our solidarity with all the people hatred designates—the LGBT+ people, the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities, those who believe as well as those who do not believe, up to those who have left the faith—will hold this evil at bay. Naming it, yielding nothing, never turning away our eyes: it is at this price that we will remain free.
