As someone who studies terrorism and religion, I approach each Christmas with dread due to the possibility of terrorist attacks around the holiday. A string of bombings hit churches in Indonesia and the Philippines in 2000, killing over 40. In 2016, someone drove a truck through a Christmas market in Berlin, killing a dozen. And just a few weeks ago, German police foiled an attempted attack on a Bavarian Christmas market.

Each of these involved Islamist extremists, either organized through al-Qaeda or ISIS or lone radicalized individuals. While we rarely got a full manifesto, it is reasonable to assume these attacks were intended to sow fear among what the extremists saw as their religious enemies.

The identity of the perpetrator changes the usual threat analysis for these attacks.

Like many, that is where my mind went when the news came of the latest attack, this one on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany. Despite heightened security around such markets, he managed to drive his car into the crowd, killing 5.

But then we learned more about the perpetrator. He was a Saudi man who was granted asylum in Germany ten years ago, working as a doctor. He apparently renounced Islam, and has been actively campaigning against what he sees as the threat of Islamism. This includes criticizing Germany for not doing enough to prevent the “Islamization” of Europe, and supporting the far right Alternative for Germany party.

This obviously changes the threat analysis. The attack was not extremist anger at Christian religious beliefs, it seems like a punishment for Germany’s relatively open approach to Muslim refugees. And it fits the call of terrorism experts like Sean Everton to not conflate white supremacy with far right extremism.

The question moving forward is whether this is an aberration, or the model for future attacks.

The German government also dropped the ball, and that requires further investigation. How did someone get a car into the market? There should have been physical barriers in place to at least slow it down, and give the crowd a chance to disperse. Beyond that, Germany had received warnings from Saudi Arabia that the perpetrator was a threat and he had made violent statements before that. There should have been surveillance.

The question moving forward is whether this is an aberration, or the model for future attacks. The perpetrator seems a little unhinged, even for a terrorist, so this may be a one-off event. But I’m not so sure. As I’ve written here before, the seemingly disconnected right-wing terrorist attacks the world has been experiencing feel like they’re cohering into a real campaign. All it will take is someone to organize these disparate extremists into a terrifying movement. Meanwhile, governments are struggling to make sense of this new threat, as seen in the German government’s fumble.

Moving forward, these bursts of right-wing terror may become the norm.