(personal underlines)
JD Vance is right. Europe is in peril
On Wednesday evening, a man threw a fragmentation grenade into a café in Grenoble, leaving 15 people injured.
The following day, an Afghan shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ drove his car into a crowd in Munich and injured more than two dozen.
The previous week in Brussels, two men strolled through a metro station firing bursts from Kalashnikovs – one of several shootings that day in the Belgian capital, which wounded three people.
It is believed that Wednesday’s attack in Grenoble was the latest in the drugs war being fought across the country by rival cartels from North Africa. Last year, I described Grenoble as ‘one of the most dangerous places in France’, although there are other contenders.
Marseille, for example, where in the past two years scores of people have been killed by the cartels. Or Paris, where last month a 14-year-old boy was murdered for his phone.
Initially, some media reported that Elias had been stabbed with a knife after refusing to hand over his telephone to a 17-year-old. This week, his family issued a statement accusing the press agency that broke the story of misinformation. Their ‘terrified’ son had handed over his phone, but the mugger killed him anyway – not with a knife, but with a machete. ‘The real difficulty is to understand the society in which we now live,’ said the parents. ‘It is totally beyond our grasp.’
The steady disintegration of European society this century is beyond the grasp of most people. A minority remain in a state of denial, jabbering ad nauseam that diversity is Europe’s great strength.
Really? Tell that to the four people who were stabbed by an Egyptian in the Italian city of Rimini on New Year’s Eve, or the young women who were assaulted in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo on the same day. One of the women told reporters that the 40-strong mob of non-European men shouted ‘vaffanculo Italia’ (‘fuck off, Italy’) as they encircled their victims.
It is not just Italy that these people hate – it is the West in general. They are westernophobes.
Axel Rudakubana murdered three little girls in Southport last year and boasted to the police who arrested him that he was ‘so glad those kids are dead … it makes me happy.’
We are told that Rudakubana wasn’t an Islamist, and nor was Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, the Saudi who drove his car into a throng of Christmas shoppers in Magdeburg last December, killing six and injuring 300. In a message posted online prior to the attack, al-Abdulmohsen declared: ‘If Germany wants a war, we will fight it… If Germany wants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die, or go to prison with pride.’
It appears that he killed because he hated Germany, its people and their way of life.
The ISIS terror cell that massacred 130 Parisians in 2015 did so because they lived – in the words of the statement released by ISIS after the atrocity – in ‘the capital of abominations and perversion’. They targeted bars and a rock concert because they regarded them as emblems of Western decadence.
A month after the Paris attack, in Cologne, scores of women celebrating the new year were assaulted by men who had recently arrived in Germany after Angela Merkel’s open invitation.
For some of these men, German women were worthless – an attitude shared by the Pakistani men in England who for decades have raped and abused white girls and women because they considered them ‘trash’.
In response to this week’s attack in Munich, Alice Weidel, leader of the AfD, asked: ‘Will this go on forever?’
There is certainly an air of resignation among some European leaders. In one bloody week in October 2023, an Islamist murdered a French school teacher in Arras, and another gunned down two Swedes in Brussels. Emmanuel Macron responded by declaring: ‘All European states are vulnerable … It’s the vulnerability that goes with democracies, states governed by the rule of law, where you have individuals who, at some point, may decide to commit the worst.’
But hasn’t this vulnerability been exacerbated dramatically by a continent that has given up controlling its borders?
It was certainly a defeatist message – one which echoed that of Manuel Valls in 2016, when he was Prime Minister of France. ‘Times have changed,’ he said, shortly after an Islamist had slaughtered 86 people in Nice. ‘France should learn to live with terrorism.’
Why have times changed? It took an American, JD Vance, to explain why in his speech to the Munich Security Conference. Having first offered his thoughts and prayers to those injured in the attack in the city 24 hours earlier, Vance noted that this wasn’t the first attack of its kind in Europe. ‘How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilisation in a new direction?’ said Vance. ‘No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.’
So why are they here? Because, said Vance, ‘of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent.’
Europe is faced with a choice. It can follow Vance’s advice and change course, or it can carry on doing nothing, as Valls proposed, and learn to live with terrorism. This will require stoicism and a little luck – that next time a man drives a car into a crowd, you are not among them, and that the café you frequent is not a target of a drugs cartel.
One eyewitness to the attack in Grenoble remarked to reporters: ‘Guns, trafficking – Grenoble isn’t a good place to live.’ But where is, in Europe, these days?
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário