Another day, another empty seat at this year's Christmas table - thanks to western governments, feckless and complicit in the destruction of their societies.
So a German couple decide to travel to Paris for a pre-Christmas break. The City of Light and all that, right? Don't worry, they didn't go to any of those dangerous banlieues. Instead, they were a few yards from the Eiffel Tower strolling the Quai de Grenelle when a man attacked them shouting - go on, take a wild guess - yes, "Allahu akbar!" The husband, in his early twenties, was fatally stabbed; the wife is alive because a passing cabbie intervened. The stabber then fled across the Seine and attacked a local chap and a 66-year-old English tourist whom he hit in the eye with a hammer.
Who would do such a thing? The BBC was right on the case, identifying the perp as "a 26-year-old French national". Those crazy Frenchmen! It's only a fortnight since a bunch of other "French nationals" went full Maurice Chevalier on a village in the Drôme. And now it's happening at the Eiffel Tower.
Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking: "'French national', mon cul! I'll bet his name is Mohammed bin Jihad."
Wrong! It's Armand. And you can't get more French than that, can you? Unless it's Armand Croissant. In fact, Armand was born Iman - in full, Iman Rajabpour-Miyandoab, a son of Iranian non-Muslims who converted to "radical" Islam. It gets better:
The suspect had in 2016 been sentenced to four years in prison for planning another attack, and had been on the French security services' watch list, the minister said.
Great news: he was on the "security services' watch list". And how did that work out for his victims?
So, as a certain "niche Canadian" has been saying for close to two decades, the so-called "lone wolf" turns out to be yet another known wolf - just another working stiff from Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. His Facebook friends included Larossi Aballa, who stabbed two policemen to death in Magnanville, and fellow stabber Adel Kermiche, who who murdered a priest at Mass in Saint-Étienne du Rouvray. Oh, and, while still in prison, he was in touch with Abdoullakh Anzorov, who a fortnight later fatally stabbed and posthumously beheaded the schoolteacher Samuel Paty.
But, just like certain characters in Out of Time and The Prisoner of Windsor, Armand aced the Deradicalisation Programme and assured his minders he was now eating pork and drinking beer. Seriously.
Gee, it's almost like all these "watchlists" are a complete waste of time. Remember Père Hamel, the priest ritually decapitated by Adel Kermiche? I do, because I attended his funeral in Rouens Cathedral. His killer was also on the "watchlist", and taken so seriously he was fitted with an electronic ankle tag. But, very sportingly, to allow the chap a bit of privacy, the authorities switched it off for a couple of hours every day. Which, conveniently, happened to coincide with the times of Père Hamel's services.
So what's "the minister" - Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin - going to do about this latest "security" fiasco?
Oh, sorry, he's got other priorities. Here's what he was fretting about in the hours before the attack:
Drame de Crépol : Gérald Darmanin "scandalisé par la manifestation" d'ultradroite à Paris en hommage à Thomas
"Gérald Darmanin 'outraged by the demonstration' by the ultra-right in Paris in tribute to Thomas" - the poor boy killed in the last nothing-to-see-here Islamo-stabbing.
Why was the Minister of the Interior so "outraged"? Well, he'd ordered the Prefect of Police to ban the demonstration, but some judge struck down the order on the quaint grounds that it's apparently still legal in France to protest the mass stabbing of children.
Perhaps M Darmanin would have done better to commend the approach of Irish senator Seán Kyne, who suggests that last week's anti-stabbing rioters in Dublin should be punished with a "good, honest, decent beating". It seems to be very important to our rulers that the masses get used to the occasional child sacrifice and, if they're minded to wonder why the mound of corpses piled on the altar of diversity gets higher and higher, they have to be punished. Per The Guardian:
Crackdown on French far right urged after boy's killing sparks protests
...because protesting the killing of boys is now, like gun rights and free speech, a right-wing thing.
Senator Kyne might be heartened to know that his appeal for a "good, honest, decent beating" was answered - in Romans-sur-Isère. Another group of ultra-right far-right ultra-far-right Frenchmen were protesting against the stabbing of Thomas. One twenty-year-old ultra-far-rightist showed up for the march, but, seeing all the coppers, got cold feet and decided not to participate. So off he wandered to wait for the 'bus, where some chums of Thomas's killers grabbed him and stripped him naked in the street:
This video shows part of the kidnapping.
Man filming the video: "That's how fascists end up. Stripped naked." pic.twitter.com/cxmNdMZILl
— The Air Loom 🇫🇷 (@Styx_Boatman) November 25, 2023
Then they took him off to hold him hostage and administer that "good, honest, decent beating". You skipped the demo, but they tortured you anyway: there's a useful lesson there.
Thus the political class making common cause with the stabbing class - and with the connivance of the media. It is the convention of the press, in France as in Germany, to refer to the victims of violent crime, if at all, only by their first names - "Christian names", as they used to say. This was ostensibly to preserve their privacy. But, on the present scale, it has the effect of rendering the victims anonymous in death - just generalised blurs: "boys", "tourists"... - as if their murderers have deprived them of not only their futures but also their pasts. That too has an obvious symbolism.
But keep on celebrating diversity, right? Here's a "British" imam who's worried that these anti-Jew protests are all very well, but you could easily find yourself standing next to some bloke who "takes it in the backside at night":
Not an out-take from 'Four Lions' but a real-life preacher worrying that Palestine protests will include women and men who "take it in the backside at night" pic.twitter.com/93IfaHOGbS
— Jake Wallis Simons (@JakeWSimons) December 3, 2023
That guy and Queers for Palestine: what Marx would have called the internal contradictions of diversity - because "diversity" is only an interim phase.
Over the weekend we aired Plum Duff, my short story about what happens when, as a German lady put it to me in 2016, "Christmas is a target". Alison Castellina writes:
Congratulations - your story ticked every box. Authentic speech patterns, recreation of fading Christmas customs ...and a dramatic and not entirely unexpected ending.
Unless something changes, Alison, there will be no "unexpected" endings. Were the events of Crépol, Dublin, Paris in the least bit "unexpected"? Are any of this random selection of recent headlines?
Muslim migrants kidnap teenage German girl, keep her as sex slave for nearly two years...
In the Saarbrücken Basilica of St. John, unknown persons have massively damaged a statue of the Virgin Mary. One of Mary's hands has been severed, and the head of the baby Jesus in her arm had been broken off...
Karlstadt Christmas Market opens with Muslim call to prayer...
None of those are "unexpected", not to readers of a certain bestseller from the day before yesterday, when it would still have been possible to change the ending. But, if nothing changes, then, as in Greek tragedy, the ending is foreordained: we are not in O Henry territory. M Darmanin and Senator Kyne and the rest of the political class are not offering a surprise ending; they're simply trying to finesse the death of your societies that their policies have made inevitable.
Politics? Voting? Unless your candidate and party are serious about changing the ending, they're on the other side.
~One man who was right about where all this was headed has just won the Dutch election: the "far right" Geert Wilders. We have a few copies left of a joint Steyn/Wilders literary endeavour: Geert's terrific book Marked for Death, complete with an introduction by Mark. It's available at the SteynOnline bookstore, and is the perfect Christmas gift for the far-right member of your family.
Notwithstanding Mark's one-step-forward-three-steps-back health, we had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's take on the latest Diversity Rape of the Day. For his Saturday movie date Rick McGinnis checked out Ridley Scott's take on Napoleon. And on Sunday Steyn talked to Hugh Martin about his great Yuletide standard, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". Our marquee presentation was Mark's very timely tale of Christmas under siege: Plum Duff. Nancy Fredericks, a new Steyn Club member from Wisconsin, enthuses:
I loved this story. Brilliant and heart rending. Our entire culture could benefit from listening to this.
You can listen to Part One here, and the conclusion here.
If you were too busy spending the weekend planning that romantic trip to Paris, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
