Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~How many of your daughters are you willing to toss into the volcano as a sacrifice to the gods of multiculturalism? We are approaching the twentieth anniversary of the death of a courageous young lady called Samira Bellil, author of a 2002 book called Dans l'enfer des tournantes - "In the hell of the" ...well, the word "tournante" was new to me back then, at least in the gang-rape context: it used to mean "rotating" or "revolving"; but rape-wise, which is now its principal usage, it can be roughly translated as "take your turn" or, for those partial to children's games, "pass the parcel" - the parcel in this case being the child.
Mlle Bellil's book was said to have "stunned" and "shocked" France with its vivid depiction of life in the Muslim banlieues where gang-rape is endemic. In Samira's case, it started when she was fourteen, when her "boyfriend" sportingly invited three of his mates to "take your turn". A month later, the most violent of the quartet dragged her off a train by her hair, and he and some more friends - friends of friends of the boyfriend - gang-raped her all over again. The other passengers? Oh, they looked the other way.
And so it was with Mlle Bellil's book. Everyone was "stunned" and "shocked" - and then they went back to looking the other way. Her parents were horrified - not by the gang-raping of their daughter, but by the fact that she'd written a book exposing what really went on in the Muslim community. So they kicked her out of the house. Within two years, she was dead at thirty-one of stomach cancer.
In the intervening two decades, the hitherto unknown "tournante" has spread, as Islam has, way beyond the banlieues. A week and a half ago, a twelve-year-old girl was gang-raped in Courbevoie, just north-west of Paris. She was seized in a park, dragged to a shed by a gang who, according to the police, "forced her to have anal and vaginal penetration, fellatio, while they uttered death threats and anti-Semitic remarks".
[UPDATE! The rapists demanded that their victim convert to Islam. So the usual official coyness about who's doing all the gang-raping is a bit superfluous.]
As is now customary, France is "stunned" and "shocked", and will not resume looking the other way for at least another forty-eight hours. M Macron is pretending to be very serious about it, because next month Paris is hosting the Olympic Games and gang-rape isn't supposed to be one of the sports. So he has called for - wait for it:
"Un temps d'échange... " Emmanuel Macron réclame une réflexion autour du racisme et de l'antisémitisme dans les écoles
"A time of exchange": Emmanuel Macron calls for a reflection on racism and anti-Semitism in schools.
Aw, a "reflection": how nice and limpid and passive that is. As with Samira Bellil all those years ago, the boys were known to this poor twelve-year-old. One was supposedly her former beau, who "confessed to the attack and said he had acted out of revenge after she hid her religious identity from him". It turns out she's a Jewess - ugh, gross! So he sodomised her. But don't worry, a couple of sessions in M Macron's "time of reflective exchange" and he'll be all cool with her Jewiness.
By the way, will these gang-rape reflections on "racism" extend to Anglo-French times of exchange?
British woman is found in tears on the streets of Paris holding her underwear 'after being gang-raped by several men at a music festival'
Heartbreaking 💔 https://t.co/gKGPq2O1Co
— S A M M Y woodhouse (@sammywoodhouse1) June 24, 2024
Was this "music festival" in some cavernous rock arena in a dodgy part of town? No, it was at the Olympia, which is so squaresville and respectable even I've been there. Piaf played the Olympia, Sinatra played there, Jacques Brel played there, the Beatles played there... Now gang-rapists play there. It's like getting gang-raped after leaving the Palladium or Radio City.
The French establishment's principal concern about tournantes at every turn is that it might harsh Paris's Olympic mellow, and that voters might be sufficiently "stunned" and "shocked" to vote for Mme Le Pen:
The violence has sent shockwaves through the Jewish community and added to tensions in the run-up to a snap election that could bring the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) to power for the first time.
That's a quintessential Euromedia sentence, somehow managing to imply that anti-Jewish violence and the rise of the "far right" are related. They are, but only in the faintly surreal sense that, if you're concerned about all this mysterious "violence", a party founded by a guy who wasn't above doing oven jokes in public appears to thirty-six per cent of French voters to be the only one minded to do anything about it other than calls for limpid soft-focus Macronian "dialogue".
As always for the Euro-princelings, the real problem is not the gang-rape but those vulgar enough to notice it. Six months ago I wrote about another rape frenzy in another municipal elysium - Hamburg's Stadtpark:
So a fifteen-year-old girl gets dragged into the bushes by a gang of four "youths". They rape her, and take the trouble to film themselves doing so. Because, after all, if you gang-rape someone, you want to have something to show to the lads who weren't able to make it. When they're sated and push off, the girl gets to her feet and staggers away only to run into five more chaps, who rape her all over again. And film it all over again, in what by now is enough video for a full-length feature - over two-and-a-half hours. That's getting close to Lord of the Rings - and with a cast to match: the semen of nine different men was found in and on her body. And from all over the map: Egypt, Libya, Kuwait, Iran, Afghanistan, Montenegro, Poland, Armenia... That's a lot of diversity: it's like the UN General Assembly of semen...
The rape of a schoolgirl is a terrible thing - especially for the guys. As the eminent lady psychiatrist assigned to the case, Nahlah Saimeh, was at pains to explain, "a migrant background can push offenders to the margins of society" and lead to "fantasies of grandeur as an attempt to compensate for one's own misery".
Yeah, but two-and-a-half hours? That's some fantasy of grandeur.
But what do I know? On Tuesday the court rendered its verdict: Nine rapists aged between nineteen and twenty-three were found guilty, but only one will go to prison - for two years and nine months. The other eight received suspended sentences, so walked straight out onto the streets, perhaps figuring they'd take the scenic route and have a stroll in the park.
Not everyone was happy about eight convicted gang-rapists walking free. And at least one Frankfurter determined to take the law into her own hands and, er, send one of the gang-rapists a WhatsApp message:
A 20-year-old female has been convicted of insulting and threatening hate-posts in connection with the trial for the gang rape in Hamburg's Stadtpark. She has to go to juvenile prison for a weekend, reports the Hamburger Abendblatt. The woman had seriously insulted and menaced one of the suspects via WhatsApp, calling him a "dishonorable rapist pig" and a "disgusting monstrosity", among other things.
So this twenty-year-old young lady will do more time than eight gang-rapists put together ...for the crime of calling a convicted rapist a rapist.
Gang-rape a girl, you'll go free; insult the gang-rapist, you'll do time. On the sacrificial altar of the multicult, you can't make a diversity omelette without breaking chicks.
Another old line of mine: I used to worry there'd be a civil war. Now I worry there won't be.
~Many readers have asked how to support Mark's transatlantic free-speech lawsuits on the Covid vaccines and the climate hucksters. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;
b) buying a near-and-dear one a SteynOnline gift certificate; or
c) ordering a copy of Mark's latest book, The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it - ask Kathy Gyngell).
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds goes to a grand cause - and, in the third, a significant chunk thereof save for shipping costs. And, in all cases, you or your loved one gets something, too.
