Following my column on the Christmas market slaughter, a reader writes:
Dear Mark,
Spot on. It reminds me of the old joke about the procedure for separating the sane from the insane, back when there were "mental asylums" and society tried to keep crazy people inside them instead of running the country.
The intake assessment involved giving each patient a mop and bucket, then locking them in a room and slowly flooding it with water.
As the water level rose, the insane went to work with the mop and bucket.
The sane located the valve and turned off the water.
Merry Christmas to you and yours!
Rick Darby
In fact, the lunatics running the asylum have effortlessly surpassed the old joke - in that even the droplets their mops pick up they manage to lose. Thus Berlin's mass murderer:
'Armed and dangerous' Christmas truck suspect is still at large as it's revealed he had been under surveillance for months and was arrested three times
And that's just the headline.
The 23-year-old, who has a 100,000 euro reward on his head, was under close surveillance of German intelligence for several months following his arrival in the country last year.
He was arrested three times this year and his asylum application was rejected, but deportation papers were never served and he disappeared.
The Tunisian radical was known to be a supporter of Islamic State and to have received weapons training.
He tried to recruit an accomplice for a terror plot – which the authorities knew about – but still remained at large.
Today his own father claimed he had served four years in an Italian jail after he set fire to a school. Tunisian security officials also revealed he was convicted in absentia for aggravated theft with violence in his home country...
Meanwhile a European arrest warrant issued for Amri reveals the fugitive has used at least six different aliases under three different nationalities.
Wait, it gets better:
Anis arrived in Germany in July 2015 and was put on a danger list shortly after arriving - a sign authorities considered him prone to extreme violence. He was placed under surveillance but details remains unclear.
In April this year he was given an immigration hearing and denied the right to asylum. He was due to be deported before the end of the year.
But under a peculiarity of the German asylum system he was granted a 'Duldung' - or toleration papers - which allowed him to stay for unknown reasons.
Oh.
That's not a joke, incidentally: "Duldung" really does mean "toleration". There's not enough trees in Germany for all the "toleration papers" Mutti Merkel wants to issue.
But don't worry, they were monitoring his phone. So that's great. Unless, under some other "peculiarity", they turned off the monitoring for a few hours a day - just like, with the Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray jihadist, they switched off his electronic anklet each morning, round about Mass time, to give him a bit of privacy to decapitate Catholic priests. They take their privacy rights seriously in Europe:
Despite an unfolding international manhunt the first pictures of him released in Germany have his eyes deliberately covered, thought to be because of strict privacy laws there.
Heaven forbid that slaughtering a dozen people should infringe on one's privacy rights anymore than the court convictions, deportation order and intelligence surveillance appear to have done.
So, as I always say, the "lone wolf" turns out to be a known wolf. A few SteynOnline readers have complained about the way I always say "as I always say". But, as my friend Douglas Murray complains in The Spectator, it isn't easy writing the same column every week for 15 years because nothing ever changes: #JeSuisParis, #JeSuisBruxelles, #JeSuisNice, #JeSuisOrlando, #JeSuisBerlin, #JeSuis[YourTownHere]...
As recently as a quarter-century ago, Her Britannic Majesty's Government, in order to contain a domestic emergency, was willing to impose internal travel restrictions within the United Kingdom on those suspected of terrorist associations, in order to prevent some fellows from Newry or West Belfast flying to Manchester or Birmingham and blowing stuff up. Just to underline my point, that was a domestic emergency: the bombers were already within the nation's borders, and full citizens, so you're stuck with them. But today it would apparently be unreasonable to expect western governments to cease importing large numbers of foreigners who wish to murder the natives. Indeed, in an exquisite touch, the depraved Mrs Merkel was attending a self-flattering love-in called the "International Day of Migrants" at the precise moment the known wolf hit the gas and ploughed into his victims.
As I noted yesterday, my sometime warm-up act Jonathan Kay deplores all this "Mark Steyn-esque hysteria" about Islam. So it's important to emphasize that not every "refugee" wants to kill all the infidels. For example, this fellow just wants to make the Nativity play a wee bit more diverse and vibrant:
The Somali asylum seeker suddenly leapt on stage during the traditional depiction of the Christian story in the Austrian town of Oberndorf near Schwanenstadt in the state of Upper Austria, causing horror and upset amongst the children and parents.
At first, no one had reacted when the asylum seeker came to the venue and stood next to the stage where children of nursery school age were performing.
The asylum seeker suddenly leapt on stage, took out a copy of the Koran from his rucksack and started preaching.
The 24-year-old, who was wearing a white robe, was eventually overpowered by a number of men, including two brothers, while he was shouting "Allahu Akbar".
See? "Allahu Akbar" isn't necessarily the last words you'll ever hear just before the powder keg goes up. Sometimes it's just Arabic for "Happy Holidays!", a cheery greeting from one people of the book to another - as our youngsters will understand once we start teaching it in nursery school:
A witness said: "The children are totally anxious and petrified, we were terribly afraid for our children."
Oh, c'mon. Nobody died or was even injured, did they? So what's with the Steynesque hysteria?
As long as they keep issuing "toleration papers", the lunatics running the asylum are gonna need a lot more mops and buckets. Which means they'll need a lot more mop factories and bucket factories. Which means they'll need to import millions more refugees who can be trained to work in them. Except for the ones who can be hired to work in the department that issues "toleration papers". Mop, rinse and repeat...
