Programming note: Tonight, Monday, I'll be live with Tucker Carlson, coast to coast across America on Fox News at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific, with a rerun at midnight Eastern. If you prefer me in non-visual format, we'll be essaying another of our Clubland Q&A audio extravaganzas, live around the planet tomorrow, Tuesday, at 4pm US Eastern. (Check local listings for the time in your area.)
Stabbings in the news. First from Sweden:
Gothenburg Man Suspected Of Killing Australian Appears In Court
And Vermont:
Burlington Man Charged With Motel Machete Attack
And Ireland:
Dundalk Stabbing Victim Was Japanese
And one more, from Germany:
The teenage girl died of her injuries after the 15-year-old boy stabbed her with a kitchen knife in Kandel.
There's rather a lot of this nowadays, don't you find? Hard to keep up. I try to winnow it down by only following stabbings in towns I've been through in the last two years. In 2016 I spoke to some "Syrians" in Kandel, a month or so after passing through Gothenburg en route to dine with my friend Ingrid Carlqvist. On the steps of my hotel, two young bearded chaps were selling copies of the Koran. "Thanks all the same," I said, "but I've already got one."
Dundalk and Burlington I know rather better. The machete is, of course, a traditional farming implement of northern New England. It's used by plaid-clad Yankee farmers to tap maple trees for their bountiful sap. In hunting season the woods are full of gnarled hardscrabble oldtimers waiting patiently in their tree stands to spy a passing bull moose and then hurl the machete into him, splitting the skull to leave perfect his-and-hers antlers for the master bathroom. On Winter Solstice each year, thousands of Bernie bros gather at Senator Sanders' lake house to worship the earth goddess, dancing naked on the shores of Champlain and whooping at the moon before using their ceremonial machetes to trim each others' wispy beards and man-buns.
So which particular "Burlington man" committed this "motel machete attack"? Let's go to Channel 3 News:
SHELBURNE, Vt. (WCAX) A Burlington man faces attempted murder charges after allegedly attacking a woman with a machete...
That female, was a 73-year-old Meals on Wheels volunteer who was dropping off meals on the regular route. It is unclear what provoked the attack, but police say 32-year-old Abukar Ibrahim...
Ah. It is "unclear" what "provoked" the "Burlington man" to attack a septuagenarian Meals on Wheels volunteer. We may never know - especially if we follow American media coverage.
What of Dundalk? It's a border town between Ireland north and south, so it has a history. My daughter and I were there a couple of years back, and I tried to impress her with tales of the old days, when I foolishly ventured into bars full of hardened Provos. But post-Troubles all that's left is economic decay, and she thought it just an exceptionally ugly burg, save for its truly splendid railway station and the old Dundalk Gaol.
A century ago, at the end of the Great War, Churchill (whom we discussed over the weekend) made a much-quoted observation:
As the deluge subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that have been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.
He meant that the great thing about the "Irish Question" was its magnificent intractability: Tsars and Kaisers fall, in time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, but some things never change. So, if one chanced to see a headline about an attack in Dundalk, one could be fairly confident that it was some Loyalist/Republican thing - like the still unsolved Prod Christmas bombing of 1975. Instead, whatever "the integrity of their quarrel", the Irish Question has evolved in many surprising ways. In Dublin the new Taoiseach is the gay son of a Bombay Hindu (really), and in Dundalk you can now have fatal "sectarian violence" and neither Papists nor Protestants need be involved:
A 24-year-old man has died and two others were wounded in a stabbing incident in Dundalk.
The first incident happened on Avenue Road at around 9am, where the victim, who was from Japan and had been living in Ireland for the past year, was attacked on the street and stabbed in the back.
RTE then tap-dances around for a zillion paragraphs before disclosing the identity of the perp:
Initial reports suggested the man was from Syria, however further investigations suggest that he is 18-years-old and from Egypt.
Ah. His name is Mohammed Morei, and there's no "investigation" to "suggest" he's eighteen other than the fact that he says so.
Last year, for the first of our series Tales for Our Time, I read Arthur Conan Doyle's great yarn of 1897, The Tragedy of the Korosko. Sir Arthur describes the fate of one young American thus:
'I'm done!' he whispered, as the Colonel ran to his aid, and then he lay still, with his china-white cheek against the black stones. When, but a year before, he had wandered under the elms of Cambridge, surely the last fate upon this earth which he could have predicted for himself would be that he should be slain by the bullet of a fanatical Mohammedan in the wilds of the Libyan Desert.
But it is the genius of our ruling elites - among them Ireland's own fanatical "Godfather of Globalization", the late Peter Sutherland - that you no longer have to go to "the wilds of the Libyan Desert". You can be wandering "under the elms of Cambridge" - or Shelburne, Vermont - and be set upon by a fanatical Mohammedan. "Surely the last fate upon this earth" that a Japanese student could have predicted for himself would be that he would go to Dundalk to be slain by a fanatical Mohammedan. "Surely the last fate upon this earth" that an Australian could have predicted for himself would be that he move to Gothenburg to be with his Swedish girlfriend and be slain by... Ah, but we must be more politic here. As I write, the man arrested in that last murder is described merely and cryptically as "a Swedish national and Gothenburg resident". Elsewhere, life in the new Sweden goes on: "Surely the last fate upon this earth" that a Swede could have predicted for himself is getting blown to bits because he bends down to pick up an explosive device outside the metro station in Stockholm.
But "the last fate upon his earth" a westerner could predict for himself is becoming remarkably commonplace, no matter how far the distance he puts between himself and "the wilds of the Libyan Desert". Here's another town I was in in 2016:
The parents of the young girl from the small, peaceful town of Kandel in Rhineland-Palatinate are inconsolable. The crime is already incomprehensible, and becomes even more so when we are told that the presumed murderer was, for a while, practically a member of the family. "We took him in as if he were a son," the girl's father said, according to the Bild tabloid newspaper. He has lost his only daughter. She was stabbed and killed by her former boyfriend, an unaccompanied refugee from Afghanistan.
Abdul claimed to be fifteen. The grieving father who took him in no longer believes the "boy". But, unfortunately for his daughter, he believed it - and all the other Merkelist guff - far too easily for far too long. Here's another German story of near parodic gullibility:
On Thursday the first witnesses were heard at the district court in the case of the attempted murder by the Syrian hairdresser Mohammad H. of Ilona F. from Herzberg.
How did Ilona F come to be within throat-cutting range of Mohammad H? Well, she and her hubby hired him:
Together with his wife, and with the help of the refugee helper organization, in 2016, he searched for an Arab hairdresser, to offer something special to the customers of the region. He thought that he had found him in Mohammad H.
So they signed Mohammad and gave him the razors. And you can't say he doesn't offer "something special": how many other German stylists can cut your hair and your throat? But for a while he was the town's "model refugee", a poster child for Mutti Merkel's "We can do this!" optimism - as in the press photo above of the local job-center honcho getting a trim. Once the media had moved on, it was another story:
"I knew that he wasn't a good employee, but I did not want to drop him," said Michael F. Mohammed H. only delivered good work on four of the 100 work days. "His level was that of fourth- or fifth-grade special-needs school."
To return to my fellow Irishman, the late Peter Sutherland (with whom I had a brief but intense acquaintanceship for a couple of days), until his final cancer he led a charmed life, jetting off from one cozy sinecure to another at the European Commission, the Royal Bank of Scotland, the World Trade Organisation, Goldman Sachs... He was an almost absurd example of the type I referenced in my closing statement at the Munk Debate, flying between "all the nice places", making grand plans for those 30,000 feet below:
Earlier in the debate, I made the point to Simon Schama that, in the scheme of things, the differences between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants are minuscule, and yet in Dundalk and elsewhere thousands of people have died over those differences, and we accept that they are sensitive and subtle and have to be managed very carefully, and that it's entirely reasonable for one group to wish to live separately from the other. But somehow you can breezily import Islam from the Horn of Africa to the Hindu Kush on such a scale that it becomes the principal source of population growth in the British Isles, Scandinavia, the heart of the Continent ...and there will be no complicating consequences.
Professor Schama and Madame Arbour denied it all on the night. Simon snapped back at me early on that my characterization of the "refugees" as overwhelmingly young men was false. And he and Louise rejected Nigel Farage's and my focus on the wave of brutal sex crimes across Europe. We were obsessed with it only because we were sad losers who couldn't get any action:
All the smart pundits agreed with Schama and Arbour: The Globe & Mail's Doug Saunders dismissed the sex crimes as "urban myth" and my old chum Jonathan Kay said my numbers on the sex imbalance were "very dubious" (his original Tweets seem to have disappeared). Only fringe nutters like me and Nige believed such things.
Oddly enough, two years later, every point we made is now taken as read:
BERLIN (Reuters) - Young male refugees in Germany got the blame on Wednesday for most of a two-year increase in violent crime, adding fuel to the country's political debate over migrants...
The government-sponsored study showed a jump in violent crime committed by male migrants aged 14 to 30.
To reprise something else I said that night: they're not "refugees" from a "civil war"; it's as if in the 1770s George Washington and the boys had skedaddled to Europe and left Martha and the women and children to take on the British. This too is now acknowledged, albeit utterly pathetically:
The study said reuniting refugees with their families by allowing them to come to Germany too could help to reduce violence. Such reunions look set to be a particularly contentious issue in talks about a new coalition government.
The predominantly young male majority of refugees live in Germany without partners, mothers, sisters or other females whom the study sees as a "violence-preventing, civilising force."
So the solution for all those stabbings, murders, gang rapes and child rapes is ...more Muslim immigration.
Wouldn't it be nice if someone said maybe the answer is less immigration? Maybe we owe it to the memory of fifteen-year-old Mia in Kandel and all the other dead and raped girls to ease up on this thing a bit?
I am in favor of ending mass immigration from the Muslim world, which makes me a fringe nutter. Because the mainstream is dominated by people like Chancellor Merkel and Peter Sutherland and that Reuters reporter who think it entirely reasonable that the answer to a Muslim immigrant epidemic of violent crime is to bring in more Muslim immigrants as a "violence-preventing, civilizing force".
The late Mr Sutherland's friends in Berlin and Brussels and Davos can't and won't hear you. Hundreds marched silently in memory of Mia but were greeted by thirty counter-demonstrators noisily demanding "a colorful Germany" - and, as the German press coverage indicates, those glib euphemisms remain inviolable. It was a livelier scene in Dundalk:
As Morei was led into the courthouse by Gardai, crowds pushed and shouted abuse at the suspect.
Jeers of "Welcome to Dundalk" and "This is for Ireland" could be heard as the mood outside became more aggressive and members of the media were pushed and shoved in the scuffle.
Gardai cautioned some local men, telling them: "Quieten down, or you'll be lifted."
And no one wants to be lifted so they all went home. We are a long way from the sacking of chancelleries, but we will get there one day, somewhere on the Continent: The imprudence and arrogance of the Sutherland class is stretching Europe to breaking point.
~We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, including my take on Churchill's return to the silver screen, Darkest Hour, and a celebration of Keely Smith's unlikely signature song. We also marked Twelfth Night with a round-up of some of the best live performances by my many musical guests over the years. If you were busy over the last weekend of Christmastide, we hope you'll check out one or all of those movie and musical diversions.
If you're still seeking a great Twelfth Day of Christmas gift for a loved one that doesn't involve twelve drummers drumming on the back porch all night, there's always a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Or, if you sign yourself up, you'll still be in time to participate in tomorrow's Clubland Q&A live around the planet at 4pm Vermont Time - that's 9pm in Dundalk, 10pm in Gothenburg and Kandel.
