Europe is doing pretty poorly all round, and it’s probably reasonable to say that the last thing it needs is people running about beheading their nearest and dearest and attacking each other with hammers and iron bars.
Nonetheless, that’s what happening. Yesterday, Atlas Shrugs covered this story, from France:
Three young Jews wearing skullcaps were attacked Saturday night in Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon, by a dozen individuals who beat them with hammers and iron bars, acts “extremely serious” denounced by the Minister of the Interior Manuel Valls.
A youth had assaulted an open wound to the skull and a young girl was hit in the neck, according to the Ministry of Interior. Briefly hospitalized, they came out all three of the hospital Saturday night with five days of temporary total interruption, said police told AFP.
Manuel Valls described the anti-Semitic attack “extremely serious” and reiterated “its determination to fight against any aggression of a religious nature”.
And today, this charmer from Germany:
A man is under arrest in Germany after killing his wife in front of his six young children and cutting her into pieces.
Orhan Sircasi then ran on to the roof of his apartment building clutching her severed head in one hand and a butcher’s knife in the other.
The 32-year-old killer of Turkish origin fought off police as they tried to seize him early this morning by lunging at them with the knife and swinging the head like a club.
Orhan Sircasi threw his wife’s head from the roof of the apartment building, landing in the courtyard below (pictured)
After he lunged at police with the severed head of his wife he threw it from the roof of his five storey apartment building to the street below.
He was overpowered on the rooftop in Berlin and taken into custody.
Then officers entered the apartment in the Kreuzberg district of the capital to find the dismembered body of his wife and the six children aged from nine months to ten years.
’They were in a terrible state,’ said a neighbour. ‘He made them watch as he butchered their mother then cut her up into little pieces.’
These are horrific incidents in and of themselves. But what is worse in the long term is that the news outlets insisted on describing the perpetrators geographically. Thus, the men wielding the iron bars were ”of North African origin” and the man who cut off his wife’s head was “of Turkish origin,” as if that were more important to the story than that the first attack was carried out against Jews on Shabbat, and the second was punctuated with cries of “Allahu Akhbar.”
Europe has a problem, and a difficult one to solve. The first step to recovery on this front will be willingness to speak its name.