Yes, another headline reading "VERMOORD". As Bruce Bawer details in his excellent book While Europe Slept (and if you haven't read it yet, get over to my place where I will either read it to you or kick you ass, depending on how nice you are...heehee), Europeans have long decried "American Conditions". Anything that threatens to resemble life in America (other than our music and films among other tasty delicacies). In other words, all of those negative stereotypes which we rather proudly flaunt but which rarely have much basis in reality. However, we do have a rather large problem with child predators and murder in general, which is why you rarely see headlines in major papers reading "MURDERED!!".
But how will this go in many Western European countries in which war has become stigma, violence "a thing of the past" and heavy sentences for criminals considered barbarically beneath them (yes, this is a similar discussion in which Mojo and I made the French girl cry in under 5 minutes, but she attacked first!)? Having seen Europe through the eyes of many Europeans and now through the eyes of Bawer, I think that Bawer left perhaps a more instructive background, though my European friends continue to give me a feel for what is going on 'on the ground'. But Bawer really gives a tutorial of things through the eyes of an American and includes many details that most Europeans I speak with take so certainly for granted that they don't even think to mention. For more on this, I will write a more thorough review of his excellent book. But first, some more on the recent murders in Belgium and a scene out of control, with a people trained not to face these conditions. I guess it's never too late to learn. I will go into Bawer later, so as to not make European readers feel that I am insulting the Continent, which is not my intent here.
From (yes, I forgot how to link again, sorry!): http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1139
"Two weeks ago the police arrested 38-year old Abdallah Aït Oud, a Belgian of Moroccan origin. He was seen near the little girls prior to their disappearance. Aït Oud denies having murdered Stacy and Nathalie. Though the police has not been able to prove otherwise, he is a major suspect. He has already been arrested twice for pedophilia, once in 1994 and once in 2001, and he has no alibi for the night and the day after the disappearance of the girls, who are stepsisters.
In 1994 Abdallah Aït Oud was convicted to five years imprisonment for the rape of his 14-year old niece. He had regularly abused his sister’s daughter since she was six. Three years later, however, in 1997, when the Belgians were still recovering from Dutroux’ atrocities, the Belgian authorities, though they had promised the citizens that pedophiles would have to serve their sentences, released Aït Oud from prison prematurely. On 7 September 1997 he was arrested for theft and sent back to prison, where he remained until 2000. In March 2001, shortly after his release, he abducted and violently raped a 14-year old girl.
This time the negligent Belgian authorities decided not even to give the pedophile a prison sentence. Instead they sent him to a mental hospital. Last December Aït Oud’s doctors decided that he was cured and let him go. He went to live in Stacy’s and Nathalie’s street in Liège. The authorities did not notify the neighbours that a man with a dangerous pedophilia record had moved into their street. Disclosing such information is illegal in Belgium, where the state cares more about protecting the privacy of criminals than about protecting the innocent children of law-abiding citizens."
Yes, these things happen plenty in the USA. But this?
"Clearly, the Belgian state is no longer able to guarantee the safety of its subjects. Citizens are even beginning to wonder whether the authorities are not just unable but actually unwilling to do so. As I pointed out here a year ago, in relation to another Belgian sex scandal, with Moroccan victims, “morality has gone berserk all over Europe, but nowhere to the same degree as in Belgium.” The country has been sliding into Gomorrah since the 1970s. This process is described in detail in my book A Throne in Brussels, which argues that it is the logical result of Belgium’s nature as an artificial construct, where the state deliberately undermines public morality.
In the final paragraph I warn that the “Belgian disease” might soon become the “European disease”, if
“Europe, like Belgium become[s] a federal state which fails in the basic duty of a state: to guarantee law and order, provide a fair judicial system, and protect its citizens and their children. In a few decades from now, will Europeans, like Belgians today, be obliged to say of their pan-European – supra-national, or rather post-national and post-democratic – state: Thou feedest us with the bread of tears (Psalm 80:5)?”
Belgium’s capital, Brussels, has a murder rate about five times higher than Paris and two times higher than London. The murder of the two children in Liège is the latest in a series that started last February in Brussels with the assassination of a 16-year old black boy, whose throat was cut by five “youths” who have not yet been found. This atrocity was followed by the murder last April of 17-year old Joe Van Holsbeeck, stabbed by two underaged Polish gypsies during rush hour in Brussels’ Central Station. Barely a month later, last May, there were the murders of a two-year old toddler and her black nanny and the shooting of a Turkish woman in broad daylight in downtown Antwerp by an 18-year old Flemish boy playing out a violent computer game in real life. In a crowded public transport bus in Antwerp last Saturday a passenger was kicked to death by six youths, described by some as “five Belgians and one Spaniard,” referring to their nationalities, and by others as “six Moroccans,” also referring to their (dual and original) nationalities."
Given the state of the criminal justice system in place in many European countries (for instance, Volkert van der Graaf was sentenced to 18 years in prison for the murder of Pim Fortuyn, a sentence considered quite heavy there and with the possibility of early release, despite the murderer's statements that he would do it again), what on earth will the rising crime wave there lead to? Will the people get fed up enough to vote in more "tough on crime" advocates, will people begin to overthrow media and elitist ideals and take matters into their own hands? Will the fascism that Islam has wrought be answered by nativist neo-fascist groups, as is Bawer's worry?
At any rate, it is an interesting time to end my news-fast. I think my news OD is over, and will be posting again now.
