Why can’t we speak plainly about migrant crime?
On Wednesday, two striking events happened in France. The first was that the President of the Republic led the nation’s mourning for Lieutenant-Colonel Beltrame, the policeman who swopped himself for a hostage at the siege at a supermarket in Trèbes last week. Elsewhere in Paris on the same day there was a silent march past the flat of Mireille Knoll. As a girl, in 1942, Mme Knoll narrowly escaped being rounded up by the French police and put on a train to Auschwitz. Last weekend, at the age of 85, the remains of her wheelchair-bound body were found in her Paris flat. Her body had been stabbed and burned. Mme Knoll, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease had apparently previously told police about a neighbour who had threatened to ‘burn her’. And so the fires that failed to catch the nine-year old Mireille in Auschwitz caught up with her seven decades later in multicultural, diverse, 21st century France.
What are we to think about this? Well, that depends on what we are allowed to know. There has been some outcry about the murder of Mme Knoll (not least because of its similarity to the murder of 66-year old Sarah Halimi last year) and it has been described as an act of ‘anti-Semitism’. But you might have to search – certainly in the English-language press – to find out what variety of anti-Semite might have stabbed a Jewish grandmother eleven times and then burned her body. Was it a member of the National Front? Or Momentum?
Read a report like this one at Sky and all you will learn is that ‘Two men, including a neighbour, have been charged with the 85-year-old’s murder.’ But if you read other parts of the press in France then the reference I made earlier to France’s new ‘diversity’ and ‘pluralism’ begins to make sense.
Likewise with the murderer of Arnaud Beltrame. In the days since his murder, Lieutenant-Colonel Beltrame has come to epitomise the very finest of his country and people. The words ‘brave’ and ‘heroic’ are overused, but in their purest, most inviolable form they apply to this son of France. But what are we to know, or say, about the person who slit his throat and shot him in the head? The attacker – who claimed allegiance to Isis – killed four people in total. And only some of the news stories carry any details about the man. He was apparently called Redouane Lakdim. He was 26 years old and was born in Morocco though became a French national where his main contributions to the life of the nation consisted of petty criminality and jihadism.
What are we to think, or say, about any of this?
