Did Iryna Zarutska’s life matter? Judging by the delayed, sheepish media coverage of her killing in North Carolina last month, it seems not. Apparently the violent death of this young, beautiful refugee to the United States was a non-event, undeserving of the liberal rage and tsunami of pained thinkpieces that tend to follow other senseless killings in the US. For two weeks her tragedy was disregarded, her suffering ignored.
The suspect is one Decarlos Brown Jr, a mentally ill, African-American vagrant. He has been charged with first-degree murder
We need answers on the cold indifference of the activist class and the media establishment to this abominable slaying of an innocent. Zarutska was 23 years old. She was born in Kyiv. She fled Ukraine with her family in 2022 to escape Russia’s invasion. They thought they’d be safe in the great American republic. But on 22 August, on a bus in Charlotte, North Carolina, Iryna was knifed in the neck in an act of almost unimaginable inhumanity. She died at the scene.
The suspect is one Decarlos Brown Jr, a mentally ill, African-American vagrant. He has been charged with first-degree murder. There is CCTV footage of the rage-fuelled assault on Zarutska. I cannot bring myself to watch it. I have seen a still, though, showing Zarutska covering her mouth in quiet alarm as she realises what has happened and what is likely to happen next. A young woman resigning herself to a cruel, quick death – it is one of the most chilling images I have ever seen.
There is fury across social media over Zarutska’s death. I can understand why. Yes, there are around 20 murders a day in the US, but this one seems to shine an especially harsh and unforgiving light on America’s crisis of morality. For a start it raises the question of why so much public space has been surrendered to the unhinged. Brown had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He had 14 prior criminal convictions. His own mother sought to have him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric unit after he became violent at home.
And yet he was free to walk the streets – a mad man, literally, set loose among the law-abiding. We need to talk about how the ‘compassionate’ approach to mental illness can end up unleashing hell on good people. If we’re being honest, we have all, at some point, felt uncomfortable around unstable individuals. I’ve felt it in London when that wide-eyed babbler or shrieking vagrant boards my Tube carriage. But you’re not meant to say anything. It’s considered discourteous, possibly ableist, to wonder out loud if such people might be better cared for away from society.
Even now, in the wake of this grimmest of killings, there’s a perverse sympathy for the mentally ill man over the well, targeted woman.
‘It’s difficult’, said a CNN host, ‘because when you are mentally ill, you have a hard time knowing that you are mentally ill’.
‘We don’t know how to deal with people who are hurting in the way this man was hurting’, said CNN’s Van Jones. Excuse me? The only ‘hurt’ I saw in the stills from that calamitous event was the quiet, agonised demise of a woman stabbed.
The truth is we do know how to deal with men like Brown. There is, for all the protestations of the cop-hating left, a ‘carceral solution’ for men like this. A civilised society should surely recognise that precautionary commitment to a psychiatric facility, justly administered, is preferable to the endangerment of the lives of innocents. A left that thinks interfering with the liberty of a man like Brown is more protest-worthy than the savagery visited on Zarutska is a left that has truly vacated the realm of reason. It’s a left that now dwells in a purgatory of inhuman moral relativism.
This brings us to why so much of the ‘liberal’ media were initially silent, shamefully so, on the death of Zarutska. Here’s the thing: we all know why. It’s because that dystopic image of a young white woman with blonde hair being savagely set upon by an African American man with ‘mental health’ problems grates against the identitarian narrative these people are intoxicated by. It doesn’t compute. It’s not convenient. So they look the other way, preferring callousness to any calling into question of their rigid belief system.
It’s only now, more than two weeks later, that Zarutska’s death is being discussed in America’s national media and the global media too. Some say it was just a local crime story and those don’t often break through to the mainstream. Nonsense. The violent death of a young woman who had sought sanctuary in America, allegedly at the hands of a man with a long rap sheet, is unquestionably a national event. It’s a story of monumental moral importance.
No, it was the pathology of the new racialism, the dogmatic belief that black people are victims and white people are oppressors, that led to the instinctive memory-holing of this unconscionable crime. A young life full of promise sacrificed to the delusions of an unstable man, her name and memory sacrificed at the altar of political correctness. This terrible event and its fallout are all the confirmation we need that identity politics has broken souls as well as minds, leaving basic humanity in ruins at the foot of ideology.
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