French racism is not the problem

Last week we learned that a woman in a park in Skegness was dragged into the bushes and raped by a 33-year-old male. The man had arrived in the UK illegally on a small boat just 40 days earlier.

Strangely, I can find little anger about this. The story was reported in a couple of papers but there were no fulminating editorials or emergency questions in the House. Jess Phillips hasn’t found room to grandstand about it. Nor have Yvette Cooper, Stella Creasy or any of those other Labour MPs who like to shake their heads in disgust as the Home Secretary explains that the British taxpayers can’t forever foot the hotel bills of illegal migrants.

The Conservative MP for Skegness, Matt Warman, described the rape as ‘hugely shocking’. Which it both is and isn’t. Every-one should by now be well aware that if you allow very large numbers of young men to break into your country illegally, this sort of thing will happen (as Germany, Sweden and France can all attest). What are you gonna do about it?

Personally, I would tear up the earth to find which officials in the Home Office, UK Border Force, NGOs and others encouraged, helped or permitted the suspect to come to this country, let him stay and later let him loose. And I don’t just want them to lose their jobs. I want them to serve prison time for aiding and abetting people smuggling. After all, someone let the attacker into this country, didn’t they? And then couldn’t be bothered to deport him.

Naturally, at this stage we have to say that not all migrants are rapists or terrorists. But if you have open borders and no checks on who is arriving, a certain uptick in rape and other crimes will inevitably occur. We all know this, but because politicians from every main party have presided over or actively encouraged it, the whole business becomes just one of those unacknowledged downsides of diversity.

In France in October the body of girl called Lola Daviet, aged 12, was found in a travel trunk in Paris. She had been sexually assaulted, asphyxiated, stabbed and mutilated. The person arrested for her killing was a woman of 24 from Algiers who was in France illegally and living with an expulsion order. And while there was political anger around the killing, nothing happened.

As with the UK, by now everybody knows the score. There are benefits to allowing ongoing illegal mass migration – like getting to feel all warm and good about yourself. And then there are the negatives – such as the occasional raped and mutilated 12-year-old.

Now a different killing in France actually has provoked reactions. This is the death in Nanterre of Nahel Merzouk, 17 and of Algerian descent. Merzouk was too young to have a licence to drive, but was careering around in a Mercedes when the police tried to stop him. He resisted arrest and was shot. In the days afterwards there were riots, lootings, assaults and burnings across France. From Paris and Strasbourg to Marseilles, much of urban France resembled a warzone.

Of course the media – in the Anglophone world in particular – has been keen to talk about the ‘victim’, his family and the horrors of police violence (especially ‘racism’). All of which explains next to nothing.

It does not explain, for instance, why these millions of North African migrants and others are in France in the first place. Why would they be if it is such a terrible country? There have been large population transfers between North Africa and France before. If the situation is so bad, why not move again?

The answer is that France is not the problem. A significant chunk of the non-integrated immigrant population is. They use the country without belonging to it. Moreover, many of them clearly know that as long as they say ‘racism’, France will be in fear of them. All the while, the chances of them leaving the hellhole of France and returning to the garden of Algeria are near zero.

France – like Britain – is one of those countries that we are always told people ‘risk their lives’ in order to get to. Once they arrive, we are then told how little we do for them, how terrible our housing and integration systems are. We hear only what evil, racist countries we are.

None of this – like the other responses to the killing – makes any sense. Let us say for a moment that you do think the police were heavy-handed, and that when they encountered a teenager tearing around a neighbourhood at the start of the school day they ought to have let him drive on, or at least approached him in a more kindly manner. But even if you do think that, why, when they failed to behave as you wished, should you set fire to libraries or other municipal buildings or smash your way into the local luxury-goods stores? Does the society that sheltered and paid you owe you a spate of shopping with violence? One business paper this week led with ‘Irate rioters in France looted high-end stores such as Louis Vuitton, Zara and Nike amid violent protests over the death of a 17-year-old boy’. Ah yes, those ‘irate’ people who head straight to the handbag section when they want to protest against police racism.

The truth is that France has allowed the law-breaking, just as Britain has. And we allow it still. We permit people to break into our countries, we put them up in hotels, let them disappear, and blame ourselves if their lives don’t go right.

‘What is your solution?’ I hear you say. Well, we could start by sending away anyone who is here illegally. But no politician in either country will do that. So we just have to keep taking the very rough with the not so smooth.