Annecy: Encore Une Fois

In a scene reminiscent of the horrors of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, a sudden, murderous presence has terrorised a tranquil, waterside community. Except this isn’t the fictional Amity Island, but the painfully real Annecy – a lakeside town in Southeastern France, nicknamed the ‘Pearl of the French Alps’. As toddlers and mothers played in the morning sunshine, a 31-year-old Syrian man granted refugee status in Sweden, ran amok on a stabbing spree; seriously wounding four toddlers and two pensioners. The assailant was eventually shot in the legs, overpowered and arrested by police. It has been confirmed that he recently came to France, claiming asylum, and that he left behind a wife and three-year-old daughter. He also claims, unusually, to be a Christian. 

If this sounds depressingly familiar, it is. France is still reeling from last year’s brutal murder of ‘Lola’, a sweet-faced 12-year-old girl who was tortured, slain, and dismembered, before being unceremoniously dumped in a suitcase in Paris. Her killer was ‘Dahbia B’, an Algerian immigrant who was in France illegally. For the Brits among us, you don’t need me to jog your memories of Emily Jones: the beautiful 7-year-old who had her throat slashed while playing in the park by Eltiona Skana, an Albanian illegal immigrant. Naturally, Dahbia suffered from ‘extreme psychological problems‘, while Skana displayed paranoid schizophrenia – that tends to be about as much truth as our media can stomach. 

The western response to the mysterious slaughter of its own citizens is now so polished, it makes the recent Coronation of King Charles III look amateur. The timeline in this case was immaculate: France’s National Assembly has already observed the customary minute’s silence; ‘thoughts and prayers’ are being offered to the victims and their families; and most importantly of all, no one knows anything, not even the name of the attacker, except that the motive is definitely ‘not terrorism’.  

The asinine tweets are going out too, chief among them this splendid effort from Emmanuel Macron, who managed to tick every box: 

Attaque d’une lâcheté absolue ce matin dans un parc à Annecy. Des enfants et un adulte sont entre la vie et la mort. La Nation est sous le choc. Nos pensées les accompagnent ainsi que leurs familles et les secours mobilisés.

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) June 8, 2023

Attack of absolute cowardice this morning in a park in Annecy. Children and an adult are between life and death. The Nation is in shock. Our thoughts are with them as well as their families and the emergency services mobilized.

Mais non, Monsieur le President! It’s very far from cowardice. Stabbing innocent people is not cowardice; cowardice is sacrificing the nation’s children, rather than face the reality of your own lunatic immigration policies. Almost a decade on from the Paris attacks, with its scenes of world leaders linked arm-in-arm, it appears the West has learnt nothing about the dangers of open borders. 

Now of course the narrative has to be shaped before we go back to normal, so that the impressionable natives don’t draw any ridiculous conclusions themselves. Fortunately the media had their top man at hand, one Fawaz Gerges, Chair of contemporary Middle Eastern studies at the London School of Economics, who had this to say:

It seems to me the French police, not the anti terror investigators have taken charge of the case, and this tells me it’s not a terrorism case; it mainly is a criminal case. My fear is that regardless of what the investigation shows, the fact that the suspect is a Syrian refugee and an asylum seeker will likely be used a great deal by the far right in France…My first instinct tells me this is really a mentally disturbed individual as opposed to being part of a terrorist organisation like al-Qaeda or the so-called Islamic State.

Of course it’s the ‘far right’, it’s always the ‘far-right’. The ‘far-right’ objection to pointless lockdowns, the ‘far-right’ concern about illegal immigration, and the ‘far-right’ exploitation of dead French girls. If objecting to toddlers being stabbed in a park makes one far-right, we’d better hope we all qualify on that score. But it’s not the far right. It is left-wing governments, throwing open their borders to anyone who can come; and when such policies inexorably lead to chaos, they blame their racist citizenry for daring to notice. 

I say now directly to the politicians responsible for these lax policies, the celebrities who promulgate them from their gated communities, and the leftwing media who fawn over them: this is on YOU! Merkel, Macron, Sunak et al – you all have blood on your hands. There is nothing in the world more heinous than the slaughter of the innocent, unless it is also state-funded and marketed as tolerance. A tolerance for opening other people’s front doors to murderous savages, in exchange for votes, airtime, and social media likes. Fuck you and your tolerance! 

Meanwhile, until such time as anyone in authority decides to actually get serious about this, might as well just leave the candles out for the next time.

This piece first appeared in The European Conservative, and is reproduced by kind permission.

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