Knife violence and mass immigration are merging into a crisis European officials are reluctant to seriously address.
Knife violence and mass immigration are merging into a crisis European officials are reluctant to seriously address.
I n little more than a decade, Angela Merkel, Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, and other celebrated Eurocrats have ensured that the worst thing that can happen to you on the continent is to be European. France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, and Belgium — nations that were once prosperous and secure — are becoming nightmarish for their citizens. A walk through the center of Paris, Berlin, or Brussels can treat you to stabbings, threats, robberies, and a host of other disturbances.
It has been almost ten years since Merkel raised the famous “welcome refugees” banner and opened the doors to mass immigration. With a debate raging over the connection between these policies and crime, officials are in search of solutions. Those solutions leave much to be desired.
Today, German police unions are debating whether the government should offer Netflix subscriptions to those who voluntarily hand in their illegal knives to police. As I look on from my chronicler’s desk, the only thing that comes to mind is Nicolás Gómez Dávila’s famous aphorism: “Stupidity changes its subject in every era so as not to be recognized.”
A glance at the German press at least explains why the authorities want to do something about the knives. A policeman was killed, and several were seriously injured, in an attack on an anti-Islam activist in the center of Mannheim in May 2024; the attacker was Afghan. One week later, in the same place, a local candidate of the right-wing AfD party, Heinrich Koch, was stabbed and wounded. An attacker stabbed several fans in the European Championship fan zone in Stuttgart in June 2024; the police refused to reveal the stabber’s nationality, but the press did its job and reported he was Syrian. The same month, a Somali attacked random bystanders in Würzburg, killing three and injuring six; police said he was just a madman. In July, a naturalized German Iranian attacked bus passengers with a knife and injured nine in the city of Lübeck.
The list could be much longer, but the common denominator is a non-European attacker who never seems to use his knife just to slice ham. Many knives and razors are seized in Germany. The explanation is simple: Where an ordinary German might see a kitchen tool, a jihadist sees a job opportunity. One of the most sought-after models is the butterfly knife. Some cities have banned the carrying of knives, which, I suppose, is sending to the suburbs those guys who want to take their machetes for a walk in the park while others might walk their dogs or iguanas.
More and more European countries are taking desperate measures to curb similar attacks. Brussels, with the moral superiority characteristic of the European Parliament, often criticizes U.S. gun policies, but the truth is that, from the U.K. to France, the continent is experiencing a worrying epidemic of attacks that involve knives and razors, which are much more difficult to regulate than firearms.
Following the attack on the Euro Championship fan zone in Stuttgart, Manuel Hagel of the Christian Democratic Union party said the increase in such attacks is worrying, revealing that more than half of the knife attacks are by foreign perpetrators. Attacks in the region have risen by 13 percent over the last year. AfD’s Anton Baron accused Hagel of hypocrisy, reminding him that CDU has been responsible for the migration rules that, since 2015, have caused this situation and that the party has always voted against AfD proposals to tighten asylum laws. Meanwhile, a refugee-friendly association condemned Hagel’s statements as “racist.” This is the game that has been promoted by the European left, with the approval of the European Parliament’s center-right leaders: The facts do not matter. What matters is that uncomfortable debates are not had.
For years, the German police have not disclosed the nationalities of perpetrators of attacks and assaults. That might be starting to change. In North Rhine-Westphalia, authorities have just decided to make disclosure of offenders’ nationality mandatory in the interest of transparency. In Lower Saxony, on the other hand, the police are opposed to such a policy, claiming that it would constitutes “structural racism” and that there is no correlation between nationality and crime. Perhaps there isn’t, but the police spokesman who asserted this has not provided any data to back it up. The press, and not only the left-wing press, is cooperating in this suicidal campaign to protect aggressors.
In Spain, newspapers are mocked for their reporting. Whenever there is a gang rape, a knife attack, or a heinous crime by a Spanish perpetrator, you will find it in the headline (“A Spaniard kills his wife,” for example), along with his photo and maybe his postal address and favorite ice-cream flavor. But if the perpetrator is foreign, he automatically becomes “a youth” (“A youth stabs a minor in Lorca” — in this case, a Moroccan). In fact, a popular meme on the subject shows a world map where the names of countries such as Afghanistan or Morocco have been replaced by “Youthland.”
The obfuscation regarding the nationalities of offenders makes it impossible to use official data to test if there’s a correlation between immigration and crime. That is part of the trick. Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, who have ruled the EU since time immemorial, have concluded that what cannot be talked about does not exist. The only German party that does not seem willing to play this game is the right-wing AfD, which is perhaps why CDU and SPD have joined forces to try to outlaw it. Moreover, the Social Democratic government of Chancellor Scholz presented a plan last spring to monitor and even ban debates that question migration policies and LGBT rights — i.e., to censor opinions that are contrary to the views of the establishment.
The debate over the proposed policy of trading Netflix for knives is irrelevant, perhaps, but it is so immensely illustrative of the EU’s failure that it is impossible to overlook. It is important to retrace the degenerative thread of this story, from “Welcome refugees” to free Netflix subscriptions. If Europeans were told in 2015 about such a proposal, we would have said without hesitation: “That will never happen here.” When our grandchildren read the press of the past few decades, they will be astonished at what we once were in the Old Continent and how we stupidly tore it all apart.