Irish singer Róisín Murphy was dumped as headliner of a music festival in Islamist Istanbul, Turkey, after she celebrated the fact that fewer children are now identifying as transgender.
On October 21, Murphy posted a graph that argued that the number of 18 to 22-year-olds that claim to be trans or nonbinary has dropped precipitously since 2021. Along with the graphic, Murphy said that transgenderism “was never real,” and added, “Terribly sad though. Absolute havoc wreaked on children, families and society.”
It was never real. Terribly sad though. Absolute havoc wreaked on children, families and society. pic.twitter.com/ULx4QT20ww
The singer has not apologized for her X post, and it is still live despite the blowback she has since suffered.
Now, the “Murphy’s Law” singer has experienced a major consequence for her opinion after the Back In Town Festival in Istanbul, Turkey, dropped her as the festival’s headliner.
In a statement, the festival said it was no longer “comfortable” hosting Murphy, according to Stereogum. The organizers added that they felt she had the “energy” to be their headliner, but in light of her statements, they have changed their minds.
The organizers now say “the statements she shared in recent days completely eliminated these feelings.”
“Because we would never be comfortable including her in such a festival set-up, we would like to state that we cannot include her in our program, keeping the values we try to introduce to you above all things — and knowing that this stance cannot have any financial equivalent.
“Back in Town Festival will take place as planned with the new headliner that we will announce soon. We thank you for being with us, and we expect understanding from everyone whose hearts we have unintentionally broken.”
For her part, Murphy is 100 percent sticking by her guns and, in a long statement, blasted “cruel” trans activists and said she does not want them “anywhere near [her] or [her] music, however that may affect my career.”
“I won’t be held to ransom – no more blackmail. What I see more than anything is a spoiled and entitled childishness. I am not interested in being their ‘mother’ or ‘queen’; these babies need to grow up and allow artists like myself the dignity of opinion and the space and freedom to create,” she exclaimed.
The mob is out in force. The more I see of this cruel “activism,” the more convinced I am that I do not want them anywhere near me or my music, however that may affect my career. I won’t be held to ransom—no more blackmail. What I see more than anything is a spoiled and entitled…
She added, “My declaration ‘it was never real’ refers to the contagion that was undoubtedly aided by the submission of the media, captured medical institutions, and social media derangement.”
“Recently, this wilfully blind and irresponsible behaviour has been curtailed to some degree, as more and more people affected by it stand up and demand a long-needed audit of trans ideology, which continues to stamp its boot across anyone who decries its negative consequences,” she said.
The festival replaced Murphy with Turkish singer-songwriter Kalben.
A 26-year-old French police officer, Éric G., has been imprisoned for 15 months in pre-trial detention for shooting an illegal Algerian migrant to death after the man broke into his 94-year-old grandmother’s garage in Bobigny. His request to be released before his trial has been denied a total of seven times.
A 26-year-old French police officer, Éric G., has been imprisoned for 15 months in pre-trial detention for shooting an illegal Algerian migrant to death after the man broke into his 94-year-old grandmother’s garage in Bobigny in Seine-Saint-Denis, one of the most multicultural neighborhoods in Paris.
All of Éric G.’s requests to be released from pre-trial detention have been systematically denied — rejected a total of seven times. The officer’s lawyer indicates that the officer is being persecuted by the judge because he is a White man who shot an Algerian.
“Basically, it was a blond man with blue eyes who shot an Algerian,” said Éric G.’s lawyer, Laurent-Franck Lienard.
Remarkably, the case has not even gone to trial, well over a year after the officer shot the Algerian man to death. However, the officer remains incarcerated in extreme conditions.
The officer’s lawyer dismissed the court’s main argument for continued detention—the risk of recurrence—as nonsensical:
“The main argument [for continued detention] is the risk of recurrence. As if he were going to find himself tomorrow morning in his grandmother’s garden with his service weapon, in front of another squatter. It makes no sense,” Lienard stated. He also rejected the hypothesis of his client pressuring the civil party, denouncing the situation as “a profound injustice” rooted in political bias.
On Saturday, June 29, 2024, police officer Éric G., a 26-year-old, shot and killed Slimani, who had previous arrests on his record, including for illegal cigarette sales.
Éric G. maintains he was acting in self-defense.
The sequence of events began around 6:00 a.m. when Éric’s mother alerted him to suspicious noises at his elderly grandmother’s house, following an incident from the day before in which someone was trying to force open the garage door.
Éric G. was off-duty at the time of this incident. He said he took his service weapon and went to the house. He said that he believed his grandmother might be prone to hallucinations, which is why he did not want to call emergency services right away.
In a report written by Éric G. after the incident, he described the situation when he first arrived.
“Arriving at his home, I put on my police armband, climbed over the fence, and headed towards the garage, the area that had been damaged and squatted the day before,” reads the report.
The garage, a small outbuilding, contained the individual, Amar Slimani, visibly asleep.
Éric, who was off-duty but wearing his police armband, contacted 17 (the police emergency number) after confirming the man’s presence. He stated, “I announced my position, told him he was being arrested for trespassing, and told him to stay calm, with which he initially seemed to cooperate,” in his report. While on the phone, the situation escalated.
According to Éric, the suspect became increasingly hostile. The man “became increasingly uncooperative and ended up confronting me in a very provocative and threatening manner.” Éric drew his telescopic baton, issuing a final warning:
“I gave him my final order, pointing with my left hand toward the back of the garage. And brandishing the telescopic baton in my right hand, I told him in a strong and firm tone to move away and back off.”
The police officer claims that after a brief stare-down, Slimani grabbed what he mistook for a metal sledgehammer, later identified as a caulking gun, and armed himself.
“He had won the balance of power,” Éric stated in his report.
Fearing for his life, Éric said that he tried to flee but realized he was cornered, as the man was chasing him:
“I immediately made the decision to flee toward the street. During this escape, I realized he was chasing me and that I could no longer escape.”
Éric drew his service firearm, turned, and fired seven times, hitting Slimani five times. The victim died shortly after, despite Éric’s attempt to administer first aid.
In his report, Éric described his immediate actions: “My priority is to help him. I place his body in the lateral safety position and take his pulse: I feel movement. […] I try as best I can to apply what I was taught in police school and during continuing training regarding self-defense. I think the individual is alive but unconscious. I call 17 again to request medical assistance and to be guided. I am still alone.”
Prosecutor initially recommended not to prosecute
Éric G. was immediately placed in police custody and subsequently in pretrial detention, against the initial advice of the prosecutor’s office. Fifteen months later, despite guarantees for his release, including offers of employment and housing outside the department, every request has been rejected.
His mother, Michelle, expressed her despair: “He needed people to welcome him outside the department and a promise of employment. Well, there are two families waiting for him and two employers ready to put him to work!” she swore.
She questioned the severity of his detention: “Why don’t they let him go out with an electronic bracelet? Why are they treating him as if he were the worst serial killer?”
She added: “My son shot to avoid dying, not to kill! What’s the point of persecuting him like this?”
National Rally backs officer
The Algerian’s family is claiming that the Algerian man, who broke into the grandmother’s garage, is the victim of a “racist crime.”
Clearly, the case has become political, with the National Rally backing the officer. Yassine Bouzrou, the lawyer for Amar Slimani’s relatives, confirmed this reality, saying, “We believe it more than ever, now that we know the family has the support of the National Rally.”
The psychological assessment of Éric G. is now being used against him. The report claims he is “rigid” psychologically and expressed little sympathy for the Algerian man.
The lawyer for the Algerian is also going on the attack, saying that continued pretrial detention is “the least we can do.”
The laywer claims that the putty gun did not represent a weapon and that the seven shots fired by the officer showed his determination to kill the Algerian. He said Éric G.’s version of events featured “numerous lies” and is “completely contrary to the truth.” He said that Slimani may have simply been an illegal worker doing “odd jobs” for the grandmother. The officer’s lawyers vehemently deny this claim, saying that the man had no tools when he was found at the scene.
Furthermore, Éric G.’s family completely denies this claim. The officer’s mother said her family has now been destroyed and that it appears their son is the victim of revenge.
“I recognize that their family is destroyed, but what’s the point of destroying ours now? Is this revenge?” the mother asked.
Éric G.’s mother further confirmed her son is struggling in prison. In French prisons, police officers are targets and must be kept in extreme isolation.
“He has dark thoughts, it breaks my heart. He told me that if we weren’t there, he would have hanged himself already,” said Éric G.’s mother.
As for Éric G.’s grandmother, she passed away months ago. She was never told her grandson was incarcerated. This measure was taken by the family to “spare her” the pain, according to the officer’s lawyer, Lienard.
Even if, as the European Right demands, the flow of Muslim immigration were to be completely halted today, the proportion of Muslims in Europe would continue to grow rapidly due to pure demographic logic, as years ago confirmed by Pew Research Center’s “Europe’s Growing Muslim Population”: they are younger, have much higher fertility rates than locals, and the vast majority consider abortion morally unacceptable, so the percentage of Islamic women who have abortions is minimal.
Beyond official statistics, anyone of my generation, or those aged 40 and older, has had the opportunity to witness the contrast in colors and cultures between the neighborhoods where we grew up—whether in Madrid or Berlin—and the image those same neighborhoods present today. Much has been written about the consequences of illegal immigration on security, the saturation of social services, and the loss of Europe’s Christian identity. However, the problem is less frequently approached from the perspective of generational responsibility.
It is a fact that our ancestors thought more about the legacy they would leave for future generations than we do. Their cultural cosmos placed greater value on continuity, rootedness, and tradition, whereas in our time, immediacy, self-interest, and instant results prevail. Perhaps that is why we pay so much attention to the problems that affect us now and so little to the world we will leave to others. The only exception, curiously, is the environmentalist insistence on the consequences of climate change, which keeps millions of people preoccupied with generational cataclysms. Yet it is a diffuse problem, lacking scientific consensus, full of manipulation and demagoguery, and propelled by an ideological current that seeks not so much to save the planet as to achieve, through green hysteria, what communism failed to accomplish in Europe by other means.
Islamization, however, is a real, tangible problem today, and its evolution is so rapid that it should concern our politicians more than the imaginary problems they are usually distracted by. Yet when it is ever addressed in parliaments, it is always linked to the idea of insecurity in the streets, which is understandable but insufficient. Very few parliamentary interventions in Europe appeal to the danger that the Old Continent, which our children and grandchildren will inherit, will become an Islamic prison for Christians. We have forgotten Edmund Burke’s “contract” between generations.
“Society is indeed a contract,” he wrote, “It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” From G. K. Chesterton to Russell Kirk, from Roger Scruton to T. S. Eliot, all who shaped conservative thought based on the Christian heritage of the West insisted on the need to strive for the permanent, to maintain the work built by our ancestors, and on the fundamental responsibility we have: to transmit to those who come after us the transcendent meaning of existence, the way in which this Western society of freedom and prosperity has been formed over the centuries, upon the pillars of the Judeo-Christian origins of our culture.
By addressing only the problems that affect the present—security, social services, women’s freedoms, or the defense of the Christian family—we leave out of the battle a motivation that should be paramount: the responsibility we have to future generations, which is to transmit at least a world as livable as the one bequeathed to us by our ancestors.
The first consequence of this shift in approach to the Islamic invasion of Europe is the urgency to address the demographic problem as a genuine emergency. But this must also be done from a cultural, not a pragmatic, perspective. Many conservative parties are proposing tax exemptions and aid for large families, attempting to encourage a baby boom. These measures are not inappropriate, but they once again focus solely on the urgency of solving a present problem by any means necessary, without considering that, if there is no European cultural renaissance, the birth rate will fall again as soon as subsidies disappear, or when the left returns to power and decides to cancel birth incentives. That is why the pro-natal discourse of European conservative leaders misses the heart of the matter: what nation do you want to leave to your grandchildren? One of the burqa and Sharia? What moral responsibility do you have for the nation you bequeath to your descendants?
There are those who mock such questions, claiming that despite everything, the presence of Muslim immigrants remains a minority in Europe compared to local Christians. The argument for this mockery is fallacious in every respect: the Muslim presence in Europe is a minority… compared to Africa. Islamic culture is far more invasive and defining of the character of a society than the current Christian culture, stripped of all its strength by the disintegrating poison of European laicism; the rates of insecurity resulting from immigration (look at the statistics by nationality of arrests in Europe for violent crimes or sexual assaults) show that even though they are relatively few, they account for enormous percentages of crime, making their real influence on society much greater than the statistics suggest.
Furthermore, the suicidal ‘refugees welcome’ policy, the consequences of which we continue to suffer, was not the brainchild of European Muslim parties—there were none—nor even of the European far left, always ready to support causes that erode the sovereignty of our nations. Rather, it was a joint initiative of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, in which the former will always bear more blame than the latter, from whom ultimately we do not expect much either.
The successful emergence of New Right parties is largely due to the political suicide of European Christian Democrats, which began not with immigration but with their refusal to endorse the Christian origins of Europe in the European Constitution. Emptying Europe of Christianity, as conservative intellectuals warned at the time, would leave no space for laicism and freedoms, but rather for any other cultural wind that could blow decisively. That wind today—driven by Muslim immigration—is the hurricane of the Islamization of Europe.
Without a determined return by all right-wing parties—new and old—to the restoration of Europe’s Christian heritage and the defense of the sovereignty of its constituent nations, focusing more on the Europeans of coming centuries than on solving the problems arising from Islamization with immediate pragmatic fixes, our children and grandchildren will have every right tomorrow to label us The Irresponsible Generation that broke the contract.
Rochdale grooming gang jailed for total of 174 years as ringleader sentenced to 35 years | GMP
Relatives of convicted grooming gang members have been seeking employment at victim support organisations in attempts to access and intimidate survivors, according to charity leaders.
The family members exploit gaps in safeguarding procedures and severe recruitment shortages within the care sector to gain entry to organisations helping sexual exploitation victims.
The infiltration attempts involve family members of offenders who apply for positions when their convicted relatives would be flagged by security checks.
Support charities have reported multiple instances where associates of grooming networks have submitted fraudulent job applications specifically targeting organisations working with survivors of sexual abuse.
Paul O’Rourke, who leads Next Stage Youth Development, revealed his organisation has uncovered five infiltration attempts in the past decade whilst supporting four young women affected by Rochdale grooming networks.
The most recent incident occurred in August 2024, when a grooming gang member’s relative submitted an application that initially passed standard checks.
Mr O’Rourke told the Times: “It was only because one of our vigilant colleagues recognised that member of the family because they were on one of the grooming documentaries on TV.”
The charity subsequently alerted authorities, who confirmed knowledge of the individual despite their absence from shared watchlists.
Seven individuals received substantial prison terms this month following convictions for 50 child sexual offences against two teenagers in Rochdale between 2001 and 2006.
The Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court heard how the men subjected “extremely vulnerable girls” to sustained abuse.
A survivor who experienced exploitation by a separate Rochdale network has shared her story publicly.
Now 25 and a mother, she was 13 when predators targeted her following her mother’s departure from home.
She revealed: “It was terrifying, I was still a child, but I felt trapped in something I didn’t understand and couldn’t get out of.”
The woman described seven years of struggle before breaking free from the network with assistance from Next Stage Youth Development.
Despite escaping, she continues experiencing harassment from individuals connected to her abusers.
She said: “There have been times when people connected to them have tried to get back in touch, trying to see where I was living or what I was doing. They acted like nothing had happened, as if everything was normal.”
She reported ongoing intimidation through social media and malicious rumours.
The survivor added: “I don’t think that kind of fear ever completely goes away, especially when after being controlled for so long. But I am stronger now because of the support I’ve received, and I know how to reach out for help when I need it.”
A trans-identified male who made TikTok content has appeared in court charged with rape and domestic violence. On October 20, Manchester Crown Court heard how Jordan O’Brien, who also goes by Jennifer Nieve, exerted coercive control over his partner and sexually abused her.
According to court documents shared by a former friend, O’Brien was charged with six counts of sexual abuse, including rape, assault by penetration, strangulation, coercive control, and threatening to assault the victim with a weapon. According to the court records, the offenses took place between June and December of 2022.
O’Brien is described as having exerted terrifying control over his victim, monitoring her cellular device, destroying her possessions, and being verbally abusive towards her. Among the more serious convictions, O’Brien was found to have raped his victim with a dildo, strangled her, and threatened her with a knife.
On Friday, October 20, O’Brien was found guilty of four out of the six counts for domestic abuse and sexual assault during a hearing at Manchester Crown Court.
O’Brien had amassed over 60,000 followers on social media for videos he made about identifying as transgender, and, judging by comments made on TikTok, had been receiving gifts from his fans. One respondent stated that they had come to regret spending over £100 on O’Brien after learning about the charges against him.
Despite identifying as transgender, O’Brien claimed to hold “controversial opinions” within the community, and affirmed that he believed humans could not change biological sex. In one video, he stated: “I am a genetic male. I was born male. I will always be male. I do not think it is possible – actually, I know it is not possible to go from male to female. You can present more feminine, you can be a feminine male, and you can be born in the wrong body – in my opinion, not scientific fact.”
Since his conviction, multiple former associates of O’Brien have come forward to express their outrage at the situation and reveal more details about O’Brien’s history.
One of his former friends, a woman who goes by the name Daisy Mae, came forward with an apology for the victims while revealing that she had been aware that O’Brien had been running private chats with minors since 2020.
“I’m so sorry to every victim!! I knew this was happening since January 2020. The amount of kids who came and told me Jen was in private Snapchat groups with kids that are 14/15 … I hope you can rest now you have justice,” Mae wrote in a TikTok caption. In the same video, Mae stated that O’Brien was a father of four, and suggested that he had previously served time in prison before.
O’Brien’s former roommate, a drag queen who uses the moniker Charli Angel, also took to TikTok to condemn O’Brien for his crimes. Angel, who attended the trial at Manchester Crown Court, said he had been misled about the serious nature of the charges against him, while referring to O’Brien with feminine pronouns.
“I’ve just been at the Manchester Crown Court for the past three days – Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. A while ago Jennifer told me she had a court case coming up, and she really downplayed the charges against her. She said that she’d been wrongly accused, that she would never do such a thing, and I believed her.”
“A few months ago I realized she had a five-day trial at Manchester Crown Court and I realized it wasn’t a minor thing, it was a major, serious thing… I’ve not ever been told the whole truth of who she is, what she’s accused of, or what actually happened… She’s not the person that I thought she was.”
Former roommate Angel added that after the jury found O’Brien guilty on 4 of the 6 counts against him, the judge stated that he would be “put away for a long custodial sentence.” He is set to be sentenced in January of 2026, and has been remanded to custody until then.
Bishop Marian Eleganti K-TV Katholisches Fernsehen/YouTube
Bishop Marian Eleganti has criticized the Vatican for installing a prayer carpet for Muslims in the Vatican Apostolic Library.
In an exclusive interview, Bishop Eleganti told LifeSiteNews that “Islam is naturally expansive.”
“As soon as a Muslim prays there, somehow in the minds of the faithful—I’m not entirely sure about this—but I wouldn’t be surprised if it then becomes a kind of rooting and foothold, an outpost of the coming dominance that Islam naturally always strives for.”
“Islam wants absolute dominance; it is inherently intolerant,” he continued. “It has caused Christianity to disappear everywhere.”
“Conversely, one would never allow us to set up a chapel in Mecca, the holy site of Islam itself, where we could celebrate Holy Mass,” Eleganti noted.
Earlier this month, the Vatican Apostolic Library provided Muslims with a room featuring a prayer carpet.
“Of course, some Muslim scholars have asked us for a room with a carpet for praying and we have given it to them,” Giacomo Cardinali, vice prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library, toldLa Repubblica.
The disclosure that Muslims can pray at the Vatican Apostolic Library has sparked an outcry from Catholic commentators, who have suggested that the permission signals religious indifferentism, ambivalence about its own Catholic identity, and ideological surrender to Islam.
Bishop Eleganti said that Islam is “a religion that we believe is not really inspired by God, but is deliberately conceived in an anti-Christian sense.”
“It’s a total polemic against Jesus’ divine sonship and against his absolute significance as mediator between [man and] God the Father.”
He stressed that Islam “denies the Trinity” and “Christians worldwide suffer persecution at the hands of Muslims.”
“I think it just shows that even in the Vatican, the people who allow and support this have, in my opinion, a completely surreal, naive relationship with Islam and interfaith dialogue,” the Swiss bishop stated.
He said that with actions like these, the Vatican is portraying “a purely emotional religion: we are friendly, we are open, we are tolerant, we have a welcoming culture, we are open to dialogue, etc.”
“It’s a kind of emotional religion that no longer takes the truth and difference seriously, because there is only unity in truth. Everything else is an illusion.”
He criticized the Vatican for trying “to achieve unity with heterodox religions without asking the question of truth.”
He said that Muslims have “large mosques in Rome” and that there is no need for them to have a prayer room in the Vatican.
“Why do they have to perform their prayers in the Vatican? Nobody understands that, and I don’t think it’s good.”
Award-winning broadcaster, writer, and former politician Sir Trevor Phillips has said that Muslim grooming gangs have targeted “tens of thousands” of White children across Britain, describing the abuse as “industrial” in scale and protected by political fear.
Speaking to Times Radio, Phillips said the ongoing grooming gangs inquiry has been hindered by authorities’ reluctance to confront the link between race and sexual predation.
“What’s coming together here is a really horrid combination that nobody really ever wants to talk about — the intersection of race and sexual predation,” he said. “Let’s be honest, a lot of this is bringing those two things together in an unpleasant way.”
🇬🇧 “We’re talking about tens of thousands. It’s industrial. These children are chosen because they are White.”
An important shift in the language being used by mainstream broadcasters in relation to Asian grooming gangs operating in the U.K. pic.twitter.com/Ps6D0eyQd4
Phillips accused successive governments and local Labour councils of failing to act for fear of inflaming community tensions. “The government clearly never wanted these two things to be put together,” he said. “Much of this took place in areas run by local Labour councils, and the authorities who ought to be watching over this — stopping it, monitoring it — did nothing.”
He said that, unlike other forms of child abuse, these crimes were not hidden. “The difference with this grooming gangs thing is that everybody knows. It happens in public. The girls are first attracted by young men from within those communities — flash cars, cigarettes, drugs — and then they’re passed around amongst older men,” Phillips said.
Drawing on decades of reporting on child abuse, he added that the victims were deliberately chosen “because they are White and because they are outside the community of the groomers.”
Phillips, who won a Royal Television Society award for a 1988 documentary on pedophiles, said this form of abuse stood apart due to its vast scale and the complicity of public institutions. “These people know that they are protected,” he said. “They’re protected politically, by social workers, by local police, because everybody says we don’t want to ramp up tensions in the community.”
The remarks come as the government’s ongoing inquiry into grooming gangs faces criticism for being too limited in scope. The investigation follows revelations such as the 2014 Jay Report, which found that more than 1,400 girls were abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, often by groups of men of predominantly Pakistani heritage. Similar networks were later uncovered in Rochdale, Telford, Oxford, and dozens of other towns, primarily across England.
Phillips warned against attempts to downplay the racial and cultural dimensions of the scandal, calling it “completely different” from other forms of child exploitation. “This could not be more different,” he said. “That’s the scandal here.”
Me and the other survivors have come together to speak about the main issues that lead to us resigning and we have responded to the home secretary's statment last night with conditions that would need to be met to ensure that this inquiry runs smoothly for us to consider… pic.twitter.com/l6JTzHO811
In recent months, the government’s inquiry into grooming gangs has faced renewed controversy after several victims resigned from its advisory panel, saying their voices were being ignored and that the investigation had become “toothless.” Former participants accused officials of narrowing the inquiry’s scope to avoid confronting the ethnic and religious factors of the abuse.
Rape gang survivor Ellie Reynolds tells the truth about real racism in Britain. pic.twitter.com/jHgbbYTKZX
At a press conference with Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage on Monday, one rape gang survivor, Ellie Reynolds, told journalists, “It’s taken the media decades to recognize grooming gangs that are coming over and raping our children because they are White.”
In a joint letter addressed to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood last week, four survivors who resigned from the Victims and Survivors Liaison Panel said they had been “dismissed, silenced, and called liars” by government officials, including Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips, whom they accused of publicly contradicting their accounts.
They said they would only consider rejoining the inquiry if Phillips resigned, if survivors were consulted on the appointment of an independent chair, and if the inquiry’s focus remained strictly on grooming gangs and group-based child sexual exploitation. The survivors said their conditions represented the “bare minimum” required to restore trust, warning that without them, the process risked becoming “yet another exercise in protecting the reputations of failed institutions rather than seeking truth and justice for victims.”
Twenty years ago, in October 2005, two young boys, Zyed and Bouna, sought refuge in an electrical transformer while trying to escape a police check and died there. In response, violent riots broke out in Clichy, in the Paris suburbs, before spreading throughout France and causing chaos for three long weeks. Since then, these events, which were unprecedented at the time, have been repeated and will continue to be repeated: the lessons of this episode have not been learned, condemning France to relive an increasingly intense and violent scenario of urban warfare.
The events took place in Clichy-sous-Bois on October 27th, 2005: two teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, were electrocuted in an electrical substation while trying to escape a police check.
Car on fire in the Grande Rue de Sèvres on November 3, 2005, during the urban riots. A.J., CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Three days later, with unrest already breaking out locally in protest, a second event sparked widespread violence: a tear gas grenade was thrown at the entrance to a mosque in Clichy by police officers who had been targeted by projectiles. The riots then spread to the entire department of Seine-Saint-Denis and, two days later, to towns throughout France, to the point that a state of emergency had to be declared on November 8th and then extended for three months. It was not until November 17th that calm returned—after a wave of nearly 3,000 arrests, three French victims, and countless acts of damage to infrastructure and property, particularly burned cars.
In France, these three weeks of riots left a lasting impression because they were the most significant in France since May 1968. They remained unparalleled in Europe until the 2011 riots in England. Today, analysis of the spiral of violence that gripped France shows that the news of the two teenagers’ deaths sparked the unrest but quickly took a back seat. The grenade attack on the mosque in Clichy fuelled the violence, especially after the then-minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, denied any responsibility or fault on the part of the police.
At the time, the entire political class seized on the case in an attempt to find causes, explanations, and those responsible. The Left developed an offensive discourse of a culture of excuse: the explosion in the suburbs was explained by the resentment of the immigrant populations living there, who were said to suffer daily humiliation, segregation, and contempt from native French people. Socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn blamed “the reduction in subsidies” and “the dismantling of prevention” in poor neighbourhoods. Lilian Thuram, a member of the 1998 World Cup-winning soccer team and a member of the High Council for Integration, declared on Tuesday, November 8, 2005, that “before talking about insecurity, we should perhaps talk about social justice.” With the force of this argument, the troublemakers become the first victims.
The statements made by the ruling political class—President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin—reveal the discomfort of leaders who did not assume their role as representatives of state authority. Their statements were mixed with confused arguments about “respect for the law” and “the fight against illegal immigration,” but also the need to develop social housing throughout the country.
The ethnic dimension of the riots sparked heated debate. On the side of the rioters, there was a strong sense of identity, stemming both from their origins and their shared feeling of being “excluded from society.” The foreign press sometimes uses much clearer terms than the French press to describe what is happening: this is indeed an ethnic war that dare not speak its name. The rioters are mainly young people of African origin from the latest waves of immigration to France. While 95% of the rioters arrested are French nationals, the majority are ‘from immigrant backgrounds,’ with just over half coming from North African families. This ethnic dimension, which is quantifiable and real, refutes the discourse of the Left, which sees the inhabitants of the suburbs as nothing more than social outcasts: many pockets of deepest poverty in France can be found in the countryside, not in the neighbourhoods that benefit from “urban policy.” Yet it is never these people who rebel, loot, and destroy.
Twenty years later, the wound has still not healed and the lessons have still not been learned. The riots of June 2023, which followed the death of young Nahel, killed after refusing to comply with a police check, were a repeat of the events of 2005. The spectre of urban warfare is becoming more apparent, but the blame machine—blaming white people, the police, racist France—continues to run at full speed.
But that’s not all. Today in France, everyone knows the names “Zyned” and “Bouna,” just as everyone remembers the death of “Nahel.” But no one remembers Jean-Claude Irvoas, Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec, and Alain Lambert—French victims of the riots whose memory is not worth celebrating. Jean-Claude Irvoas was killed in a lynching in front of his wife and daughter next to a streetlight he was photographing for his work because he was mistaken for a police officer. Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec was also killed in a lynching for trying to put out a fire started by rioters. Alain Lambert died of asphyxiation as a result of a fire caused by these riots.
As MEP Marion Maréchal pointed out, “While these riots are still celebrated today as a ‘social awakening,’ let us remember that they were one of the most violent explosions of anti-French hatred our country has ever known.”
Some right-wing outlets looked into the fate of the third boy involved in the Clichy tragedy, who had also climbed into the transformer but survived. Muhittin Altun has racked up a string of convictions, including two suspended prison sentences for acts of violence and one year in prison for robbery with violence. According to the lawyer of one of his victims, “He thinks he’s an icon; he considers himself untouchable.” There is a kind of symbol in his fate. Meanwhile, consumed by guilt and refusing to call a spade a spade, France continues to fight the wrong battles and is paving the way for a new explosion that will, overnight, set the country ablaze.
A young Afghan male has been arrested on suspicion of murder after three people were stabbed in Uxbridge, West London, on Monday afternoon.
London’s Metropolitan Police tasered and arrested a 22-year-old Afghan male after a triple stabbing in Midhurst Gardens, Uxbridge, London on Monday evening. The man was arrested on suspicion of murder and of attempted murder.
BREAKING: Police have confirmed that the suspect arrested for the triple stabbing in Uxbridge, Hillingdon, is an Afghan national.
London Ambulance Brigade treated three people with stab wounds at the scene. A 49-year-old man died of his wounds at the scene. A 45-year-old man was described as having suffered life-changing, but not life-threatening wounds. A 17-year-old boy was also injured.
No further information about the identity of the suspect or any particular motive for the mass stabbing has been released by police, who say they are urgently investigating the matter.
🇬🇧🔴 "Someone's been stabbed over here. Someone's been stabbed here. Babe, I can't take it."
One man has died and two others, including a minor, were injured in a stabbing spree on Monday evening in Hillingdon, west London.
Local police chief Jill Horsfall asked that anyone with knowledge of the attack to come forward. Referring to discussion on the internet about the stabbings, the officer instructed the public to disregard what they may have read on social media, and not to “share sensitive footage”.
A migrant at makeshift camp where homeless asylum seekers sleep rough in tents along Grand Canal in Dublin, Ireland, 22 May 2024.Screengrab youtube
History moves in cycles, sometimes brief ones. The following headline (bold-type in the original) which appeared in last Saturday’s The Irish Times is a marker of one such cycle.
“How social media drove the Citywest riots. Far-right agitators, retweeted by prominent international figures including billionaire Elon Musk, used social media networks to foment anger.”
No mention of the actual reason for the riots: the alleged rape of a ten-year-old Irish girl by an illegal African immigrant at Citywest, a hotel-cum-asylum centre outside Dublin, shortly after the the murder of Vadym Davydenko a Ukrainian youth fleeing the war, by another African immigrant.
Of course, to suggest that there was a context to the riots would have been implicitly racist: how to avoid that implication?
Simple: Blame a rich white man and invoke the glorious spirit of the George Floyd riots 0f 2020!
Ireland had already tasted the glories of multiculturalism two years ago, when an Algerian illegal immigrant knifed a group of little girls emerging from an Irish language class, triggering riots of the usually brainless kind.
However, these turned out to be surprisingly useful, providing a splendid distraction for the leftist media who could blame “the far-right” for them. One journalist rather inventively even detected the fell hand of the Ku Klux Klan, thereby meaning that the Algerian could be forgotten, as this gallant duly was.
So too has the real culprit for the visible decay of Irish life, Angela Merkel.
It was she who in 2015 did to the EU’s walls what her fellow Germans had done to the Berlin Wall in 1989, by allowing some two million “Syrians” into her homeland.
Whereas the earlier breach allowed freedom to flood east, her initiative transformed the demographics of Europe.
Armies of young men with no connection to Syria underwent a Damascene conversion, suddenly discovering a much-cherished, inner Syrianess, and so Syrian was what they promptly became.
In The Year of Moving Easily, millions of migrants poured northward and westward towards Europe’s borders: Preferable destination, Germany, but since that was filling up quickly, it also made sense also to try other sucker-lands.
Detect a note of cynicism there? Clever you!
Ireland has been the prime-victim of Merkeldemographics (not just Germans can concoct long words, you know).
Yet even now, she is never blamed by the Irish for the disasters befalling their country.
Why? That would be “misogynistic”, and Ireland’s many government-financed non-governmental organisations would never coalesce against a woman.
But to do so against a white South Afican and an avowed friend of Israel, amid the lingering vapours of apartheid and the fresh and more recent and toxic ones of Gaza, why not? Nothing too explicit, of course, while being irrefutably implicit!
Asylum-centres anywhere — like windfarms — are usually proof that the aboriginals are powerless, and can be easily imposed on.
In Ireland, asylum centres are A) Unwelcome B) Privately-run C) Government-financed D) Enormously profitable.
But more relevantly, asylum-centre (again like windfarms) are virtuous. What? You object? You crazy? You want to burn in hell for all eternity?
Since Merkel’s Annus Mirabilis, asylum seekers, refugees, call them what you like, have managed to find permeable borders all over Europe, even in those foolishly cocky Schengen lands.
Forty years ago last June, they agreed to abolish all border checkpoints, or even the requirement to slow down when entering a new country. Why bother? We’re all good Europeans, aren’t we? What could possibly go wrong?
Lots, as Europe soon discovered, and Ireland most emphatically did, in large part because its powerful left-wing/feminist axis within the Irish parliament, the Dail, argued that it would be racist not to accept asylum seekers’ assertions at face value, before giving them loads of money and free-medical care, and accommodation.
The Dublin Agreement (oh what an ironic term!) ruled that asylum-seekers must seek asylum (the clue is in the name) in the first EU country they set foot in.
However, since most EU accords are as elastic as a she-sparrow’s morals, that stipulation soon perished.
Soon migrants went house-hunting according to the stupidity, or the generosity — in EU-speak (you speak EU-speak?) the two words have identical meanings — of the jurisdictions under review. (Not easy for us migrants, is it? Windmills here, matadors there! If only these wretched countries would issue brochures, like their tourist boards do!)
But perhaps nowhere has been as idiotic as Ireland, where the culturally-dominant Liberals compare every illegal arriving there with their own migrants from the 1840s Famine, which killed a million people.
This is a hard act to follow, but at least these Liberals had the ace of moral spades in their hands.
What? You want to limit the numbers of poor hungry refugees coming to Ireland? But Germany, the land of the Holocaust, is going to absorb two million Arabs, or two million something-or-others! Doesn’t that make you feel ashamed?
As we now know, Ireland was culturally incapable of either absorbing or assimilating large numbers of immigrants (as is everybody, but that’s another story).
Ireland had no experience of large-scale immigration, and the Irish state did not have the bureaucracy or the mindset to cope with it, any more than Switzerland could cope with a tsunami or Holland with a plague of rabid Yetis.
So, a passport-scam between Nigeria, the Congo and Ireland outwitted immigration at Dublin airport for years.
Recycled passports enabled an endless procession of illegal immigrants to arrive in Ireland before the same passports were posted back “home”, enabling others to make the same journey.
Once in Ireland, access to the absurdly generous welfare state was easily achieved by the safe-crackers that run the immigration industry.
All for a fee of course, which (equally of course) will be paid over the longer term by the Irish taxpayer.
So the liberal elites have triumphed.
The walls have been breached, and Europe’s indoctrinated judges will ensure they stay that way.
The dates of European brief era of freedom are now clear: 1989-2015.
The young woman who was freed by the earlier date was also the she-Joshua who blew down Europe’s walls during the latter year.
Quite an achievement, as one cycle comes to an end, and the next begins.
