Really, it was a social experiment. Put thousands of 18-year-olds together in an enclosed space, living in cramped flats, seeing the same randomly chosen people every day, with no clubs or societies or bars or clubs. And as one person put it, “the social experiment went really badly for most people”.
Libby Elliott, Maisie Outhart and Ella Robinson in the Manchester Mill, June 25th 2023
Along with other mental health professionals, I have been hugely concerned about young adults’ well-being during and since the pandemic. The failure of policymakers to acknowledge and adequately weigh up the potential for harm when planning public health measures, and the failure of many professionals working in education and young people’s health to adequately advocate for them has been shocking. I mostly work with children and teens (I have written about thoughts about these younger age groups during the pandemic previously). My professional experiences since March 2020 are in line with what one would expect if you have not been living under a rock and are aware of the wealth of evidence that has emerged, describing the terrible impact of the pandemic response on children and young people.
A UCL study published this week is only the latest to conclude that what was perpetrated on the young by the U.K. Government in 2020-2022 was nothing short of a disaster: “The impact of the pandemic will have detrimental consequences for children and young people in the short and long-term, with many not yet visible,” the report said. “It will have continuing consequences for their future in terms of professional life trajectories, healthy lifestyles, mental well-being, educational opportunities, self-confidence and more besides.”
Given that there were voices during those years trying hard to alert Government, media and society as a whole to the obvious harms of public health policy that was myopically obsessed with a disease that did not impact children while imposing restrictions which evidently would hurt them, it has been a depressing – and frustrating – time.
I work in private practice. During the pandemic, due to the difficulty accessing services and increased need in this age group, in addition to my usual clientele I also had a number of student clients. They described new or exacerbated psychological distress developing in the context of the extraordinary circumstances in which they found themselves. I heard various upsetting accounts and personal experiences. I was alert to the incredible pressure these young people were under and how difficult it was to support them as I would like, given that many of the the behavioural strategies I would be suggesting were impossible due to restrictions.
In November 2020, during the second national lockdown, I watched students at Manchester University tearing down barriers that had been erected apparently to ‘keep them in’ or maybe (as the University suggested in a hasty public apology in the response to what was quickly turning into a PR disaster) to keep people out? It doesn’t really matter – in the crazy world of 2020, it was probably both. The important thing was that young people were actually effectively being barricaded in their place of residence by the university authorities, in the name of public health. It was unbelievable. I watched those students in the grainy images taken on mobile phones and wondered anew what life must be like for these young people, locked up in their Halls of Residence, newly away from home, many with vulnerabilities. They were deprived of most of the normal experiences of university life and were now navigating such extraordinary social circumstances. I cast my mind back to my university days and imagined the dynamics that would be at play. I thought about the psychological difficulties experienced by my young adult clients and wondered how students such as these might manage in these circumstances. What would it actually be like to be locked in halls with stressed people you hardly knew, with no outlet and no idea of when this would end, with all the usual social and sexual dynamics and academic pressures of student life at play. It seemed to me these students had been placed in an intolerable position, but that few in Government, media and society seemed to care much.
This week I gained belated insight into the world behind the barricades at the Fallowfield Campus in 2020. The article appeared on a local news website in Manchester, and is written by three students who were first and second year students at the University of Manchester in Autumn 2020. It is a comprehensive description of the extraordinary circumstantial, relational and social pressures that U.K. students were under during the pandemic and reads like a Halls of Residence Lord of the Flies. I would like to think that Gavin Williamson and Matt Hancock might read it too, and that Baroness Hallett and her team might add it to their reading lists and reflect on the horrors within. I won’t hold my breath.
These students provide unique insight into the world which was born when students were “stuck in our rooms all day with no outlet”, except for the illegal parties “which mattered a lot” because there was nothing else.
Whereas previous generations of students would meet every day at lectures and at the library, we sat in our rooms accessing our reading online. Lectures were video calls, some of which people slept through with their cameras turned off. By second term, you could book a socially distanced slot for an hour in the library.
Imagine being 18 years old, living in flats or on corridors with people you hadn’t chosen to live with and were just getting to know, but “all of a sudden you were with them every moment of the day”, with no escape.
What quickly developed was a deeply cliquey and reactive social life where you would panic if you weren’t invited to every single little thing. Everyone’s lives were so restricted and so enclosed and so comparable. You could hear the parties. You knew who was hanging out with whom.
This was a world in which it was “all the normal uni stuff, but… extreme”, a world of “destructive social dynamics”, of intense social hierarchy (unsurprisingly favouring the rich London kids, the good-looking rugby boys, the DJs and anyone who knew them), sexual dynamics (definitely not favouring the girls), social exclusion embedded by the lockdown and after by the ‘Rule of Six’ (“Social Exclusion round two”, as the students put it) and compounded by anxious obsession with social media and intense fear of missing out. A world in which you were “beholden to do what your flatmates wanted to do”, which often meant drugs, which unsurprisingly became a much bigger part of the student experience during the pandemic. One student’s main memory of her first year was “the bitching”:
It felt like a year-long summer camp. It was so, so enclosed. Getting irritated with your flatmates is normal. But normally you have an outlet – places to go and other people to speak to. Plus, there was much less to talk about – people didn’t have funny stories about weird guys they had met or sports matches their friends had played in. All news was flat news. Everything was internal. You’re in a boiling pot.
You don’t have be to a psychologist to recognise the utter toxicity of this environment and to imagine the mechanisms by which many young people’s mental health deteriorated. You just have to remember what it is like to be 18, and apply a little empathic imagination.
Readers may also want to remember that after months during which students had been denied access to normal university activities, socialising and in-person lectures and had been subjected to enforced self-isolation in box rooms (whilst paying for this privilege), they were at one point facing the anxiety-inducing prospect of a two-week mandatory isolation in halls of residence over Christmas 2020, with Matt Hancock refusing to rule out this ordeal. Readers may also remember that students were encouraged to return to the reopened universities in September 2020, and then blamed for the rise in cases that autumn, prompting the Matt Hancock infamous “Don’t Kill Granny” comment. In the words of an opinion piece in the student Varsity magazine in April 2021, in 2020-2021 students were being stigmatised as “antisocial disease vectors”. In February 2021, universities were neglected in the ‘roadmap out of lockdown’, with theme parks and zoos and hospitality taking precedence, and leaving many students with lingering restrictions and ongoing uncertainty for longer than most within the general population.
There is now an entirely predictable plethora of evidence about the deterioration of young people’s mental health during the pandemic – including specifically students.
In 2020, eight students’ lives were lost in the U.K. during the first month of the autumn term through suicide or drugs-related deaths. In the words of the father of 19 year-old University of Manchester student Finn Kitson, who died in student halls in October 2020, “If you lock down young people because of COVID-19 with little support, then you should expect that they suffer severe anxiety”.
The student voices in the Mill article provide useful context to this mental health disaster and the associated tragic loss of life. It is also a useful reminder of the behaviour and attitudes of ministers, policymakers and university officials, who imposed these harmful measures and who now seem surprised by the entirely predictable consequences – and increasingly try to distance themselves from them. As Dame Sally Davies, Former Chief Medical Officer and now Master of Trinity College Cambridge, shed crocodile tears at the Covid Inquiry last week – stating that lockdowns (which she supported) had “damaged a generation”, that children and young people were still suffering the effects of lockdowns and that she had found it “awful watching young people suffering” – I was reminded of the account of life at Trinity College during the pandemic given to me by a client. She was taking legal action against the college due to her psychological distress and her belief that the college had failed to allow reasonable adjustments to accommodate her anxiety and depression when the enforcing of COVID-19 guidance. She described the regime presided over by Dame Sally as “one of the strictest in all Oxford and Cambridge colleges”. She told me that students were “strongly encouraged” to stay in their room at all times, to wear masks at all times when leaving their room – including to go to the bathroom – both indoors and outdoors on College property (including on the fields at the back of the college), and that these rules were enforced via CCTV surveillance and porters patrolling the stairways to ensure students did not associate with those outside of their ‘household’ (which could mean as few as four people living in rooms off a single staircase).
I also remembered the email from Dame Sally, addressed to students and reported in the Varsity in February 2021, urging students to “stay at home unless they face imminent danger” and to “join our wonderful silent majority of students who are resiliently getting on with studies and life at home”.
The riposte that young people are ‘resilient’ was used frequently during the pandemic to minimise the impact of devastating social restrictions that interfered with their ability to engage in the normal developmental tasks of childhood and young adulthood and the activities (social connection, social engagement, sport and exercise) that we know are essential for good mental health. The full impact of these extraordinary measures and events on children and young people’s wellbeing, development and future is yet to be fully understood but the indications so far (in terms of public services, mental health, physical health, education and young people’s long-term prospects – particularly for the most vulnerable and socioeconomically deprived) are not good, as the UCL study confirms.
It would be nice to think that, at some point, some of those responsible will recognise that this crisis was avoidable and predictable, and that young people – who were never at any significant risk of COVID-19, and whose safeguarding and nurturing is the responsibility of all of us – were spectacularly failed. I hope that people are held to account – in Government and in universities – and that we will resolve as a society never to subject our young people to such a catastrophic social experiment ever again.
Dr. Zenobia Storah is a Child and Adolescent Clinical Psychologist who currently serves as Clinical Lead at the Knowsley Neurodevelopmental Pathway in Liverpool.
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No contribution should mean no benifits ..simple !
No. I do not want to see us (the UK) descend to this. Certainly there should be minimum benefits. We should provide some alternative to missing meals and sleeping rough.
A minimum level of support with additional support for those willing to put some effort into trying to rise out of poverty.
Updated to add: something like an updated version of the old workhouse system. Not something you’d want unless you were desperate.
The UK benefits system is the problem. In order to discourage the third world invaders we should simply refuse access to the benefits system in total – no free housing, no free health care, no jihadi allowance.
We have to reclaim our country. It is not the responsibility of hard working, indigenous British people to subsidise the third world. Our ancestors worked hard to make this country a world leader and we should not allow treasonous politicians to take it from us nor gift it to muslims.
The UK benefits system is the problem.
Yes.
Our benefits system should not attract anyone to get into a boat in France to get to the UK.
Well, it certainly doesn’t, as people who’d go to Germany instead would get more money (and generally, more of everything else as well) and would need to spend significantly less of it to cover their daily needs. It’s probably more people desiring to get to West Pakistan because this seems more congenial to them.
But they are fleeing a Warzone….France!
I agree totally. But are we clinging to the lifeboat called Britain that is sinking under the weight of mass migration? ——-I am almost accepting my fate. Britain is not a Nation anymore. It is simply a Region.
If you force your way into this country and then expect to be fed, watered and housed it amounts to breaking and entering and theft and includes extortion with the examples above. If there were no benefits from forcing your way in, this Trojan Horse of humanity would stop. We are not responsible for Islamic countries being poor.
Another disincentive would be remove any chance of gaining British citizenship (for life) if you force your way in from a safe neighbouring country especially one that borders another safe country. However, we are up against the UN.
Open borders satisfy Article 13 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that all people have the inherent the right to enter, exit, move around in, and live in any country they choose.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-open-borders
And…
“The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation.”
UN’s Commission on Global Governance
And…
REPLACEMENT MIGRATION: IS IT A SOLUTION TO
DECLINING AND AGEING POPULATION?
United Nations Population Division
https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/unpd-egm_200010_un_2001_replacementmigration.pdf
Here is one particular paragraph from this uninvited ‘solutioning’ from the UN:
“Except for the United States, the numbers of migrants needed to maintain the size of the total population (scenario III) are considerably larger than those assumed in the medium variant of the United Nations projections (scenario I). In Italy, for example, the total number of migrants is 12.6 million (or 251 thousand per year) in scenario III versus 0.3 million (or 6 thousand per year) in scenario I. For the European Union, the respective numbers are 47 million versus 13 million (or 949 thousand per year versus 270 thousand per year).”
The issue for many third world countries is lack of power and specifically electricity. If poor countries could provide their populations with electricity it would allow them to modernise and industrialise. They could produce clean water on tap – literally. They could build factories and take people off subsistence living. They could provide medical care and not the sort inflicted on us these last four years.
God knows where our Foreign Aid budget goes because significantly we never here stories of the benefits to local peoples of all this taxpayer cash but it sure as hell isn’t building power stations. Why is this the case? The short, brutal answer is that poverty and hunger provides for a more productive labour force. Mines are not going to be dug if nice factory jobs become available which pay living wages.
As a compliance model hunger and poverty work a treat and clearly the DD’s have decided that the model needs to be reintroduced to the Developed world after some population reduction measures have been implemented.
Understandably Third World citizens have decided that they have had enough of their own shit holes and will move to countries which have decided to give them money, housing and health care simply as a thank you for turning up and no questions asked. Hence, as I have stated previously, we must turn the benefits tap off.
It would be nice to imagine that soon a western politician would speak on these issues and positive measures could be taken to stop the mass movement of people because the longer it continues the greater the disasters and miseries that will ensue.
The foreign aid budget is abused just as much as other projects paid out of our taxes. I read in here the other day about either India or Pakistan receiving foreign aid from the U.K. whilst they are squandering money on their space projects. Ridiculous.
Your first paragraph is exactly what I have been saying on DS since I joined here nearly 2 years ago. What you say is totally correct, but the reason the third world is not getting electricity is because there is nothing more horrifying to western “environmentalists”, politicians etc than people in the third world having the same standard of living as us, because to do that they would need to use the same fuels as we did —-coal oil and gas, and this is a finite resource. So we fob them off with some money for turbines and solar panels and build them a school or a water facility to keep their mouths shut. There are still one billion people in the world with no electricity and telling them they cannot use their coal and gas is really telling them they cannot have electricity.—-This is a diabolical disgrace and it shames the GREEN parasites. It also means these people will do anything to get away from a life of abject misery and getting to Europe and the UK is their main goal in life.
The number of people with access to electricity has been steadily increasing so that over 90% of the World is now connected in some way. The UN points out that 675 million people still lacked access to electricity in 2021, mostly located in Low Development Countries.
(https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2023/Goal-07/#:~:text=The%20global%20electricity%20access%20rate,2021%2C%20mostly%20located%20in%20LDCs.)
However, there is this paragraph:
“The world continues to advance towards sustainable energy targets – but not fast enough. At the current pace, about 660 million people will still lack access to electricity and close to 2 billion people will still rely on polluting fuels and technologies for cooking by 2030.”
The UN have cleverly tied access to electricity with renewables as if that is where everyone else gets their electricity while the last sentence unsubtly implies that the polluting fuels and technologies must be non renewables. I’m sure you know that those polluting fuels and technologies are wood and dung, often burnt indoors and that are responsible for most of the world’s deaths from poor air quality.
Also all the pandemic measures had hugely detrimental effects on poorer countries particularly in Africa. And the UN/WHO would be quite happy to do it all again, as well as pushing expensive energy to meet Net-Zero targets.
How about this gem?
https://stopthesethings.com/2022/05/25/solar-showdown-indian-villagers-reject-greenpeaces-useless-fake-electricity/
“The wind and solar obsessed in the first world are quite prepared to ensure the World’s poorest stay that way. With economic development agencies peddling ridiculously expensive solar panels – seen as ‘fake electricity’ by those lumbered with it – and forcing tinpot governments to sign up to costly and pointless wind and/or solar power schemes, the ratio of haves to have-nots is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.
Eco-zealots have attempted to ram wind and solar power down the throats of Third World governments under the auspices of saving the planet and purportedly with the purpose of dragging millions out of poverty. But it never takes their targets long to work out that wind and solar power are both insanely expensive and hopelessly unreliable; sitting in the dark, night after night, generally does the trick…
While some villagers expressed optimism about Dharnai, India, solar facility in 2014, others protested it saying they didn’t want “fake” electricity, according to Mongabay-India. At the time, Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, applauded the project and told locals that coal power would diminish over time while solar power would always be around.
“In the first three years, it worked well and people were using it. But after three years the batteries were exhausted and it was never repaired,” Ravi Kumar, a local shopkeeper, told Mongabay-India. “So now, while the solar rooftops, CCTV cameras and other infrastructure are intact, the whole system has become a showpiece for us.”
“No one uses solar power anymore here,” he continued. “The glory of Dharnai has ended.”
The number of solar connections in Dharnai and surrounding neighborhoods with access to the solar grid fell from 255 in 2014 to 120 in 2016, a Nalanda University study published in 2020 concluded. The study blamed high prices associated with solar power and the grid’s unreliability — villagers were warned not to use high power appliances like televisions and refrigerators — on the decreasing connections.
“We left solar connection after using it for one year. How can poor people like us pay such amounts of money?” an anonymous local told Nalanda University. “They used to give electricity only for two hours. During rain, they do not use to give electric supply and so does during the fog in the winter.”
Dharnai was eventually connected to the region’s coal-powered grid in 2016, giving villagers access to a much cheaper and more reliable power source, Mongabay-India reported. Coal power also allowed them to use high-power appliances.
Greenpeace apparently stopped posting about the Dharnai solar farm on social media and in blog posts back in 2015. The group didn’t respond to requests for comment from TheDCNF.
Very good and extensive comment. I have also been making similar comments over the last 2 years here on the DS and for longer periods of time elsewhere. In a world of 8 billion people and finite fossil fuel resources in the ground the UN takes it upon itself to control the worlds wealth and resources, but people should not just take your word or my word for it. We remember the words of Ottmar Edenhoffer of the UN who said a few years ago “One has to free oneself from the illusion that climate polices are environmental policies anymore. We redistribute the worlds wealth by climate policy”. ——–So the wealthy west has to cease using fossil fuels and the developing world might not get them at all. ——-We are to be coerced into Net Zero, costing us astronomical sums of money with the junk science of a climate crisis as the excuse and the third world are to be fobbed off with turbines and solar panels as if we are doing them a favour.
Quite. You must be aware of the extensive collection of comments on this topic here?
https://www.c3headlines.com/global-warming-quotes-climate-change-quotes.html
Here are just four examples.
The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.
Michael Oppenheimer Major environmentalist
The answer to global warming is in the abolition of private property and production for human need. A socialist world would place an enormous priority on alternative energy sources. This is what ecologically-minded socialists have been exploring for quite some time now.’
Louis Proyect Columbia University:
However it is achieved, a thorough reorganisation of production, consumption and distribution will be the end result of humanity’s response to the climate emergency and the broader environmental crisis.
Walden Bello Leftist and founding director of Focus on the Global South:
The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization…Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine.
Keith Farnish Environmental writer, philosopher and activist:
And then there is ‘Earth Overshoot Day’ which ‘calculates’ each year the month when we have used up Earth’s resources – each year!!! Last year Earth Overshoot Day was August 2nd and this year the ‘day’ will be announced on June 5th. Currently we are ‘using’ 1.7 earths per year. Where to begin?
I think we should turn to Julian Simon for a breakdown of this absurdity.
Thank you Varmint. I wasn’t aware of Julian Simon (probably many others as well). I’ll add him to my growing list of optimists. I first came across such thinking in the 1970s with Buckminster Fuller, although he was of the opinion we should stop burning fossil fuels and we should construct giant solar collectors in space. However, his view was that we are a success but we insist on not acknowledging that. More recently there is Hans Rosling. The big disappointment (and related to your comment below) is how some friends seem almost hostile to what Hans explained, or are not interested in hearing his perspective. One friend handed the book back unfinished and seemed somewhat dismissive of what he had read.
We cannot use “1.7 earths per yer” because there’s only one. This is absurd nonsense published for political reasons.
It is hugely disappointing that supposedly educated adults are pushing this absurdity and why is it necessary to point out why.
..to them.
Thanks for all of that which I am more or less aware of and much more. ———-I feel sorry for the general public who switch on their 6 0’clock News to be treated like simpletons allowing themselves to be fed politicised weather stories day in day out. They go and spend their own money on solar panels, and heat pumps, and let the energy company in to install a smart meter because they think it will maybe save them money, when infact it is there to ration energy use because as my next door neighbour said to me when he had one installed “We are all to get them”.
They are completely oblivious to the motivation that drives all of the Eco fundamentalist energy policy or where it all comes from. Infact they don’t even know there is an energy policy. They think wind turbines and solar panels are just “the latest thing”.
Because the weather in the UK is so changeable the government can tell them anything they want about the climate and they will mostly believe it, because they cannot comprehend why anyone would say there is a climate crisis if there isn’t one.
You and I and many other can come to websites like this and make the comments we are making but I reckon 95% of the pubic will never see what we are writing, because they are tuned into Mainstream News who sanitise every bit of information and nothing that you wrote above will ever be allowed to appear.
What I find most disappointing is that the quotes I have shown above, for example, are accepted as reasonable and plausible by many people, especially those uttering them, and yet I would have thought they are self evidently very bad. However, it wasn’t that long ago that we hanged, drowned and burned thousands of mostly women for being witches and no one ever stepped forward to stop that cruelty or point out witches don’t exist. Not sure if it is significant that the last person burned as a witch was around the same time as the first Newcomen engine – a mere 300 years ago. The modern equivalent is Daesh and Hamas and the progressives in the West commit obstructive and violent demonstrations in favour of such barbarity. Queers for Palestine come to mind and all supported by Greta.
Seconded
A reminder of the filth that has been allowed and encouraged to pollute our supposedly Christian, democratic and civilized countries. Support for the would-be psychopathic murderer, but not a whole lot of condemnation from the Muslim community, that’s for sure. I wonder if this bloke is a so-called ‘moderate’. They’re not really big on tolerance or freedom of speech/expression, are they? No wonder their values fit with the Leftards’, like hand in glove;
”Muslims are celebrating the jihad migrant Terror Attack on Politician Michael Stürzenberger today in Germany…
Remember, these are the “peaceful enrichers” flooding into your communities!
Not only was Stürzenberger a victim of Islam, but the German government should be held responsible for allowing an Afghan terrorist into their country. Never forget that the government wasted resources trying to imprison Stürzenberger for exposing the threats Islam poses to the West instead of deporting the terrorists who threatened his life and attacked him constantly.”
https://x.com/AmyMek/status/1796715396462194959
I haven’t heard any update on how the policeman is doing. His condition yesterday was described as ”critical”, as he was stabbed twice in the neck. But speak out against Islam and you automatically end up with a target on your back. Huge respect for these people who continue to do so and exercise their right to free speech, despite the inevitable consequences that this evidently entails;
”Update!
From his hospital bed, Michael Stürzenberger released the following information about his condition via a message posted to Telegram:
“It was really close yesterday. Four doctors had just arrived for their rounds.
The stab wound to the side of my chest, which went towards my lungs, could have been life-threatening.
The stab wound to my thigh hit veins and caused considerable blood loss. There was a second stab wound to my leg above the knee, fortunately without injuring the tendon.
The injury to my upper arm is relatively minor.
The stabs to my face were different. I have staples in the side of my jaw. My upper lip was stitched up, and I had a gaping open wound right up to my teeth.
A big thank you to all the doctors and the facial surgeons who came all the way from a specialist clinic.
What a single Afghan ‘refugee’ can do with a knife...”
https://x.com/AmyMek/status/1796846896293757118
Defo cultural enrichment!
What a single Afghan ‘refugee’ can do with a knife...”
This is a really bad summary. This was a premediated, politically motivated attack which started with some bearded guy (read: muslim) approaching the organizers and shouting at them that they’d be “worse than the AfD” (Ever heard that rethoric before?) and that their event “really needs to be prohibited”. It’s also noteworthy that there was apparently plenty of police on the scene but they didn’t interfere while only Stürzenberger and his team were being attacked. The moment the assassin targetted a fellow policemen, they quickly ‘remembered’ that they were all armed and shot him.
The cluelessness of these people is also remarkable: They had the attacker down on the ground but let him get up again. In case this ever happens to someone reading this: If you ever find yourself in such a situation, make sure the guy doesn’t get up by any available means as absolute, first priority. For as long as he’s wielding a knive and hasn’t been incapitated, he’s a mortal danger to anyone around. It’s better to end up in a German cangaroo court (as right-wing extremist, obviously) for “willful murder” of a “traumatized” refugee than six feet under a headstone.
The video is confusing because you think the attacker is the one the Police are holding, turns out they had hold of the victim!
That’s not at all confusing. They actually even arrested (God only knows why) at least on the the “evil islamophobes” who got attacked and hadn’t “our islamic hero” been so completely braindead to attack a police officer, he’d certainly have left the scene unharmed, although maybe in police custody.
For the German home secretary, the group which got attacked at the ultra-bad bad guys who endanger all that is good, just, beautiful and democratic and whom the state needs to persecute with all the vigor it can muster.
It is actually confusing because the real sequence of event was as follows: The guy attacked Stürzenbacher and fell to the ground with him. Two from the organizers then pinned the attacker on the ground. At this point, a policemen intervened, tore one of the guys holding the assassin away from him, threw him to the ground and then jumped onto him in order to fixate him, ie, the police was actually attacking the people trying to hold the original attacker down. They guy with the knife then attacked the policemen who had just freed him(!) and thus, got shot by another police officer.
Presumably, that’s also the person who got arrested. Imagine this: Get attacked by a knife wielding Islamist and while trying to defend yourself, the police intervenes against you.
Truly unspeakable.
The police actions at the London Bridge attack, involving a van, was exemplary as they dealt with the attackers within seconds of getting out of their car.
The German police intervened in order to protect the attacker(!).
JFTR: The translation is a correct rendition of the German original.
I hear this—“Not all Muslims are terrorists”. ——Yes but we know what the reply to that is don’t we?
I was once overtaken by a gentleman driving hands free, to enable extravagantly devout prayer gestures, his open copy of the Koran resting on the steering wheel, steering with his knees. I was doing the speed limit of 120km/hr. He clearly needed all the help that divine providence could bestow, and an understanding insurance broker.
“overtaken by a gentleman”
Gilding the lily there. Surely the wording should read
…overtaken by a third world heathen with no inkling of manners or decency.
The gentleman in question was a very well turned out individual with an immaculately ironed headdress. Given the brisk pace at which he was proceeding, and the observances that he was conducting, conversation proved impossible so I accord him due respect as a matter of basic courtesy, none the wiser really as to whether he merited it.
Nevertheless, the manners of many individuals in that country (UAE) often put our own to shame, as does their decency.
I’m not too sure what a heathen is but Islam, itself, is, historically, generally rather tolerant of other religions.
There are extremists, of course, to be found within all strongly held belief systems. I’m not sure that Islam is any worse in that regard than the covid or ‘climate crisis’ fanatics.
Yr correct at present. Climate crisis fanatics are actually more dangerous than Muhammad ‘s cult followers to ordinary ppl. That said it’s rather likely to change as demographics shift.
Climate fanatics so far do not blow people up at pop concerts so they are currently not “more dangerous”. ——That may change but it is not the case at the moment.
Both wish to bring down the West – one via Intifada and subjugation (violent in both cases) and the other by destroying the vital underpinnings that allow 8 billion people on the planet to stay alive.
“No worse in that record”——Yes we hear endless reports of Protestant and Catholic terrorist attacks don’t we? Oh and by the way Islam is not just a religion, it is a political and legal system as well. In the west religion and politics are separated.
I have, personally, been attacked by both Catholics and Protestants, and, indeed, by Moslems.
I am not able to separate out my feelings on each different occasion.
It is not the belief system that is the problem, it is the people, as we all discovered in 2020.
Just a bunch of monkeys…..
How many Protestants or Catholics drive vans into people on a bridge? How many Protestants or Catholics run about stabbing people shouting that god is great? How may Protestants and Catholics target Christmas markets to blow people up? How may Protestants or Catholics run grooming gangs? ——–You are trying to cloud the issue, but the issue is crystal clear.
I recall a documentary about the Kray twins and how they were characterized as being well mannered, such as opening the doors for ‘the ladies’ and looking after their mum, or something equivalent.
Remember an article in the paper about a Muslim School Bus driver, parking up with a Bus full of kids and praying on his special rug in the layby.
The religion of peace in which the prophet commanded his men that when committing mass rape they should “finish off” inside their victim. Hardly surprising we have a grooming gang problem when their prophet was a paedophile child rapist who encouraged his followers to rape non Muslim women. Before we get the Christians blah blah relativism, there isnt a bit in the new testament where jesus tells his disciples to rape Mary Magdalene or other women.
‘…leading radical Mr. Choudary…(said) “But the normal situation is for you to take money from the kuffar [non-Muslim]. So we take jihad seeker’s allowance. You need to get support… The normal situation is to take money from the kuffar. You work, give us the money, Allahu Akhbar.”
This makes my blood boil
Courageous, honest, eye-opening article by Steven Tucker, defying the attempts by Humza the Brief up north, and the Unholy Muslim-Marxist Alliance worldwide, to criminalise all criticism of Islam.
Well done to the Daily Sceptic team for printing this article, telling the truth that westerners need to know.
By the way, I wonder what the new SNP leader John Swinney is doing about the Hate Crime/Sharia Act nonsense in Scotland? It’s all gone quiet…
Some years ago a friend of mine worked for a finance company. He told me standard practice was not to grant loans to people whose surname began with a vowel, they were likely to either be Muslim or Irish.
What is the “Muslim Vote”? Are Muslims a separate entity that speak with one voice, and all vote for the same politicians (other Muslims)? Do all Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Hindu’s and Buddhists do the same? ——-I don’t think so. So are Muslims voting for good policies they think are good for the country or are they voting for them because they are only perceived to be good for Muslims? Where is the “integration”?
Despite this article being responsible for significantly raising my blood pressure, I’m pleased to see it in a perverse way. It just reinforces my contempt of politicians and government departments.
“Britain’s estimated four million or so Muslim voters”
Wow. That is scary.
Look how many demonstrate all the time in London.
How many are peace loving and how many are not?
This changes the UK social structure dramatically for one with conflicting moral and social perspectives.
So much for multiculturalism.
Look at what is happening in Yemen right now with the Houthis. Let alone Gaza with Hamas.