Who’s to Blame?

You’ve probably heard about the gang of Muslims who terrorized a train in France. A group of more than 20 North African “youths” boarded the French train and “terrorized hundreds of train passengers in a rampage of violence, robbery and sexual assault on New Year’s Day.” Only three of the marauders were arrested; the rest escaped. The sexual assaults were shocking, but France’s political parties were quick to put the blame on anyone other than the assailants:

The opposition Socialist Party said it viewed the incident with “astonishment.” It said “such acts show a worrying lack of security” and questioned why it took so long for police to rescue the passengers and why so few arrests were made.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who has championed hard-line security policies in France, partly blamed the state rail company SNCF for not communicating better with the police. “The problem is that law-enforcement services didn’t know that there was a promotional fare going,” he said.

Personally, I doubt that the real problem is that some law enforcement agencies don’t know about promotional fares. I think it has a lot more to do with an unwillingness to recognize who is assaulting French women on trains, and who is not. But in contemporary Europe, any rational approach to this problem is light years away.

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