OPINION:
Last week, at the Farragut West Metro stop here in the capital of the free world and about two blocks from the White House, Rahmanullah Lakanwal — who had engaged in combat on behalf of American interests in Afghanistan and been brought to America because of that effort — shot two National Guard members. One subsequently died from her wounds. During the shooting, just in case the purpose wasn’t clear, Mr. Lakanwal offered the obligatory “Allahu akbar.”
A few thousand miles away, in what remains of the United Kingdom, British citizens continue to struggle to reach a reckoning with their story of immigration gone wrong. In the town of Rotherham from 1997 to 2013, somewhere around 1,400 young women and children, some as young as 11, were beaten, abducted, sexually exploited, trafficked and/or raped by multiple males, most of them of Pakistani origin, according to a 2014 report commissioned by the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council.
Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, the report disappoints. Once past the executive summary, it runs another 138 pages before it mentions the role of the Pakistani “community” in the crimes.
The report writers did try to signal the fact that this was pretty much a cultural thing and that silence about the crimes was enforced by the diversity police. “By far the majority of perpetrators were described as ‘Asian’ by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue … for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”
There you have it. No one wanted to do anything that raised questions about the unassimilated in their midst. What better epitaph could one write for a culture and a society that is slowly dying because it will not defend itself from an outside force? It is the story of the fully “enlightened” and completely enervated old Europe. From Ireland to Germany, the officials who are supposed to protect and defend their own nations and tribes continue to fail.
Indeed, the only reason the horror of Rotherham has been discussed recently is that Elon Musk suggested that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer should quit because he didn’t address the criminality during his tenure as the country’s leading prosecutor. Mr. Musk accused Mr. Starmer of being “complicit in the rape of Britain.” He may be right. The law enforcement establishment in England let hundreds of crimes go on annually for more than 15 years without doing a single blessed thing.
In a larger sense, the two instances of criminality — systemic rape and human trafficking in Britain and an assassination of an American soldier two blocks from the White House — are linked to the imperial designs of both nations. It turns out that when you wander about the world killing people and expanding your power and influence, lots of times you bring the world back with you. That almost always turns out to be suboptimal for the invader. Just ask the Romans about the Visigoths, or Minnesotans about Somalis.
The story of the “Pakistani-heritage community” in Britain is cautionary. The British, rulers of the subcontinent, recruited Pakistanis to work in the factories after the war. The factories disappeared, the Pakistanis stayed.
The tale of Mr. Lakanwal is similarly cautionary. Whether he was radicalized here or overseas (and not caught in the multiple examinations) is almost immaterial. At some point, he turned his murderous impulse on Americans.
We might want to think about that the next time someone in authority talks about sending our troops out into the world to pacify and subdue old lands or get in the middle of some ancient (and probably pointless) squabble. Remember that some of the people our troops are shooting at will eventually show up on our doorstep, and they are likely to have only a very tangential relationship with the essentials of Christianity or Western civilization.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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