By Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday
Published: 19:01 EST, 21 February 2015 | Updated: 03:21 EST, 22 February 2015
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Copenhagen killer Omar El-Hussein had twice been arrested for cannabis possession
Can you put two and two together? Have a try. The authorities, and most of the media, cannot.
Did you know that the Copenhagen killer, Omar El-Hussein, had twice been arrested (and twice let off) for cannabis possession? Probably not.
It was reported in Denmark but not prominently mentioned amid the usual swirling speculation about ‘links’ between El-Hussein and ‘Islamic State’, for which there is no evidence at all.
El-Hussein, a promising school student, mysteriously became so violent and ill- tempered that his own gang of petty criminals, The Brothers, actually expelled him.
Something similar happened in the lives of Lee Rigby’s killers, who underwent violent personality changes in their teens after becoming cannabis users.
The recent Paris killers were also known users of cannabis. So were the chaotic drifters who killed soldiers in Canada last year. So is the chief suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings of April 2013.
I might add that though these are all Muslims, who for rather obvious reasons are to be found among the marginalised in Europe and North America, it is not confined to them.
Jared Loughner, who killed six people and severely injured Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona in 2011, was also a confirmed heavy cannabis user. When I searched newspaper archives for instances of violent crimes in this country in which culprits were said to be cannabis users, I found many.
One notable example was the pointless killing of Sheffield church organist Alan Greaves, randomly beaten to death by two laughing youths on Christmas Eve 2012. Both were cannabis smokers.
By itself, the link is interesting. I wonder how many other violent criminals would turn out to be heavy cannabis users, if only anyone ever asked.
But put it together with The Mail on Sunday’s exclusive story last week, showing a strong link between cannabis use and episodes of mental illness.
And then combine it with the confessions of two prominent British Left-wing figures, the former Tory MP and BBC favourite Matthew Parris, and Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow, who both tried ‘skunk’ cannabis (by far the most commonly available type in the Western world) for a TV documentary.
Two people were killed by the gunman in separate incidents across the Danish capital. Above, Krudttonden cafe which was ravaged by 200 bullets when he opened fire on a free speech event
Mr Parris wrote: ‘The effect was stunning – and not (for me) in a good way. Short-term memory went walkabout. I would forget what I was talking about even while talking. I became shaky. Time went haywire.’
But immediate effects are one thing. What about long-term use? Mr Parris recounted that he had ‘too many friends’ for whom cannabis had seemed destructive. He quoted one as saying: ‘I think it changed me permanently as a person.’
He said his mainly socially liberal friends, including health workers, generally agreed that ‘heavy use of cannabis, particularly skunk, can be associated with big changes in behaviour’.
Jon Snow said simply: ‘By the time I was completely stoned, I felt utterly bereft. I felt as if my soul had been wrenched from my body.
'There was no one in my world. I was frightened, paranoid, and felt physically and mentally wrapped in a dense blanket of fog. I’ve worked in war zones, but I’ve never been as overwhelmingly frightened as I was when I was in the MRI scanner after taking skunk. I would never do it again.’
Tributes left to the gunman's victims flooded the ground outside a synagogue. Dan Uzan was shot in the head as he watched the door of a Bat Mitzvah
This is not some mild ‘soft’ thing. It is a potent, frightening mindbender. If it does this to men in late middle age who are educated, prosperous, successful and self-disciplined, what do you think it is doing to all those 13-year-olds who – thanks to its virtual decriminalisation – can buy it at a school near you, while the police do nothing?
And yet it is still fashionable in our elite to believe that cannabis should be even easier to get than it already is.
It is hard to think of a social evil so urgently in need of action to curb it. Why is nothing done? Need you ask?
Led into another disaster by a bunch of ignorant poseurs
Defence Secretary Michael Fallon pictured above
The wild warmongering of our Government and our elite grows louder as our Armed Forces grow smaller.
Are these people up to the job? Can they read a map? Do they know any history? Do they have a clue what they are doing?
As you listen to the Defence Secretary’s bizarre raging about the Russian threat, remember that our Army is now even tinier than the token force Hitler allowed Vichy France to keep after 1940.
Under David Cameron, both the Army and the Navy have, in the past few years, thrown away huge amounts of valuable equipment, and got rid of a vast body of experienced men who cannot be replaced.
So why the belligerence? They surely do not intend to be tested. If they really believed that Russian tanks were about to roll into Riga, then we would be rearming like anything, not disarming as fast as we can.
So they don’t believe it. So why should we believe them? I used to scorn the Left-wing idea that small politicians sought conflict abroad because it made them look big at home.
But our Government’s amazing decision to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi seems to me to show that these clueless beings really are that bad.
They had no idea what they were doing, and now stand, dumb and amazed, as the country they claimed to be liberating descends deeper and deeper into murder, theft and fanaticism.
Even if they don’t care about that, they must surely worry about the resulting disaster, the unstoppable flight of countless economic migrants from Libya’s lawless coasts across the Mediterranean and on, across and throughout a borderless EU.
This, not terrorism, is how the Islamisation of Europe will come about, sooner than most people think.
It is this act of folly that we should be investigating, not the long-ago Iraq War. And these people should be banned from any further bloviating about war or foreign policy till an independent report on the Libya disaster has been published, and we know in detail that we are governed by third-rate, ignorant poseurs.
How can killing 350,000 be right?
If it was wrong (as it was) for the Germans to kill 43,000 British civilians by deliberately bombing their homes, why was it not also wrong for us to kill 350,000 German civilians by deliberately bombing their homes?
If you can’t answer this, then please don’t bother writing me rude, thoughtless letters because I – even more than the Archbishop of Canterbury – think we shouldn’t have engaged in this form of warfare.
This flock of easily-led sheep looks so familiar...
As I watched the new Aardman animation, Shaun The Sheep – The Movie, and its flock of all-too-easily led and conformist woolly creatures, I struggled to work out who they reminded me of.
Then it came to me in a flash – Britain’s monstrous regiment of political journalists.
The animals which feature in the new Aardman animation, Shaun The Sheep - The Movie, are just like Britain's monstrous regiment of political journalists