When I wrote earlier this year about “Europe’s suicidal welfare state,” it wasn’t so that I could make points about excessive spending and demographic decline.
Yes, those are very important issues. But I was focusing instead on the fact that Europe’s welfare states have a masochistic habit of giving handouts to terrorists.
So I wasn’t surprised to learn that some of the dirtbags who launched the recent terror attacks in Paris have been sponging off taxpayers.
Here are some excerpts from a story in the U.K.-based Daily Mail.
The former wife of Paris bomber Ibrahim Abdeslam has broken her silence to say he was a jobless layabout… Speaking from her home in Moleenbeek, Brussels, Niama, 36, said: ‘…He often slept during the day...Despite his diploma as an electrician, he found no job,’… Money was tight for the couple. ‘We lived on unemployment benefit which was only €1,000 a month between us so we worried a lot about money.’
By the way, money wasn’t “tight for the couple.” The handouts they got from the Belgian taxpayers gave them an income higher than the world average. And I’m guessing that the unemployment benefit wasn’t the only bit of mooching they did given the destructive lavishness of European welfare systems.
Ibrahim wasn’t the only terrorist with a snout in the public trough.
Here are some details from a story in the American Spectator.
Before he blew himself up outside a French soccer stadium, Bilal Hadfi lived in state-subsidized housing. …Open wallets as much as open borders doom Europe. Harboring shiftless populations alienated from the surrounding culture by religion asks for trouble. Give them blank checks and watch them fill up the blank spaces of indolence with destruction. …They pay back the dole with gunfire.
These are just two of the terrorists, but I’m guessing we’ll soon learn that others also were mooching off taxpayers.
And I can’t help but wonder whether the self-loathing that presumably occurs among some welfare recipients actually contributes to radicalism.
