A new 'Frenchman'?
The E.U. media are making a thing over the fact that Cherif Chekatt, the on-the-run terrorist who perpetrated the Strasbourg mass shooting, was born in France and was not an "immigrant."
Yes, he was known to authorities as a dangerously militant Muslim extremist. Yet he was, they are telling the people, a native Frenchman.
In truth, that should not be a comfort to anyone, nor is it an effective argument for those who favor allowing a nearly endless crowd of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East into Europe.
In fact it really shows the danger in doing so.
This is a lesson the U.K. has had before it now for a couple of generations. (Not a lesson they have learned, mind you.) Those first-generation "Asian" (the word used in the U.K. to describe such as Pakistan Muslims) immigrants who have come to the U.K. often are at least at first appreciative of the welcome given them and the opportunities it has opened for them. It is not they, but their children who most often become extremists – hating the nation in which they were born, but with which they share few values.
That, too, is France's problem. And Germany's, and Sweden's, and Belgium's, and the Netherlands', etc.
These European nations are behind the U.K. in the timeline – large and rapidly growing Muslim populations are for them something relatively new in modern times. But such are already forming communities of their own – taking over housing developments, entire neighborhoods, and in some cases most of entire smaller cities. Their children are anything but the "new Frenchmen" or "new Swedes" the media like to speak of.
In truth, these second-generation citizens, born of migrants, often see themselves as angry outsiders who wish to see their own foreign culture become the dominant one in their new land. Some of them are willing to do whatever it takes to help bring that about – even commit mass murder.
That is the lesson, to the extent there is one, in Cherif Chekatt's hideous rampage.
Will the French, or the Germans or the Belgians or the Swedes (etc.), learn this? Not if those currently in power in the E.U. have their way.
Make of that what you will.