Christians Under Attack

respected institutions in Western societies due to their compassion and care of the sick and vulnerable, are turning more and more into places of immigrant violence.

The latest incident of such inexcusable savagery within the walls of a European public medical facility occurred last week in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark. Danish newspapers report that about 70 men, some armed with “cudgels,” invaded the Odense University Hospital emergency ward, looking to further harm, even possibly kill, a man who had just been admitted in critical condition with a gunshot wound. Luckily, no hospital staff member was injured, and it was most likely the heroics of the police officers present that prevented the intruders from reaching the injured patient.

“There were pictures torn down from the walls. There were vases knocked into pieces. It was quite intimidating to both staff and police there, and several officers had to fire their guns to get them to disappear,” said one Danish police official in describing the chaos.

Frustrated at being unable to reach their target, the vandals then took their anger out on ambulances and police vehicles. In all, the Copenhagen Post reported that “one ambulance and four police cars were destroyed in the night’s events.”

The trouble apparently began earlier that evening between rival immigrant groups when two members of one group drove up to the other’s Eid al-Fitr celebration that was being held in a shopping center parking lot. After being identified as an enemy, one report states the 26-year-old victim wound up being shot at least twice in one leg and stabbed several times in the other, but several shots were fired at the car the two were in. It is also at the crime scene that two of the four police cars may have been destroyed, while an ambulance summoned for the injured man was also reportedly attacked.

The hospital invasion was so barbarous and disturbing to the Danish public that a “shocked” Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt was compelled to comment on it, calling it “serious criminal behavior” at a news conference. But noticeably, although the Eid al-Fitr is a Muslim celebration that marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, it does not appear she nor any police official, politician or newspaper identified the culprits as such. They limited their identification vocabulary simply to the word “immigrant.”

But there was no need for Thorning-Schmidt to be so “shocked,” if she had been observing the happenings in hospitals in other Western European countries the past decade or more. In Iserlohn, a city in Germany, the death of a Turkish man of heart failure in a hospital there, according to a report in the German newspaper Die Welt, caused the 40 members of his family, “out of rage and grief,” to lay waste to the facility’s Intensive Care ward. The reception area was ransacked, pictures torn from walls, chairs and treatment tables overturned, and medical equipment destroyed by wooden clubs.

The first police to arrive were greeted with “kicks and punches” and had to withdraw, using pepper spray and under “threats and insults,” to await reinforcements. Only a heavier police presence was able to calm the situation, after which charges were made.

Doctors and other hospital personnel are often victims of individual attacks as well. In his book The Spread of Islamikaze Terrorism In Europe: The Third Islamic Invasion, author Raphael Israeli writes: “In 2004, there were 145 attacks in hospitals in France, rising to more than 200 in 2006 in which medical staff had been attacked by Muslims.” A story in Le Figaro this year maintains that French hospital personnel are becoming “more and more victims of violence,” citing a report from the health ministry agency responsible for keeping track of violence in healthcare facilities.