Jimmy Mizen was killed for calling for good manners; and, was Mrs. Mizen’s call for no anger correct?

(This entry contains a discussion of the Mizens’ pacific response to their son’s murder.)

The Mail’s article on the conviction of Jake Fahri in the murder of Jimmy Mizen, previously discussed at VFR, is so long that readers glancing over it may miss the account of the murder itself. So I’m copying it below. I was reminded to do this by Ilana Mercer’s post on the same story, where she points out what Jimmy said to Fahri that apparently set Fahri off: “Some manners would not go amiss.” Other details worth mentioning are that Jimmy, 16 years old at the time of his death, was six foot four, came from a devout Catholic family with nine children, and was an altar boy.

The Daily Mail can reveal that Fahri could have been locked away two years ago after being charged with the rape of a 13-year-old girl in 2006.

He was 16 at the time, but the case was discontinued at Camberwell Youth Court in February 2007 after the girl withdrew her evidence, apparently because she was unable to face the ordeal of going to court.

So Fahri remained a free man on May 10 last year when he went to buy a chicken sandwich at the Three Cooks Bakery in Lee.

Jimmy was already there buying sausage rolls with his 19-year-old brother Harry.

As Fahri barged him out of the way in the queue, Jimmy told him: ‘Some manners would not go amiss.’

Fahri stepped out of the shop and snarled at 6ft 4in Jimmy: ‘Think you are a big man? Come outside and I’ll show you how big you are.’

Harry called on his phone for another brother, Tommy, 27, to come and help. Fahri went back in the shop and said: ‘Who are you f***ing calling?’, and used two drink bottles to hit the brothers.

He cornered Jimmy behind the bakery counter and grabbed a foot-long Pyrex dish, hurling it with such force that it broke on impact.

One of the shards of glass cut Jimmy’s carotid artery and jugular vein. As Harry stood by paralysed with shock, Tommy arrived to see Fahri running off.

He found Jimmy by following a trail of blood to a store cupboard where he was slumped.

Tommy was cradling him and trying in vain to staunch the wound when their mother arrived and fainted.

[end of excerpt]

- end of initial entry -

A. Zarkov writes:

As far as I’m concerned the key passages in The Daily Mail article about the murder of Jimmy Mizen occur at the lead in.

But Barry and Margaret Mizen refused yesterday to be infected by the rage which cost 16-year-old Jimmy his life. Instead they made a heartfelt plea for Britain to stop itself becoming a country of “selfishness, anger and fear.” Mrs Mizen said: “I don’t feel anger because I know that it was anger that killed my Jimmy and I won’t let anger ruin my family. There is too much anger in this world and it has to stop.”

Evidently Jimmy’s parents feel that anger does not qualify as a legitimate human emotion. They seem to regard this brutal crime as some kind of act of nature devoid of any moral choices. To them a person didn’t kill their son—“anger” killed him. An anger divorced of human volition. One must ask—why are they so afraid to feel anger or even rage in the face of so great a loss? To me this seems acutely unnatural. The fear of revenge acts as a deterrent, and we expect the criminal justice system to act in our stead and extract revenge. If it fails to do this then the value of our lives has been diminished. Have modern Britons become so desensitized that they can no longer feel anything except liberal abstractions about how the world works? These people are ripe for the taking, and the savages among them know this, and thus they take. They lost their son and yet they sound like Gandhi making a speech to the UN.

LA replies:

Thanks for articulating something I had sensed but had not put into words.

Adela G. writes:

A. Zarkov writes: “Evidently Jimmy’s parents feel that anger does not qualify as a legitimate human emotion.”

I’m not sure that’s the real nature of their response. Jimmy’s mother, like any good liberal, obviously believes in non-discrimination as the highest good. The young thug who killed her son was by all accounts an angry boy for years. Yet Mrs. Mizen refuses to distinguish between the illegitimate, irrational anger this thug displayed and the legitimate, rational anger of parents whose child has been murdered. If she allowed herself to distinguish between the two, she would be acknowledging that there is a moral distinction between them—that is, in effect, she would be judging her son’s murderer as a person who acted in anger when he had no legitimate right to do so. Couple this aversion to being judgmental with the fact that her son’s murderer is of mixed ethnicity and you can see where, as a good liberal, she literally will not let herself feel the righteous anger of a mother whose son was brutally murdered.

What made me suspect this was her saying that, “There is too much anger in this world and it has to stop.” Wrong. There is not too much anger in this world. There is too much of the wrong kind of anger, the kind that Jimmy’s murderer displayed with virtual impunity for years. There is not enough of the right kind of anger, the kind that refuses to tolerate this savagery and is unafraid to make moral judgments and take strong action against it.

LA replies:

Yes. She’s defining any normal reaction of indignation and outrage at her son’s murder as the moral equivalent of the irrational, savage, criminal anger that made the murderer kill him. That’s liberalism in a nutshell—equating what is normal and good with evil. Such as saying that what led the Nazis to mass murder the Jews was “intolerance.” Which means that intolerance must be eliminated. Which means that Europe must start receiving without complaint or criticism the mass immigration of Muslims, including the man whose son killed Jimmy Mizen.

A. Zarkov replies to LA:

You’re welcome. I didn’t express enough of my feelings and ideas in the interests of writing something quickly. I think this theme needs further development. Ultimately I think our problems are traceable to the withering warrior spirit in men—why this has happened I’m only gradually beginning to understand.

March 30

Laura W. writes:

It seems unfair to characterize Mrs. Mizen as a “good liberal” or as “Gandhi-like.” In remarks included in the article, she describes what can be fairly defined as anger, though not rage. It’s an important distinction and she deserves credit for not becoming enraged as it would most certainly destroy her family. She talks at length about the devastation the murder caused, how one of her sons still sleeps on the parent’s bedroom floor because he is afraid and haunted, how their retarded daughter is disoriented and how she herself is devastated. This is her way of expressing their anger. The article also mentions how Mrs. Mizen complained to the school about Fahri bullying her son. When Mrs. Mizen says that anger is destroying the world, it’s safe to assume she referred to the wrong kind of anger and was not including the anger her sons showed at the bake shop when they tried to defend Jimmy. Judging from the expressions on her son’s faces, the Mizen family is full of fight. Jimmy himself was supposedly fond in his way of challenging bullies. All in all, in reading about this family, I felt a sense of hope. Besides, If I had been in her shoes, and had emerged from the same courtroom, I would have been too overcome to say anything sensible at all.

LA replies:

Laura makes good points, and makes me feel that I took too easy a shot at Mrs. Mizen. And, really, after your family member has been murdered, what can you do? Yes, if she let herself be personally angry, that would accomplish nothing and would be destructive of her family. It’s the avoidance of personal anger, of a personal sense of tit for tat, that Jesus speaks of in the Sermon on the Mount. But at the same time, I felt the other commenters and I were teasing out the meaning of Mrs. Mizen’s statement, “I know that it was anger that killed my Jimmy and I won’t let anger ruin my family. There is too much anger in this world and it has to stop.” This does seem to be equating the “anger” of savage yobs with the indignation normal citizens should have at the takeover of their society by savage yobs. In reality, Britain is already following Mrs. Mizen’s counsel to avoid anger. It strictly avoids any anger, judgment, indignation, retribution at the savages whom it has, though its avoidance of “anger,” unleashed in its midst.

So it’s a complicated issue. In the Sermon on the Mount refers to the sphere of private feelings. Jesus calls on his followers not to nurse anger at those who have slighted them, for example. But a society that adopts the Sermon on the Mount as the basis of its actual policy toward criminals and enemies is a society that is committing suicide. And it is also, let us add, a society that is behaving most immorally, since it is failing in its first duty, which is to protect the lives, property, and welfare of its citizens.

Where anger or indignation is appropriate and where it is not, is something that must be worked out. This is why the Church tradition was necessary in addition to the New Testament, since the New Testament does not explicitly deal with these issues; it requires interpretation.

Stephen T. writes:

I have a deep inner certainty that, had her son’s killer been a white English youth instead of a mixed-race immigrant, Mrs. Mizen would be expressing all sorts of normal rage. The first response of whites to violence inflicted by minorities is to call for understanding and to denounce any anger about the act. What kind of mental convolutions and convulsions must be required to make a parent express—and believe—statements like Mizen’s are beyond my imagination.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 29, 2009 06:38 PM | Send