3,171 words

Today I am nearly the same age that Kriss Donald would have been if he was still with us. Kriss was murdered by a Pakistani gang in his hometown of Glasgow, Scotland when I was about to go on spring break during my sophomore year of high school. Kriss was a small teenager: about 125 pounds and 5’7” (1.7 meters) at 15 years old.

I myself had a slight build much like Kriss’ at 15. I mention this because Kriss’ story changed my life in several ways, including inspiring me to take up of bodybuilding as a hobby and lifestyle. I thought that if what had happened to him was typical of the types of threats lurking out there in what were once quiet neighborhoods, I needed to change some things. I did everything I could to gain weight: lifting weights, often twice a day, and eating everything in sight. I drank milkshakes with mass gain protein powder, probably over 2,500 calories per shake. Eventually I gained slabs of muscle, but it took years.

Kriss’ murder chilled me decades ago, and it does to this day. It has the same effect on some of my close friends as well, probably because it was one of the first times in our lives when we realized that it could very well have been one of us. We became aware of the dangers in the world, in our nations, and in our cities. We could relate to Kriss. We read the news stories and the court testimony and felt his fear as if it were our own.

The night before Kriss was abducted on a street near his home and killed, Imran Shahid, a Pakistani gang member who had been known to police since the 1990s, was involved in a bar fight with several white men, none of whom had known Kriss. The following day, Shahid and four other Pakistani members of his gang stole a car and went roaming the streets of Glasgow to find whites to attack as “revenge” for what had happened the night before.

The gang soon came upon Kriss Donald and his friend Jamie Wallace, who was then 19, at around three in the afternoon. They jumped out of their car and attacked the two. Jamie managed to get away while Kriss was pulled into the car. The attackers were much larger than Kriss; Shahid was nearly twice his size at around 225 pounds. “I’m only 15, what did I do?” Kriss pleaded with his attackers, according to reports.

What happened over the next several hours remains somewhat unclear. The gang held Kriss captive in their car while driving around, looking for somewhere remote to torture him. They eventually decided on a walking and biking path near the River Clyde, only 15 minutes from the spot where Kriss was abducted. His body was discovered the following morning with over a dozen stab wounds. He was also covered in burns after having been drenched in gasoline and set on fire while still alive.

What happened next is even more disturbing. I remembered hearing further details about Kriss’ death at the time that I could no longer find online, 20 years later. By using web archives and caching, I was able to locate articles that have since been entirely removed from the Web outside of the archives. The full details of what Kriss suffered can be found in one such deleted article that appeared in The Telegraph at the time.

As the gang of Pakis drove around Scotland with Kriss as their hostage, they were smoking and putting out the cigarettes on his skin. His eyes were gouged out, and he was also castrated. Another article notes that his tongue was cut out. Once he was covered in gasoline and set on fire, Kriss crawled about 50 meters along the river, clinging to life, but his body finally gave out. It might have been one of the most horrific evenings anybody has ever suffered.[1]

Two of the five men involved were arrested in Scotland. Three of them, including Imran Shahid, fled to Pakistan, where they would eventually be extradited back to Scotland to stand trial several years later. All five were convicted of crimes related to Kriss Donald’s death, and four of them were convicted of racially-motivated murder. Gang leader Imran Shahid has been placed in solitary confinement off and on throughout his prison term, for his own safety after altercations with other inmates. The Shahid family spent several hundred thousand dollars on legal appeals and alleging that there have been “human rights violations” due to his being kept in solitary.

One of the prison attacks on Shahid nearly killed him. While working out in the prison’s gym, several white men attacked both Shahid and a friend, hitting them with weights and barbells and then stomping on them until guards broke up the attack. Shahid was left in a neck collar for months and needed surgery to repair broken bones. The attack also fractured his jaw and cheekbones and knocked out several teeth.[2]

Kriss’ murder was not the first time that Shahid had committed a violent crime, either. He already had a long and violent criminal history in Scotland, leading to 13 court appearances. Shortly before the killing, he had in fact been in jail for giving another victim permanent brain damage after beating him with a baseball bat. He was released early, leading to the fate that Kriss would suffer.[3]

The BBC only ever mentioned the crime a handful of times and was usually slow to report on developments. Many, including some members of Parliament, contrasted their scant coverage to the non-stop media coverage of Stephen Lawrence, a black teen who was killed in London in 1993. Lawrence, like Emmett Till, became an icon of racism, at least when it was convenient for certain anti-white messaging.

Lawrence and Till only tell a very small part of the frequent story of interracial murders, however, given that such attacks perpetrated by whites are extremely rare. Police officers who were familiar with the Donald case and others like it stated that the incredible power of “political correctness” has hamstrung their ability to curb Pakistani crime and gang activity, in cases such as Shahid’s early release from jail prior to the murer. Further, the mainstream media is not interested in white murder victims, despite the fact that they are being set upon increasingly often by foreign gangs.[4] At one time there were police operations underway to curtail the Pakistani gangs by removing their leaders, such as Shahid, yet the projects were subjected to intense criticism for allegedly being “racist” and were largely abandoned.

We saw this exact same scenario play out again and again in England with the proliferation of white children who were abducted and forced into sex-trafficking operations by foreign gangs. The excuses and cover-ups that were made by the authorities in the Rotherham scandals and the dozens of others like it always followed the same narrative: the police were afraid to arrest foreign men due to fears of being accused of racism. Liberals have quite literally been arguing that it’s better to allow white children to be raped and killed than to offend a race of criminal aliens. In Kriss Donald’s case, it was said at the time that the story was largely being kept out of the national spotlight due to concerns of a “backlash” against the Pakistani community in Scotland and the United Kingdom more generally. This was the first time I heard this sort of refrain, but it has become all too commonplace in the 20 years since. We are often told that when a foreigner does something horrid, the real victims are the members of his community, who might face backlash.

I saw this firsthand when a Somali Muslim student ran over a group of other students and then began stabbing them on campus at Ohio State University. The ensuing discussion was not about how it was possible for a random Somali man to attempt to kill a group of students, but rather about the Somali community in Columbus now likely being afraid of a “backlash.” Shouldn’t they be? Wouldn’t that be the most just outcome? Is it not reasonable to be wary of a group of people who continue to produce rapists, murderers, gang members, and terrorists? These things do not happen in a vacuum. Shahid was part of a vast network of Pakistani associates in Scotland who were involved in drug trafficking, cloning credit cards, robbery, and other forms of “cultural enrichment.” His family also paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for his legal defense. How are they not complicit in the murder of Kriss Donald?

This obfuscation is not limited to immigrants and their protectors in the media and law enforcement, however. Kriss’ own mother, Angela, has spoken about her concern over the murder of her son becoming a political issue, insisting that it was “gang culture” which led to her son’s death, asking that his murder not be used to push “racial division” or Right-wing political causes.

This is a sadly familiar pattern nowadays. The most infamous example is when the father of Mollie Tibbetts, a young woman who was kidnapped and murdered by an illegal migrant from Mexico, used his eulogy for her to apologize to the Mexican community, decry racism, and describe how much he enjoys eating Mexican food. It would be almost darkly comical if this wasn’t such a serious issue. When I first read about what Ron Tibbetts had said at his daughter’s funeral, I thought it was exactly that: a grim joke satirizing the liberal mind. But I realized once again that I had given white liberals too much credit. The mother of Cannon Hinnant, a 5-year-old boy who was shot and killed by a black neighbor, made a similar statement, assuring the public that his death had not been a “race issue.”

The perpetrators of these crimes say that it’s a race issue, however. When Kriss and Jamie were attacked, the Paki gang called them “white bastards.” In his subsequent trial, Shahid stated that he had been specifically on the prowl for white people to assault.

When Emmett Till was killed, nobody suggested that his killers had simply gone looking for a random black person to kill. Till had been sexually harassing Carolyn Bryant, in a similar manner as Till’s own father, who had been executed for committing multiple rapes. Till’s lynching was obviously due to his sexual harassment of Bryant. Yet, the case is constantly held up as an example of “racism” in America.

Similarly, when Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, the mainstream narrative cast it as being about racism. Zimmerman, a Hispanic man, was subsequently deemed white enough to be guilty of white supremacism and anti-black racism. Zimmerman had never said anything about race or about wanting to kill a black person, however. When he shot Martin, he was in the process of being badly beaten by him, and even suffered broken bones.

The default assumption whenever a black is killed by a white person — or white-passing person — is that racism is involved. But when whites are killed by other races, it can never be said that race played any role, even when the pattern is abundantly clear. We should always meet all interracial conflicts and crimes against whites with at least an initial assumption that race was a primary factor. We should always ask: “Would the same crime have happened if the victim hadn’t been white?” We should also ask: “Should the perpetrator have been in this country I the first place?” and “Should the perpetrator have had such easy access to whites to prey upon?” Until whites adopt a mindset that is more appropriate to living in multiracial societies, extreme violence against them will continue unabated.

A few years after Kriss Donald’s murder, there was a gruesomely similar story in the United States: the murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom on January 6, 2007. The young white couple were kidnapped, tortured, and raped for hours by a gang of five blacks, and then eventually killed. Christopher was raped and killed first. The blacks continued to gang-rape Channon for hours until they tried to cover up their crimes by pouring bleach down her throat and scrubbing bleach all over her body, finally tying her up inside several layers of plastic garbage bags and throwing her into a dumpster, leaving her to slowly suffocate to death. The media, the police chief in charge of the investigation, and even Channon’s father all insist that the crime was not about race, however. Only Newsom’s mother and Michelle Malkin were among a small minority who pushed back against the prevailing narrative, asserting that there must have been racial animus present.

Who are these family members to decide what is and is not a “race issue?” It is tragic that they lost a relative, but this gives them no right or special authority to decide what is political and what is not. They have no special insight into the minds of particular murderers, the races as a whole, or public policy. In short, being a secondhand victim does not entitle a person to shut down discourse regarding a matter of public policy. White people’s safety, especially in historically white countries, is a grave concern. Had the “racists” such people fear been in charge of these nations, none of these murders would have been possible. “Better food,” “higher aggregate gross domestic product,” and the so-called “beautiful mosaic of multiculturalism” are pitiful tradeoffs for frequent racially-motivated violence, high costs of living, and low physical safety in our cities. But this is the trade liberals are forcing us to make.

It is difficult to argue that Kriss’ murder, and so many like it, are not political when it becomes apparent that a proper political authority would have protected Kriss, along with all the others like him. Were it not for measures such as bail reform, early release programs, forced racial integration, and open borders, I find it difficult to believe that Reagan Tokes, Ebba Akerlund, Pat Mahaney, Kriss Donald, and countless others would have been victimized. Further, if their parents or liberals as a whole reject those policies that would have saved these children’s lives, I can see no reasonable way in which they have a claim to their child’s legacy. It means they are willing to sacrifice the lives of their children for a political project that elevates criminals and foreigners over the safety of their own.

Kriss’ killers told the court that they had abducted, tortured, and murdered him because he was white, not because of something abstract or personal. Racial conflict is a matter of human nature. It has always been here and always will be. Groups that are different are always going to be at odds, either due to resource competition or simple cultural differences. This is a reality we can live with so long as we have safe, sovereign nations. What is not acceptable is allowing the members of these differing groups into our nations, ignoring their crimes, giving them our tax dollars, and allowing them to abuse us in the name of multiculturalism, diversity, or liberal ideals. When it comes to the murder of Kriss and all the others like him, there were deliberate policy decisions made at every level of governance, from the national immigration laws to local policing programs, that allowed our people to be set upon by a foreign menace.

The neighborhood where Kriss lived was, and is, a working-class one and very diverse. It is common to see such neighborhoods in the United States as well. Once a trend develops and a such a place begins to be filled with more blacks and browns, more danger and higher crime rates inevitably follow. The whites who can afford to leave will move to a town “with better schools,” leaving the poorer and middle-class whites behind to live with the consequences of diversity. This new underclass is heavily reliant on welfare and crime, receiving benefits from those they victimize in a country that has betrayed its original purpose.

In the 20 years since Kriss was taken from us, what has changed for the better? As far as I can see, all of the factors that led to his torture and murder have only increased. The cities are more diverse and more crime-ridden. The borders are wide open. Whites have become a smaller portion of the population in the nations they built. The mainstream media and academia still sneer at people like us and our legitimate concerns while obsessing over the slightest inconvenience allegedly suffered by a black or brown.

Kriss Donald’s lived the final moments of his short life on a Monday evening — March 15, 2004 — as he bled to death while burning alive, trying to extinguish the flames by rolling across his hometown’s grass and mud. The man who found his body was not even sure that it was that of a human being, believing at first that it was an animal carcass. Kriss had planned to spend the evening with a friend playing video games after going for a walk through town on an early spring afternoon — a sort of day much like those that I have spent with my own friends on many occasions. But it is the sort of day that Kriss will never again have.

It did not have to be this way.

There is a memorial bench to Kriss on the River Clyde near where he died — alone, in agony, with nobody around to help. Someday I am going to visit Glasgow and take a walk from the neighborhood where Kriss was abducted to where his body was found and see the world for what it is — and also think about what it could have been, and still might be someday.

There’s another world where Kriss is sitting on a bench along the river, perhaps enjoying a cup of coffee and sharing a smile with a friend, or maybe even a wife or child. For now, however, we are all being forced to wander among the ruins of cities that a great people once built. It weighs heavily on me to know that it is too late for things to have been different for Kriss. We can’t change the past, but in some other world, perhaps things will at least be different for those like him.

Notes

[1] Archival sources on file with author. According to several articles that are still online, Shahid instructed members of his gang to bring knives, a hammer, and a screwdriver. Shahid told the gang that he would “chop them up, take their eyes out,” referring to Kriss. See “Now tranquil, the place where horror visited,” The Scotsman, November 9, 2006.

[2] “William Crawford admits jail attack on Imran Shahid,” BBC, September 17, 2013.

[3] Graham Grant, “Mother of race-hate murder victim on her decade of pain,” Scottish Daily Mail, March 15, 2014.

[4] Antony Barnett, “Racial murders: nearly half the victims are white,” The Guardian, October 21, 2006; Imaad Azim, “Row over policing Asian gangs,” The I Witness, January 2005.