In local police blotter news on Saturday, a man walked into the usually "oddly empty" restaurant in a nice part of the southeast San Fernando Valley and shot six people, four of whom have died so far. I tried to drive by last night and the cops had four square blocks barricaded off.
My dad says he ate there once. He was the only customer in the restaurant the whole time, but employees were coming and going, making deliveries.
My dad says he ate there once. He was the only customer in the restaurant the whole time, but employees were coming and going, making deliveries.
To the surprise of nobody, it was announced today that all the dead men's names end in -ian or -yan. From the LA Daily News:
An official with the Los Angeles County Coroner's office said Sarkis Karadjian, 26, of Sherman Oaks, Hayk Yegnanyan, 25, of Glendale, and Harut Baburyan, 28, whose address was unknown all died as a result of injuries sustained after the shooting Saturday at the Hot Spot Cafe on Riverside Drive. Vardan Tofalyan, 31, was later identified by police. Police said at least one gunman shot at the six men inside the Hot Spot Cafe in the 11600 block of Riverside Drive. The cafe bills itself as a Mediterranean restaurant but neighbors described it Saturday after the shooting as often oddly empty. ... The main suspect was described only as a white male, possibly Armenian, around 30 years old.
There's no mention of whether the gunman took the cannoli.
As I wrote a couple of months ago in my study of all 2600+ homicides in LA County since 2007:
Not surprisingly to anybody who follows the local police blotter, 14 of the 47 Caucasian victims were of West Asian descent, and nine of those 14 Armenians. Only 1.7 percent of the population of Los Angeles County is Armenian, but some of them are a bit lively, rather like Sicilians in a Scorsese movie: enterprising and affluent, but with an Old World code of honor. Suspects in killings of Armenians are often described as vanishing into the night in BMWs or Lexuses. Judging by the Old Country first names of the Armenian victims, most were immigrants or the children of immigrants rather than from the pre-1924 wave of Armenian immigrants. ...
The density of diversity in L.A. County provides a critical mass that allows the bad apples to find each other. In most of the U.S., for instance, Armenians are well-behaved. In Southern California, however, there are 170,000 Armenians, enough to furnish an Armenian street gang, Armenian Power, as well as transnational mafias with roots in the old Soviet Union.
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41 comments:
when I saw this story on Drudge, I figured you would comment on it. Probably a good thing the Armenian population is relatively small, they seem to make superior criminals.
What's funny is that all of the Aremenians from the pre-1965 Immigration Act stock are all perfectly assimilated. Yes, I know the Kardashians are quite vulgar but all of the Armenian heritage Americans I have met here in suburban NJ are great. Amazing what an immigration cut-off and a self-confident culture will do...
He took the baklava .
Dude, you are implying that these folks are Italian. That's wrong -- names in -ian are invariably Armenian, not Italian.
Are the Health Department inspections online?
Does Mediterranean cover Caspian food?
There is a "Scilian" restaurant on Memorial Road in Oklahoma City that has been in business a long time without many customers visible.
I wonder?
dogberry
Oh, over on Econlog Henderson tells how he was fired by National Review.
A little off-topic, but in re: Obama's Afrocentrism is his mother's passive-aggressive revenge on her Indonesian second husband [Monday, April 14, 2008], MSNBC is now reporting that It's official: Obama is black [Saturday, April 03, 2010].
Oil futures should be up sharply.
Were they Armenians? I don't know...Armenians in times past were fine immigrants and rarely made any trouble. Something seems to have changed...
Holy cow, Armenians are doing a pretty good job of creating a second Armenian genocide all on their own.
There was a high profile killing a few weeks ago by Armenian gangsters that I thought Steve would cover. A mother was gunned down a few months after her husband and daughter were killed.
Growing up outside of Philly, I never had the pleasure of meeting many armneians besides 1 group of brothers and they were barely Armenian. Mostly Irish, but their name was Armenian. Great bunch of brothers.
I dated 1 Armenian girl in college, she is now an attorney. She was a nice girl with big jugs.
She was a nice girl with big jugs.
Those are the best kind of girls.
Anonymous said...
If Armenian immigrants are successful why is the country still poor?
I think you answered your own question.
So why would an Armenian have shot other, apparently random Armenians?
Immigrants involved in crime--what a shock. Look at Quebec's 10 most wanted list:
http://www.10criminelsrecherches.qc.ca/index-en.html
50% of them are not even Canadian citizens.
Here is Canada's most wanted list:
http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/wanted-recherches/mur-meu/index-eng.htm
about 64% of them are non-white.
I think Canada is being gamed by criminals from around the world. At least he US gives criminals long prison sentences. They just get a slap on the wrist up here.
I'm old enough to remember when Canada was mostly all white, before Trudeau's grand multiculturalism experiment. It makes me feel bad for the honest immigrants who moved here to try to get away from all that crap.
"He was the only customer in the restaurant the whole time, but employees were coming and going, making deliveries." It sounds reminiscent of how Joe Kennedy made his fortune.
We in the UK have also been culturally enriched by recent immigration.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1263617/Schoolgirl-stabbed-death-way-party.html
Richard...London
The Armenians I knew in Mass. were
all of the well assimilated upper working to middle-middle class range. I also knew a very successful Irish/Armenian family
(more like high upper middle), nothing sketchy about them.
The names were very easy to remember since they all seemed to end in "-ian". Not like trying to learn Indian names.
If Armenian immigrants are successful why is the country still poor?
armenians like overseas chinese, jews and greeks - made money as an outgroup on host populations. there was no 'armenia' it was part of the ottoman empire - and within that 'gorgeous mosiac of diversity' they were were a merchantile class
"To the surprise of nobody"
well the elite aren't surprised because they ignore the implications, if not the actual story - the same way they avoid the knoxville horror, the ongoing immigrant crime problem, etc.
The LA Times reports on a local Armenian family who suffers from a puzzling affliction.
Steve
This column is somewhat unfair. Why didnt you write similar "to the surprise of no one" columns about Joe Stack (Austin suicide pilot) and John Patrick Bedell (Pentagon shooter). You are rightly critical of Gladwell for citing outlier behavior (e.g. single charter schools that raise the NAEP scores of so-called NAMs)as being representative of trends that apply to entire populations. Dont allow your credibility to become a victim of tribal biases. Follow the facts.
You guys are giving my handle a bad name.
Yes, they were Armenians, and no, they were not selected at random. It was a gangland killing. The people in the restaurant were part of a gang that the gunman wanted to hit.
And yes, pretty much all recent waves of immigrants have had violent, crime-prone sons. America just started attracting the wrong people after civil rights, Food Stamps, Medicaid, etc. Go figure.
In what sense can it be said that Armenians make "superior criminals?"
What's that old (reputed) Chinese saying? May you live near plenty of Armenians?
In the LA area, there is a crime problem among Armenian immigrants, and young second-generation Armenians from the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. Armenians on the East Coast (Mass, NJ) are pretty much all American-born descendants of Genocide survivors.
And I hate to rain on people's parade, but I think it is unfair to judge Armenian-Americans as a whole, whether recent immigrants or fourth-generation Americans with Armenian surnames, based on the behavior of these FOB gangster types.
I happen to mistakenly stubble upon this site as I was reading about the tragedies. I am beyond appalled with your post. The families of the victims have lost their sons and brothers and you find nothing but their last names to focus on. You should be ashamed of yourself for being a bitter, ignorant person. Its people like you who spread HATE faster then those with guns. Why don’t you educate your self. Let me help you. It is immigrants that have made this country what it is, rich in ALL cultures, beautiful, and YES safe to name a few facts. On your next arrogant, sour post comment on why white males massacre their class mates and professors in the library, or why they kill Jewish man during their time of peace full prayer.
"I happen to mistakenly stubble upon this site as I was reading about the tragedies. I am beyond appalled with your post."
Hey, guys, we've got another new Steve-fan-in-development here!
Welcome, Miss Anony! You've got a big job un-brainwashing yourself ahead of you, it's true, but Steve'll make it fun, I promise.
I think the reason why a disproportionate number of recent immigrants are criminals is because the countries they have come from are mostly violent places where corruption and cheating is a way of life. If you have lived in a corrupt culture all your life, it might be difficult to change. Some of them probably immigrated with the idea in mind of setting up criminal operations and I think most of them are in Canada :(
Look at the corruption perception index at transparency.org
Armenia ranks 120th out of 180 (180 is most corrupt).
http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2009/cpi_2009_table
If less corrupt countries take in immigrants from corrupt countries they can expect many will bring corruption with them.
This applies to people from the far east, too. In Richmond (a now mostly Chinese suburb of Vancouver) someone was running a company that guaranteed people would pass their driving test if they paid a large sum of money. It involved bribing a driving examiner (also an immigrant). It went on for 5 years before it was stopped. (Which perhaps explains why so many Chinese in Vancouver are such appalling drivers). Then there was an outfit that sold software that allowed restaurants to cheat on their tax. And many students newly arrived from China don't even understand that there is anything wrong with cheating.
In corrupt countries everyone probably avoids paying tax because they know that corrupt government officals will just line their pockets with it. So they just look out for themselves and their families and try to cheat everyone else. There is no social capital in these places, which results a dysfunction hell hole.
Somehow the Protestant countries of northern Europe found a way not to be as corrupt, and to have social capital, and hence were able to create safe functional countries, for a brief window at least. Now they are being over run by desperate people from unsafe dysfunctional countries. If this keeps up soon the whole world will be unsafe and dysfunctional.
Wouldn't it be better to send out people from the functional countries to help the dysfunctional countries become functional, instead of letting people from the dysfunctional countries into the functional countries to turn them into dysfunctional hell holes?
I tried to post something like this on the CBC site and they wouldn't post my comment (as usual). We are not allowed to talk about this sort of thing in polite conversation, apparently.
As I put it in a UK context :
"One of my hobby-horses is the question of culture. For some reason UK liberals believe (or claim to) that, no matter whence you hail, the moment you set foot on UK soil the mystic properties of Old Albion (or Cymru or Alba or Erin) flow up through your shoes and make you just like the natives - in terms of your propensity to evil. But in the case of your propensity to good, all the good bits of your culture magically stay, enriching the poor natives by the power of diversity.
Call me an idiot who doesn't understand how that works. I suggest that if you recruit, say, 500 police officers from a country - say Country X - famous for the corruption of its police, that the level of corruption in that group will be higher than in the police as a whole. It probably won't be as high as back in the old country (such magical-soil features as the likelihood of getting caught and of punishment will probably reduce the levels) but it'll still be higher than the statistical average. At which point someone will be able to point to the higher-than average level of disciplinaries and cry "racist !"
None of the above would apply in the presence of a strong host culture into which the newcomers chose to integrate. But that's just what we haven't got. I imagine "we're British - we don't do that" is probably the kind of phrase that gets you chucked out of the Met."
Welcome, Miss Anony! You've got a big job un-brainwashing yourself ahead of you, it's true, but Steve'll make it fun, I promise
Yep, just look how Melykin has come along since she first showed up.
"Wouldn't it be better to send out people from the functional countries to help the dysfunctional countries become functional, instead of letting people from the dysfunctional countries into the functional countries to turn them into dysfunctional hell holes?"
And how's that working out in Iraq, Af/Pak, etc. etc. etc...
If Armenian immigrants are successful why is the country still poor? It's a really small country too.
Because people from corrupt, clan-oriented, low-trust ethnicities need someone to prey on for success?
Look at the corruption perception index at transparency.org
Armenia ranks 120th out of 180 (180 is most corrupt).
It's unfair, wrong, racist, biased, bigoted, discriminatory and mean to judge Armenians corrupt based on mere stati- oh, never mind.
This applies to people from the far east, too.
Oh, in spades. Sure, assimilate them to less-corrupt western culture in small numbers and they're fine.
Let's all thank God our government is mature enough to keep the numbers low!
Erm, no. There will always be enough contact with and immigration from the olde country to keep the corruption fresh.
I love how liberals always fall back on culture, as if they don't give everyone (except whites) a pass for their culture. As if they're going to hook these cultural offenders up to Clockwork Orange machines Real Soon Now...
I tried to post something like this on the CBC site and they wouldn't post my comment (as usual). We are not allowed to talk about this sort of thing in polite conversation, apparently.
Yeah, exactly!
"It's not race, it's culture, you fascist bigot."
"Erm, ok-aaay, so what are we going to do about their "culture" then?"
"Shut up already you racist fascist bigot!"
"Yep, just look how Melykin has come along since she first showed up"
Yep. Star pupil. Gives ya a glimmer of hope for our country, doesn't it?
This was in today's paper. Its about a refugee from Malawi, now facing 4 murder charges in Vancouver. Our legal system is so screwed up he will probably get off.
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Multiple+murder+trial+starts+Vancouver+Charles+Kembo/2096394/story.html
Charles Kembo, the Malawi refugee I referred too in my last post, arrived in Canada in 1989 and has been in trouble with the law ever since. He has a long criminal record involving drug abuse, petty crime, money laundering and fraud. He is liar, a cheat and a con. All this was public knowledge long before he allegedly murdered 4 people.
So why wasn't he deported? Because the people in Canada who are in charge of such things are incompetent and the laws are weak and toothless. The legal system in Canada might have been able to limp along and function more or less IF we hadn't gone multicultural and invited every con and criminal in the world to set up shop. Now it is a disaster. It is completely unable to deal with the level of crime and the type of criminals we have.
Kembo's lawyer is already asking for a mistrial because the Vancouver Sun published a story about the case on the first day of the trial. WTF? This morning CBC briefly posted a story about the trial, and it was open to comments (surprisingly). Someone commented that we should bring back capital punishment and broadcast the execution on TV (the comment immediatly got many "thumbs up"). I was amazed that comment made it past the censors. I went back to look at it again, and found that the story and all the comments had been taken down. I guess it is not PC to publish news about a black refugee being a serial killer, con and fraudster.
Here is a link about the case. I don't know why my links seem to get truncated sometime. Google Charles Kembo trial if the link doesn't work.
http://www.primetimecrime.com/Recent/Murder/Charles_Kembo.htm
Ok now I'm going to try and calm down and stop being angry and frightened about this. I've heard that 10% of all black men in the US will end up in jail sometime during their life, and the same is probably true in Canada (though such unPC statistics would never be made public). I'm going to try and think more about the other 90%.
What words... super, a magnificent phrase
Armenia actually has a very low intentional homicide rate of 1.4.
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