by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Restoring the West
When compassion replaces judgment, the innocent pay the price.
On the afternoon of December 27, 2017, fifteen-year-old Mia Valentin walked into a drugstore in Kandel, a small town in the German Palatinate. Her former boyfriend followed her inside and stabbed Mia seven times with a kitchen knife he had bought minutes earlier. She died in the hospital that night. Twelve days before her murder, Mia and her parents had reported his threats to the police. Officers had even visited him that very morning.
Abdul Dawodzai had arrived in Germany from Afghanistan in the spring of 2016. Claiming to be a child, he secured a place in a home for unaccompanied minors and enrolled in the school where he met Mia. Although his asylum claim was rejected in early 2017, he remained protected from deportation because Germany, as a rule, does not deport children.
Police already knew Dawodzai had assaulted someone at school. Mia’s parents had also warned the youth welfare office that he was clearly older than he claimed. After he murdered her, X-rays of his hand, collarbone, and teeth put his age at around twenty. Yet none of this mattered. He was tried as a juvenile, behind closed doors, and sentenced to eight and a half years in September 2018. A year later, he hanged himself in prison.
Every German official who handled this case believed, we must assume, that he was acting humanely. By declining to test Dawodzai’s age, the youth office spared a vulnerable boy an indignity. The immigration service protected a child from deportation, while the court that tried him as a juvenile offered a young man hope for a future. But the price of every one of these decisions—every act of supposed kindness—was paid by a frightened fifteen-year-old girl and her family.
The mishandling of the Dawodzai case was not merely a failure of German bureaucracy. It sprang from an idea. The modern West has replaced—indeed, confused—mercy with compassion. Yet compassion, in and of itself, is not a virtue. To understand why, we must distinguish between three attitudes: pity, compassion, and mercy.