IN THE wake of US Vice President JD Vance’s comments about the ‘invasion of migrants’ in Europe, we now have the US defence secretary Pete Hegseth likening recent sea arrivals in Europe to an ‘invasion’, warning that freedoms won in 1944 remain under threat.
Hegseth’s remarks were delivered at the American Colleville-sur-Mer cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach in Normandy during commemorations of the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day landings.
He said that ‘different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies’.
‘Beaches in Spain and Italy and Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive’, he said. ‘When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?’
He added: ‘I pray not, and I believe not.’
The remarks have received extensive coverage in the British media, with the BBC reporting that Hegseth ‘attacks Europe over “invasion” of migrants on its beaches in D-Day speech’. The broadcaster quotes more of Hegseth’s speech, having him say that in the years since D-Day some European capitals had grown ‘too comfortable’ with their hard-fought freedoms, forgetting that ‘freedom is not free’.
According to the BBC, he went on: ‘The men who fought and died here restored freedom to Europe . . . That freedom must be maintained by this generation of leaders and war fighters or what they fought for was merely temporary.’
If anyone had an absolute right to make such comments, in that place at that time, it was Hegseth, representing the US armed forces and the American nation. Omaha Beach was by far the costliest of the five Allied landing zones on D-Day. Across all beaches on June 6, 1944, total Allied casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) reached between 10,000 and 10,500. Of that total, some 25-35 per cent occurred solely on Omaha Beach.
America paid in blood for the freedom of Europe on that day – and on many days thereafter, the entire European campaign costing 250,000 American lives. The campaign to liberate Europe was significantly deadlier for American forces than the Pacific theatre, accounting for nearly 60 per cent of all US military fatalities in the entire war.
Not for the first time is an American politician saying that which European mainstream politicians are either too cowardly to say or won’t because they are contributing to the problem. Many have observed that if the troops who stormed the beaches could see what has become of their bravery and effort, they would be appalled.
The Daily Telegraph, however, suggests that Hesgeth’s comments will probably spark a backlash from the UK and other European countries after Downing Street appeared to hit back at Vance’s remarks on Friday. The immediate effect is to prolong the controversy which has been building up over the police treatment of Henry Nowak, broadening the scope to bring in the ongoing concerns about immigration.
If the spark that ignited the current conflagration hadn’t been Henry Nowak, there are plenty more to set fire to what amounts to a tinder-dry forest floor. One such is a ‘special report’ in the Independent headed: ‘Free to murder: How violent teenager on police bail stabbed an innocent grandfather to death days after release’.
The exclusive report recounts details which, in their own way, are as much an indictment of police performance as the Hampshire Police treatment of Henry Nowak. It tells of Rasheed Rahman, a ‘violent teenager’ who stabbed Mark Carroll, 55, to death in an unprovoked attack after he had been released on police bail – twice – in the days before the murder.
On April 10, 2024, Rahman, then aged 19, plunged a five-inch kitchen knife that he had signed out from his supported living accommodation into Mr Carroll’s back as he walked in a small London park with a friend. The attacker, who was not known to Mr Carroll, fled the scene still armed with the murder weapon, sparking an hour-long manhunt. He threatened two other people with the blade before he was caught.
Three days before the killing, Rahman was arrested after he allegedly lashed out at members of the public. He was said to have punched at least two people on a canal towpath in Camden, north London, while waving a boat hook. Just a day earlier, he had been arrested after allegedly using a brick to smash a window to break into an office in a church. Despite his spiralling criminal behaviour, Rahman was left free by the police to kill.
What firmly puts this into Hesgeth territory is that Rahman – a Sudanese national – is an illegal immigrant. It is unclear when he first entered the UK, but he told officials he had come to Britain in a lorry through Calais. He lived undocumented in the UK before being picked up by immigration officers while working at a restaurant in Essex in 2021. On discovery, he claimed asylum as a child from Sudan and was granted temporary leave to remain in the UK until March 2028.
It is very much a sign of the times that such attacks are now so frequent that it is difficult to keep track of them, especially as the media tend to give them limited coverage except where there are exceptional circumstances, such as in the Henry Nowak case.
A recent example is the murder of 15-year-old Harvey Willgoose at his Sheffield school by Pakistani-heritage Mohammed Umar Khan, also 15, who pulled out a 5in serrated hunting knife and stabbed him twice, piercing his heart. In February 2026, an independent safeguarding review uncovered massive institutional failures, revealing that Khan had over 130 recorded ‘red flag’ incidents of anger, gang association, and weapon possession flagged at his previous school before transferring to Harvey Willgoose’s school. Safeguarding and behaviour records were not requested or reviewed before Khan’s move to the school was agreed. When he did transfer, the records were not read due to unclear responsibility.
There was a flurry of media attention at the time, but it soon subsided. There are other shocking cases which are due to reach trial and reporting restrictions prohibit discussion of them until then.
When I was a boy in London, knife murders were so rare that, on the occasion of a stabbing death being reported, I recall seeing the headlines on the newspaper vendors’ stands, and my parents’ palpable sense of shock that such a crime should have occurred.
If the modern-day media gave each of the contemporary murders the same treatment – or as much coverage as they have given Henry Nowak – the impact of these crimes would be devastating, and the role of third-world imports would doubtless be harder to ignore or gloss over.
As it is, we need the US defence secretary and the vice president to warn us of how much our society has deteriorated, while our home-grown politicians do their best to suppress discussion and demonise (or jail) those who refuse to be cowed.
People may object to US politicians ‘interfering’ in UK domestic affairs – as does Starmer – but if they (and Elon Musk) don’t shine a light on this political darkness, who will?
A longer version of this article appeared in Turbulent Times on June 7, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.
Editor’s note You can watch the US Secretary of War’s speech in full here
