As Europe’s migrant crisis enters a new phase, it’s clear that European leaders have neither the will nor desire to preserve their own civilization, by John Davidson.
On Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she would not limit the number of refugees coming into the country. “On the issue of an upper limit, my position is clear,” Merkel said. “I won’t accept one.” …
It perfectly captured the refusal of European leaders to face the migrant crisis head-on—a refusal that in turn epitomizes the slow suicide of European civilization.
Feminism is the only area where Europe asks Muslim migrants to assimilate. They say that the real test of who is in charge is who it is most socially unacceptable to insult — that would be feminists, surely. Do feminists in fact run Europe? If so, are they the ones responsible for its death? Is the childless Angela Merkel a feminist?
Take women’s rights, for example. In Europe as in America, the equality of the sexes has for decades been held as an immutable fact. But Europe is even more militant about its feminism than America.
For Europeans, the very idea of a housewife is backwards and oppressive; mothers are expected to work and send their children to state-subsidized child care, not opt out of the workforce to raise a family. This is the official policy of the EU, which has entire commissions dedicated to ensuring more women enter the workforce.
For Muslim immigrants to Europe, who come from societies in which women are generally subordinate to men, this comes as a shock. Yet for a long time Europe insisted that newcomers adopt western attitudes regarding women’s rights and sexual freedom. As Christopher Caldwell has noted, this was the only non-negotiable demand Europe made of its immigrants.
The European ruling class might have been willing to look the other way on free speech and denounce as fascist anyone who worries about Islam and terrorism, but on feminism there was no room for negotiation: “It is the litmus test according to which assimilation — and even membership in the national community — is judged. It is the one area where Europeans retain both a deep suspicion of Muslim ways and a confidence in their own institutions that is free of self-doubt.”
But Muslims ravaging European women seems to be ok with those in charge, to judge by their implicit acquiescence. Hmmm.
At least, that’s how it used to be. Caldwell wrote those lines in 2009, long before the migrant crisis coincided with a spike in sexual assaults perpetrated mostly by Muslim men. The mass sexual assault in Cologne and other German cities on New Year’s Eve last year made headlines — not just because of the brazen nature of the attacks but also because German authorities tried to suppress information about them …
The most infamous case of this kind is perhaps the Rotherham child sex exploitation ring, which first came to light in 2010. An independent inquiry found in 2014 that British men of Pakistani origin had groomed at least 1,400 underage girls for sexual exploitation over the previous 16 years. The girls, some as young as 12, were variously abducted, raped, tortured, and forced into prostitution. Even more shocking than the details of the sex ring is why it persisted for so long: police and city officials knew what was happening but didn’t take action for fear of being accused of racism.
That was just in Rotherham, population quarter of a million. Similar events occurred in many other English towns and cities, with the total number of victims estimated at between 100,000 and a million.
You would think this would be enough for the government to take action and protect the women and girls being preyed upon by these men, but you’d be wrong. Two years after the inquiry, an investigation by the Daily Express found that nothing had changed; the exploitation was still happening “on an industrial scale.” …
Last week, Cheryl Benard, who spent years working with refugees all over the world, wrote about the growing incidence of sexual assault committed by refugees against local women. The vast majority of such assaults are reportedly being committed by young Afghan men, sometimes in broad daylight. In some cases, passersby have intervened to prevent women from being raped by multiple assailants. As in the Rotherham and Cologne cases, the fact of the assaults was disturbing, but equally disturbing was the reaction of the media and government officials. Writes Benard:
“It took a while for the pattern to be recognized because, until recently, western European media deliberately refrained from identifying an assailant’s refugee or asylum status, or his country of origin. Only when the correlation became so dramatic that it was itself newsworthy did this policy change. At that point, it became clear that the authorities had known about, and for political reasons had deliberately covered up, large-scale incidences of sexual assault by migrants.”
It’s almost as if the people in charge of Europe want it to happen, perhaps at some subconscious level.
