One of the more interesting aspects of the European cover-up of mass sex assaults by so-called refugees is that it abets abuse inflicted on Muslim women as well. Before the story of the Cologne attacks broke, Katin Bennhold of the New York Times wrote a piece on the abuse of refugee women on the migrant trail. The story should have set alarm bells ringing in the West about what was coming up the trail towards them but it didn’t.
Interviews with dozens of migrants, social workers and psychologists caring for traumatized new arrivals across Germany suggest that the current mass migration has been accompanied by a surge of violence against women. From forced marriages and sex trafficking to domestic abuse, women report violence from fellow refugees, smugglers, male family members and even European police officers. There are no reliable statistics for sexual and other abuse of female refugees.
Among the more than one million migrants who have entered Europe over the past year, fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and beyond, men outnumber women by more than three to one, United Nations statistics show. “The men dominate, numerically and otherwise,” says Heike Rabe, a gender expert at the German Institute for Human Rights.
Even before the NYT article was published, academic researchers were already writing about a malignant practice called taharrush, which has become the term for mass sexual harassment. It began as a public issue in the Middle East, as these things often do, with a debate over the meaning of the word.
At one point, a heated exchange arose between an older man walking through the street festival and HarassMap members, about the existence of the phenomenon of el- taḥarrush el-ginsy, or sexual harassment, in Egypt. The crux of the man’s argument was that taharrush was not a problem in Egypt. Instead, he noted that muʿāksa, often translated as flirtation, was prevalent, though he qualified this by stating that muʿāksa also existed in other countries, even America, and was not unique to Egypt, but that taḥarrush was a “big word” that should not be used lightly.
Whatever the name of this dark rite there was little doubt, as foreshadowed by the attack on Lara Logan Tahrir Square, that something bad was afoot. Yet the warnings sounded in Egypt were ignored in the West even after a movie was made out of it.
During the 2006 Eid el-Fitr holiday, groups of young men who turned away from a sold out movie at a cinema in the downtown area went on a mass sexual harassment spree, attacking women and girls (Ilahi 2008). What made this event significant is the fact that it was caught on video by mobile phones and was widely broadcasted via YouTube by prominent Egyptian bloggers, such as Wael Abbas and Malek X …
In December 2010, the popular movie 678 was released, which was the first feature film produced in Egypt that focused on taḥarrush as a problem for women in public spaces.
The New Year’s Eve crimes in Cologne were therefore what Naseem Nicholas Talab would call a White Swan — not the unforeseeable Black Swan that he was famous for describing — but the obvious thing heralded by banners and brass bands that should have been noticed by the authorities. Yet there are none so blind as those who will not see. The Swedish police are now being accused of covering up assaults going back as far back as 2014 at a music festival. Karl Ritter of the Washington Post reported that festival”organizers received reports already in 2014 of groups of young men and boys groping girls in a systematic manner. Efforts were put in place, including more security guards, to prevent a repeat in 2015 but instead the problem got worse”.
Stockholm police spokesman Varg Gyllander confirmed to The Associated Press on Monday there was “a large number” of sexual assaults during the five-day festival and that scores of suspects were detained.
He said police should have reported on the incidents at the time “given the nature of the crime.” He denied suggestions in the newspaper report that police kept quiet because the suspects were foreigners. …
Roger Ticoalu, who heads the city government’s events department, told the AP that a “large part” of those detained were from Afghanistan, many carrying temporary ID-cards issued to asylum-seekers.
The facts were clear and for that reason all the more buried. It was politically sensitive and still is. In Cologne, in ground zero for the story, politicians are putting ludicrous plans in place to forestall assaults at the coming carnival through the use of “pictograms and interpreters”. The Wall Street Journal describes the attitude of some city officials.
A City Hall spokeswoman said Monday that officials were discussing just how to convey the tradition. In an interview in the magazine Der Spiegel, Ms. Reker said the city might try to explain Carnival to refugees using pictograms and interpreters.
“I don’t know if this will help,” Ms. Reker said. “But we must do everything that will prevent things from getting out of control.”
Gabriele Klug, who oversees refugee matters in the city administration, said better police work and identity checks were more important in weeding out migrants who may be criminals than education in German values.
“It’s a question of law and mutual respect, not of education,” Ms. Klug said, referring to the New Year’s Eve assaulters. “None of these guys assumed there was an invitation to do something with the women.”
When the problem was largely confined to Middle Eastern women it is easy to understand why it was ignored. Now that taharrush has come to Europe it is easier still. Events are being covered up because it runs counter to the Narrative peddled by the Western left. The Narrative is the source of their moral authority, the justification for their special graft.
What makes the pathological denial so catastrophic is that a vast, almost unstoppable torrent of refugees is already on the way to Germany, the fragments of collapsing Islamic countries. Cologne is but a skirmish with the vanguard. The main host is still on its way.
In belated mea culpa former senior adviser to president Obama Dennis Ross at last took his boss to task in an article titled: “How Obama Created a Mideast Vacuum“. It’s too late Dennis. What “too late” means was driven home years ago when one of the volunteer members of the Philippine Airlines cadaver recovery team described an accident which took the lives of 5 members of a university mountaineering club. The party was trekking along a dry riverbed on the lower slope of an 8,000 foot volcano in Mindoro. The weather was fine and the mountaineers were doomed. Unknown to them a squall had dumped a slug of rain on the peak high above them. The first warning they had of oncoming tons of water was a rumbling sound round the corner of the gorge. Then the flood came and only those fast enough to clamber up the riverbanks survived.
In the same way the present calm in Europe can be deceiving. Even if its leaders were somehow to reconstitute its borders, a gigantic flood from that vacuum upstream of the old continent is already rushing with irresistible force upon it. The UNHCR says refugee numbers are expected to increase in 2016. Some estimates say as many as 10 million more are on the way. From the beaches of North Africa to the overcrowded camps in Jordan and Lebanon; from every nook and cranny in MENA — they are on the way. One way or the other a terrible smash is now in train.
There remains the belief that Western leaders can still fix this problem with a little tweaking. But the time for easy action has passed. The Golden Hour in which to prevent irreversible damage has lapsed, neglected by a Washington too sure of its own fantasies to act decisively. Now the storm has broken and Merkel is downstream of a dam opened by the policy of “leading from behind”. The valve with which Obama had hoped to shut down the Islamic civil war has been turned the wrong way to full open. Worse, the wheel has broken off in his hand and he is staring at the snapped spindle.
That human tide of misery will combine with the denial which this generation of Western leaders are capable of to produce a separate catastrophe, still in the future, itself foreseeable, which can still be avoided. If only … if only… those who missed the chance the first time now wake up to act this second time.
Yet as Friedrich Hegel once observed what history teaches is that humanity learns nothing from history. Our Tower of Babel is helpless to save itself. Ironically if Europe survives it will be on account of the ghosts: in the remnants of the culture the left has come close to killing; the providence of a God they no longer believe in; the stirrings of memory of a nation they have doomed to oblivion; the struggles of a half-remembered honor we are told to disown.
The fact is, for West to survive, it must become something other than what our PC leaders have tried to make it. For it is written that “the stone that you builders rejected has now become the cornerstone.” It’s poetic justice to be sure but we have to accept the justice if we are to save what’s left of the poetry.
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