Europeans Studiously Ignore Muslim Mobs
This was first published in the National Review ca. 2015 or 2016.
I am always skeptical that these sort of texts will remain available on the Internet. I have it seen too often and with too many good things that they suddenly "evaporate" without a trace.
I am always skeptical that these sort of texts will remain available on the Internet. I have it seen too often and with too many good things that they suddenly "evaporate" without a trace.
When I find an IMHO "good" text I always pull it off the Internet to be able to keep it. The following is a good example.
Begin quote:
To avoid inciting anti-Muslim
sentiment, the press and government overlook repeated, vicious riots
targeting women.
Many
years ago I read a thought-provoking science-fiction short story
about a sociologist who specialized in the important field of
bureaucratic expansionism. I can’t recall the story’s title, and
I haven’t found the story on the Web, but a colleague better
schooled in sci-fi can probably identify it.
Through
my hazy memories, however, it goes something like this. The
sociologist is excited because he thinks he has gone farther than
anyone else in discovering the sociological laws of organizational
success. But how can he be sure? Inspired by a blend of scientific
curiosity and a sense of fun, he makes friends with his mother’s
sewing circle and persuades its members to reorganize it along his
scientific lines.
At
the close of the story the sewing circle has got three Senate seats,
55 House seats, and a credible contender for the presidency.
Which
brings me not to Donald Trump but to the New Year’s riots in
Cologne and two other German cities, in which one woman was raped,
about 90 others grossly assaulted sexually, and New Year revelers of
both sexes jostled, attacked, robbed, and threatened by an estimated
1,000 men of North African and Middle Eastern appearance in
“organized” criminal gangs.
Whatever
Mohammed’s virtues or defects as a prophet, he was one helluva
practical sociologist.
Not
that the riots and sexual assaults in Cologne stemmed from the Koran
or Islamic doctrine, any more than the sewing circle’s rise stemmed
from its favored technique of knitting. But the founder of Islam
imbued his new religion with a number of rules and practices that
made it the formidable militaristic force that conquered an empire
from Spain to India in its first 100 years and that is advancing
in Africa and Asia today.
If
we exclude divine favor as an explanation of this long advance, as
Christians and post-Christian secularists presumably should, the
rules that explain it include capital punishment for leaving Islam
(a.k.a. apostasy), which is presumably a disincentive to doing so;
strict rules for regular public prayer, which strengthen group
solidarity; a privileged position for men over women, amounting in
practice to ownership of them as either wives or concubines; a
hierarchical structure within Islamic society that places Muslims in
a position above non-Muslims in law, government, and social life; and
a religious orthodoxy that endows Muslims with a general superiority
(and sense of superiority) over others in non-Islamic societies.
Taken
together, these rules help to shape a Muslim community that is
cohesive, conscious of its separation from the rest of society,
resistant to influences likely to undermine its cohesion,
self-policing through its male members, and — because its sense of
superiority is not reflected in its actual status either locally or
globally — prey to resentment and hostility toward those whom
it blames for its unjust subordination.
To
be sure, a hundred qualifications should be added to this picture.
Other religions also have rules to keep their adherents from drifting
away or being corrupted into apostasy, but in recent centuries none
so brutally — or so effectively. In practice, Muslim-majority
societies of the past have sometimes shown tolerance to minorities
and even allowed non-Muslims to hold high military and political
positions, as under the Ottomans. And the majority of ordinary,
decent Muslims, especially in non-Muslim Western societies, are far
more interested in getting good jobs, raising happy families, and
getting on with their neighbors than in martyrdom or advancing the
interests of the
umma
or the local mosque. And much else.
That
said, the minority that supports aggressive jihadism (or is simply
contemptuous of non-Muslim society) is not just larger but, as
opinion polls show, far larger than similar tendencies in other
religions and ideologies. That minority seeks to impose its rules
both on fellow Muslims and on the wider society. And it has had
remarkable success in areas where Muslims predominate locally, making
U.K. state schools conform to Islamic teaching and practices,
including the separation of the sexes; establishing “no-go areas”
of European cities where police go only by agreement and where in
their absence Muslim rules on alcohol and modest female dress are
enforced by violence; and turning local governments into reliable
Muslim fiefdoms through levels of voter fraud not known in England
since the mid-19th century.
But
the most disturbing effects occur when the Muslim sense of
superiority over non-Muslims combines with the Muslim males’ sense
of superiority over women. Last year that combination produced the
scandal in Rotherham, in which no fewer than 1,400 young women,
most of them white, working-class “Christian” girls, were raped,
tortured, beaten, abused, prostituted, passed from hand to hand, and
abused in almost every conceivable way by gangs of Muslim men of
Pakistani background who despised their victims as sluts and
“worthless.” Their story, which is heart-rending, is told here.
But the same basic narrative, varying only in the details, was
replayed in Oxford, Birmingham, Oldham, and about 20 more medium-size
English provincial towns in the last decade.
The
shame of such widespread sexual abuse is not confined to its Muslim
male perpetrators. It is shared by the police, by local councilors,
by social workers who were supposedly caring for some of the victims,
by MPs who didn’t want to know what was happening, by the negligent
media, and by local Muslim leaders. These different “facilitators,”
however, were driven by different motives. The police, the local
authorities, the child-protection agencies, and the media turned
blind eyes to the scandal (even when distressed girls directly sought
their help) from fear of being accused of racism and Islamophobia;
local Muslim leaders employed that fear to deter investigations and
to protect the good name of their community.
As
for the perpetrators, they were driven not solely by lust but also by
communal politics and a particular contempt for non-Muslim girls. It
was not derived from Islamic doctrines, which they were too
uneducated to know. As the distinguished Welsh sociologist Christie
Davies has pointed
out,
however:
What
they
did
know is that under Islam women are inferior beings who should be
denied autonomy — particularly over their own bodies — sexual
property, the property of their male relatives.
If Muslim women step out of line, they are liable to be the victims of an honor killing.
If they suffer a sexual assault, they are forced to say nothing, lest disgrace fall on their families, even when they themselves are entirely innocent.
If Muslim women step out of line, they are liable to be the victims of an honor killing.
If they suffer a sexual assault, they are forced to say nothing, lest disgrace fall on their families, even when they themselves are entirely innocent.
For
Muslims, non-Muslims are in every way inferior and the freedom
enjoyed by their womenfolk is the worst aspect of that inferiority.
In consequence non-Muslim women may be attacked and exploited without
compunction. There is a direct link between the insistence on the
wearing of a hijab for those within the fold and the raping of those
outside, between an obsession with modesty for those women who are
family property and the utter disregard for the rights of those women
who are free.
What
happened this week to the women in Cologne differs in important ways
from the abuse of the young girls in Rotherham. But it proceeds from
the same Muslim group loyalty and sense of superiorities inherent in
Islam. What the rioters in Cologne demonstrated in the crudest
possible way was that among the things they wanted to take were “our”
women. Our own society finds such logic hard to follow: In what sense
are modern independent women anyone else’s property? But by the
logic of the societies and religion from which the rioters and most
migrants come, women are either behind the veil, and thus the
property of the family, or on the street, and thus the property of
anyone. And the rioters were imposing their logic, values, and
identity on us on the significant date of New Year’s Day.
Nor
did the initial reaction of the German authorities differ very much
from that of various Rotherham officials. The police did little at
the time; no one was arrested. Indeed, they announced that the night
had been a peaceful one. The media made no mention of the event. All
told, the story was suppressed for three days by the media, the
police, the Cologne authorities, and the federal government until it
began to seep out through social media. When it could no longer be
denied, the local (female) mayor warned women to travel in groups in
future, and federal ministers were concerned mainly to warn that
these crimes should not be linked to the “welcome policy” that
Chancellor Merkel had extended to migrants. It would be, said one
minister, an abuse of debate to do so.
I
don’t think German officials have quite thought this one through.
Either the misogynistic rioters included a significant number of
recently arrived migrants or they did not. If they did, then the
migration fed directly into the riots; if they did not, then the
rioters were people of “North African and Arab appearance” who
had previously been law-abiding but who now felt able and entitled to
assault local women in public without much fear of the consequences.
What changed them? What gave them that confidence? The obvious answer
is that those rioters who had been living in Germany for some years,
maybe even having been born there, have been emboldened by the
arrival of many others of similar origin, faith, or “appearance,”
and the potential arrival of many more. They sense that the German
authorities are restrained from halting immigration or imposing
Western values on the migrants, or even preventing them from imposing
their values on the locals. And as the feminists say, they feel
“empowered” as a result.
Policy
in Germany, the U.K., France, and the U.S. since the late 20th
century has been one of killing the Muslim sense of superiority with
kindness and expecting Muslim migrants to gradually surrender to the
lures of Western liberal-democratic capitalism. It’s not an
unreasonable policy; it was adopted in part from sympathy for
ordinary, respectable Muslim families, some of whom did adapt; and I
can understand why governments pursued it. But it simply hasn’t
worked. And it will fail more and more as more and more migrants
arrive to strengthen Muslim solidarity and to weaken pressures for
assimilation. Germany is today in a state of shock; France on the
verge of serious communal conflict, even perhaps a low-level civil
war; the European Union dithering, with no idea of how to cope with
the expected future levels of mass migration; the Brits wondering how
they can regain control of their border whether they are in or out of
the EU.
Which
brings me finally to Donald Trump. His policy of simply halting
Muslim immigration has been denounced all around. It is, of course,
discriminatory and thus a mortal sin in today’s politics.
Fine.
Let’s rule it out. But if his critics don’t want a blanket
moratorium on all
immigration — which I assume they don’t — and if they don’t
want to repeat the experiences of France and Germany in 30 years’
time — which I also assume they don’t — shouldn’t they tell
us what they will
do?
And,
for once, that’s not a rhetorical question.
—
John
O’Sullivan is an editor-at-large of National
Review
and a senior fellow of the National Review Institute.
and a senior fellow of the National Review Institute.
[P.S.
My thanks to Fred Schwarz for tracking down the title of the sci-fi
story. It’s “The Snowball Effect,” by Katherine MacLean,
published in 1952. And I'm going to go back and read it.]
End quote.
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