When Pieties Collide
11th April 2016
Heather Mac Donald turns over a rock.
Feminists incessantly harp about a phantom “rape culture” in the United States and other Western countries. On New Year’s Eve 2016, Northern European cities experienced an outbreak of the real thing—and the opponents of patriarchy went silent. It turns out that a more powerful force exists on the left than feminist victimology: multiculturalism.
My, what a surprise.
As revelers gathered in the central square of Cologne, Germany, for the traditional New Year’s Silvesternacht celebrations, thousands of North African and Middle Eastern males started throwing firecrackers into the crowd and attacking passersby. They pickpocketed and robbed males and females, but they directed most of their violence against women: grabbing their breasts and buttocks, inserting their fingers into the women’s vaginas, and, in a few instances, raping them, while shouting sexual insults. A total of 653 victims filed reports with the police.
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German police and political leaders covered up the violence for days. A Cologne police-force press release originally reported that the Silvesternacht celebrations had been peaceful, though officers had witnessed the attacks. Police employees are “afraid of talking about these things in the context of the immigration debate today,” a Stockholm police spokesman told the Guardian, in reference to Sweden’s experience with Muslim sexual attacks on New Year’s Eve and at a music festival in 2014.
Eventually, however, news of the assaults leaked out, and the most surprising cover-up of all began. Leading feminists across the continent and in Great Britain either ignored the incidents entirely or distorted their significance beyond recognition. Silence was justified on the grounds that acknowledging the attacks would encourage opposition to the mass Muslim immigration that had engulfed Europe over the previous year. (German chancellor Angela Merkel accelerated that migration by declaring in August 2015 that her country would accept all Syrian asylum-seekers who made it in to her country.) Feminists were “finding it difficult to speak up about the event because of concerns it might be used to encourage aggression against refugees,” explained British journalist Jessica Abrahams. When feminists were cornered into addressing the violence, they tied themselves into knots trying to change the subject back to their favorite topic: Western white-male patriarchy. “The problem of sexualized violence has already existed here for some time and can’t simply be ‘deported,’” said German feminist Anne Wizorek to Der Spiegel. “It cannot be allowed to become the standard in gender debates that only male migrants are considered to be those responsible [for sexual violence].” In other words, the New Year’s assaults were continuous with the routine terror inflicted by German men on German women.