When Pieties Collide

[Valin]

City Journal:

Feminism and multiculturalism in Western Europe

Heather Mac Donald

Spring 2016

 

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.

 

(Snip)

 

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 Ωdeported,≈ ” 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.

 

 

(Snip)

 

To acknowledge the abyss that separates the experience of Western women from those in Arab and North African countries, though, would risk walking down a slippery slope that might end up with the recognition that Western women do not, in fact, live in a “rape culture.” But even more dangerous than such a debunking of feminist propaganda would be the possibility of confronting the potential threat that large-scale Muslim and Third World immigration poses for Western liberalism and individualism. The New York Times provided a stunning example of the inevitable “defining sexism down” that will be necessary to accommodate such immigration. The problem on New Year’s Eve, it reported, was that migrants from war-torn countries were “unfamiliar with German culture.” Translation: the norm that you don’t jam your fingers up women’s vaginas in public is just a quaint German custom, akin to wearing lederhosen. This, from a paper that routinely covers phony college rape allegations with outraged alarm. Making matters worse in Cologne, according to the Times, the police were working from “outdated expectations.” Had the police been up to date, they would have planned for mass sexual assaults. “This was new terrain for all,” the Times concluded.

 

But it won’t be “new terrain” for long...............(Snip)