Gang Raped In Cologne. By Michael Lumish.

Gang Raped in Cologne. By Michael Lumish. Elder of Ziyon, January 10, 2016. Also at Israel Thrives.

Lumish:

Deborah Cole, writing in the Times of Israel, tells us:

BERLIN, Germany (AFP) – German leaders expressed shock over dozens of apparently coordinated sexual assaults against women on New Year’s Eve in the western city of Cologne blamed on “Arab-looking men,” but warned against anti-migrant scapegoating.

Chancellor Angela Merkel called for a thorough investigation of the “repugnant” attacks, ranging from groping to at least one reported rape, allegedly committed in a large crowd of revellers during year-end festivities outside the city’s main train station and its famed Gothic cathedral.

Police in Cologne said they had received 90 criminal complaints by Tuesday and quoted witnesses as saying that groups of 20-30 young men “who appeared to be of Arab or North African origin” had surrounded victims, assaulted them and in several cases robbed them.

Germany took in around one million asylum seekers in 2015, many of them fleeing war-ravaged Syria.

But, as she fails to note, most are not fleeing war-ravaged Syria.

One need not be a sociologist to understand that importing millions of young men from a part of the world notorious for misogyny into the Land of the Blondies is likely to result in trouble and it is, in fact, resulting in trouble. Aside from rising rates of anti-Semitism and crime and homelessness in countries like Germany and Sweden there is also the little matter of rape.

They say that Sweden has emerged as the rape capital of Europe. The Swedes must be very proud.

Justice Minister Heiko Maas said the assaults represented “a new dimension of crime that we will have to get to grips with,” adding that they had appeared to be “coordinated.”

Asked by a journalist whether refugees were behind the rampage, Maas said police were still working to identify the attackers.

“This is not about where someone is from but what they did,” he said.

“Making an issue out of it, lumping it together with the refugee issue, is nothing but exploitation. Now is the time to determine the facts and then decide on the necessary consequences.”

Exploitation? I have no idea what this guy is talking about, but he sounds like someone who would be quite comfortable in the Obama administration... where they have turned dissimulation and evasion into a form of art.

Furthermore, this is not a matter of “lumping it together with the refugee issue” because it is an integral part of the immigration issue to begin with. Sweden and Germany have invited huge numbers of people into their countries who despise Jews, dislike Christians, disrespect women, and, outside of the financial benefits, do not even respect their host cultures or the authorities within those cultures.

The bottom line is that the EU, Germany, and Sweden have made an irreversible blunder and their people are going to pay very seriously, over a very long period of time, for that blunder.

I am not one of those who speaks of an “invasion” of Europe because in the minds of most these travelers, I have little doubt, it is a matter of building a better life in a more generous part of the world or, in the case of some, to run from war. Why they feel it necessary to run all the way to Stockholm or Cologne is not difficult to fathom. I mean, if you had a choice between living in Karachi or Stockholm, which would you choose?

Meanwhile the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which hopes to gain seats in three regional elections in March, seized on the attacks as “a result of unchecked immigration.”

“Here we see the appalling consequences of catastrophic asylum and migration policies on Germany’s everyday reality,” party leader Frauke Petry said.

There is no question but that right-leaning parties throughout Europe are going to benefit politically from the criminal-like negligence of the various mainstream European leaders, such as Angela Merkel. The sad thing is that most Europeans objecting to the opening of the immigrant floodgates are not racist, nor particularly right-wing. European political figures, who are invested in the policy, will encourage people to think upon those who object as “racists” if not “neo-Nazis.”

In this way Europe is undermining its liberal, democratic nature going forward.

This is true for two reasons. The first is that the immigrants do not share those liberal, democratic values and seem generally unwilling to assimilate. This means that as they gain greater political power the less liberal and democratic Europe will become. Western feminism is dying because it is trapped between the multicultural imperative and the well-being of European women. Since multiculturalism apparently trumps social justice, those of us raised within an ideologically-multicultural milieu have thrust a sock into the throats of western feminists who might otherwise be inclined to speak out on behalf of their sisters in places like Karachi or Riyadh, not to mention Tehran.

Any who attempt to stand up for the rights of women suffering under Islamic misogyny will inevitably be ostracized from their political peer group with a “right-wing racist” label smacked across their forehead.

The second reason is that it becomes much harder to uphold humanitarian values when faced with people who emphatically do not share such values. How does one hold aloft the banner of humanitarianism toward the very people who wish to rape your daughter? This is not to say, obviously, that all Arab immigrants into Europe condone or commit rape, but certainly enough that it should awaken something in the European heart.

Victims described terrifying scenes in the marauding mob.

Katja L., 28, said she was with three friends outside the station when they encountered a group of “foreign-looking men.”

“Suddenly I felt a hand on my bottom, then on my breasts, then I was groped everywhere,” she told Cologne tabloid Express.

“It was horrible. Although we screamed and flailed about, the guys didn’t stop. I was beside myself and think that I was touched about 100 times across around 200 meters.”

Europe has opened itself to a whole new set of challenges for the coming century. We will see rising rates of crime, rape, and Jihadi acts of terror as European Jews slowly drift away to Israel or Australia or North America.

In the end, I most strongly feel bad for young European women who will be pay the most immediate and direct price for their parents’ good intentions. Few people doubt Europe’s humanitarian convictions as sincere.

We merely doubt that they will get what they bargained for.

Finally, nobody is going to tell me that opposing the mass migration of a population known to hold anti-Semitic hostility in percentiles ranging from the mid-70s to the mid-90s is racist toward those people.

Cry, Beloved Cologne. By Amotz Asa-El.

Picture shows the famous Cologne Cathedral before its illumination is switched off in a protest against a march by the growing grass-roots anti-Muslim movement through the western German city of Cologne. (Photo by: REUTERS) 

Middle Israel: Cry, beloved Cologne. By Amotz Asa-El. Jerusalem Post, January 7, 2016.

Asa-El:

As the New Germans’ best friends, we must tell them from under our battle- tested Jewish nostrils that we smell calamity’s approach – and so does Cologne.

Having set out to conquer the mayoralty of affluent, bustling, cultured Cologne, an idealistic and innocent Henriette Reker presented her priorities on the Web, clueless about what she would soon come to face: downsizing bureaucracy, raising cultural funding, encouraging start-ups, upgrading infrastructure, nurturing the city’s logistical centrality, etc.

It was the agenda of a peaceful, enterprising and optimistic German liberal, a local politician who at 59 would find herself at the heart of a renewed collision between her country’s humanistic aspirations and xenophobic ghosts.

The clash came in three installments: first, as Ms. Reker campaigned, the summer’s influx of immigrants redefined the political agenda, particularly for the lawyer-turned-candidate who was running at the time her city’s social services, and as such presided over, and became identified with, the effort to welcome the thronging refugees.

Then, two days before her electoral victory, Ms. Reker was stabbed in the neck and severely injured by an anti-immigrant fanatic who resolved to punish her for personifying the immigration policy of her Christian Democratic Union colleague, Chancellor Angela Merkel.

And finally, last week, Reker’s pleasant metropolis on the Rhine, dominated by its trademark two-spired cathedral and adorned by a 628-year-old university and three major museums, became the site of a mass attack by hundreds of immigrants on scores of local women who joined the crowds that gathered outside the central train station to greet the new year.

The method, as reported in more than 90 individual complaints to police, was reminiscent of what happened in Cairo’s Tahrir Square five years ago: a ring of men would eye a woman, circle her, and then grope and rob her. Some threw firecrackers at the crowd, others shoved firecrackers under their victims’ clothes. One woman said she was raped.

The assaults, and the system’s response to them, are emblems of a denialist Europe’s looming encounter with the real Middle East.

IN LINE WITH the escapism that animated postwar Europe’s treatment of all things Middle Eastern, police and politicians refused to call the assailants “immigrants,” even though all reports made it plain that they mostly spoke Arabic and did not know German.

Witnesses readily reported what police effectively denied.

“We stood with our backs to the wall and could see how people were robbed and German girls were groped,” one witness was quoted as saying by The New York Times. “I was surrounded by a group of 50 to 60 people from Arabic countries,” he said. “They would come up to us, shake hands and then try to reach into our bags.”

A sense of alarm descended on Germany, so much so that fear of the immigrants crossed from the Right to the Center, where some in Merkel’s camp called to slash and cap immigration, and then proceeded to the Left, where some called to deport delinquent immigrants. Women’s rights groups then joined the evolving outcry, complaining that police have been underplaying reports of sexual assaults within the refugee centers.

Young as this new immigration is, the violence it triggered is already a two-way street.

In Berlin, gunshots were fired Monday into a refugee asylum, injuring one immigrant while in his bed. In Schwäbisch Gmünd, some 50 kilometers east of Stuttgart, an asylum built specially to house refugees was torched on Christmas Eve, one of 220 such anti-immigrant arsons in Germany throughout 2015.

Few places in Germany can warn more ominously than Cologne that all this is but the beginning of something much longer, bigger and nastier than several months’ worth of sporadic encounters between impolite refugees and unwelcoming hosts.

COLOGNE IS WHERE the Nazis issued one of their earliest declarations of intent, when in 1933 they deposed its mayor of 16 years, Konrad Adenauer, who had expanded the city’s port, built its exhibition grounds, and sprinkled the riverside metropolis with sports grounds, schools, infirmaries, libraries and parks.

Slipping past the SA storm troopers who by then were camped outside his house, the mayor took the train to Berlin in order to complain to the new regional governor, Hermann Goering, about election fraud.

Goering kept Adenauer waiting for three days, during which the mayor heard on the radio that Cologne’s Nazi boss, Josef Grohé, had entered city hall, emerged in its balcony, and from there – several blocks from where the crowds gathered last week to greet 2016 – announced Adenauer’s dismissal and replacement.

At 57, Adenauer lost his income, house, job and employability, and later also his freedom, all of which gave no hint of his subsequent role as the architect of a re-humanized and re-legitimized Germany – a legacy most memorably underscored by his visiting David Ben-Gurion in his shack in Kibbutz Sde Boker, and by Ben-Gurion attending Adenauer’s funeral.

Now Adenauer’s spirit is inspiring Germans like Merkel and Rekel to greet the current refugees in disregard of the Middle East that produced them, and at the same time confront the bigots who are Goering’s heirs.

Middle Israelis have nothing but admiration for Merkel, Rekel and the critical mass of Germans who have resolved to absorb so many victims of our region’s malaise.

Besides this moral salute, no one hopes more than us that Germany’s generosity will give rise to a tolerant and assertive Arab who will help undo the ignorance, hatred, misogyny, tribalism, triumphalism and bellicosity that have shaped the Middle East as we know it.

For now, however, Germany is meeting the real Middle East, the one whose despots abused millions while bribing Europe with oil and brainwashing it to believe that the region’s illnesses are the fault of the Jews.

Tragically, Israelis are the only ones intimately familiar with the unfolding German showdown’s two sides: We know the Middle East’s bigots, and our parents knew Germany’s.

God willing, the New Germany that Adenauer bequeathed will find a way to avert this clash and, better yet, to disarm its combatants and reprogram their minds. Alas, as the New Germans’ best friends, we must tell them from under our battle- tested Jewish nostrils that we smell calamity’s approach – and so does Cologne.

The Arab World Is a House With No Roof. By Hisham Melhem.

Islam’s lost golden age. Abd-ar-Rahman III, Caliph of Cordoba, and his court in Medina Azahara, by Dionisio Baixeras Verdaguer.

The Arab world is a house with no roof. By Hisham Melhem. Al Arabiya News, January 2, 2016.

Melhem:

Generations after political emancipation from direct colonial rule and overt western influence, the quest for genuine political independence, democratization and cultural authenticity in many majority Arab states is still unfulfilled. The abject failures of decades of experimentation with controlled liberalization, Arab and local nationalisms, and Arab socialism in the 1950’s and 60’s and with Political Islam in its various forms since the 1967 defeat in the war with Israel, were shockingly confirmed by the Arab uprisings of recent years.

The end of colonial rule was the beginning of the era of strong men, usually lower ranking military officers (Nasser in Egypt, Qaddafi in Libya), and the rise of repressive, chauvinistic nationalisms (especially the Baath in Syria and Iraq). The Islamist movements, beginning with the oldest one, the Muslim Brotherhood (established in Egypt in 1928) and the movements it spawned in subsequent decades shared the same illiberal characteristics of the Arab Nationalists and Socialists. In fact illiberal governance is the thread that connects that amorphous universe we call the Arab world.

Illiberalism

The Arab world is a house of many mansions. But it is very difficult for most of its inhabitants to admit that they live in a house with no roof. The uprisings have shown that the walls of all the mansions have deep cracks. It took generations to bring the Arabs to this nadir, and it will take decades to fix the walls and build a new roof, assuming that the house can be saved from total collapse. In this house of many mansions, the mostly Sunni Islamists are, and will likely to remain in the foreseeable future the dominant political force.

The Islamists, who claim that they are the only authentic political force in the Arab world, are of different stripes, but these differences are not profound. They have shaped the course of all the Arab uprisings; they showed most maturity through Ennahda Party in Tunisia, less so with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, (whose misrule did not warrant the bloody crackdown that befell them). The Islamists fielded the militias that violently toppled Qaddafi in Libya, and they constitute a huge spectrum of dizzying militant groups trying to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, when they are not fighting among themselves. The Islamists are active above ground and underground throughout the Arab world. The dominant Islamists in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen are Shiites or off-shoot of Shiism, sponsored by Iran. The combatants in these majority Arab states are Islamists of all stripes. The illiberalism all of these Islamists share may not be identical, but most don’t tolerate liberal education, gender equality, full equal rights to minorities, and they usually reduce democracy to majoritarian rule.

Elusive reform

Judging by the constellation of Islamist movements and groups in the Middle East, and given that they find themselves engaged in life and death struggles, and the absence of institutional structures that allows scholars the freedom to debate Islamic themes and reforms, it is difficult to see any time soon, the emergence of a moderate political Islam reconciled with the imperatives of modernity and liberalism that we associate with modern civil states. But this should not be seen as a call to surrender. In the last few decades many Arab scholars and Muslim reformers challenged the dogmas of both the political and religious authorities pushing for reform and a different Muslim hermeneutics and some of them paid the ultimate price, or ended up in exile or in prison.

Some had hoped that Muslim communities in Europe and North America would provide the intellectual vigor needed to spark serious critical self-examination in Muslim societies or Muslim communities in the west; but the terror acts committed in recent months and years by European born Muslims and the resulting backlash doomed such hopes. Such attacks revealed that European Muslims still have a long way to go to be fully integrated in European societies, assuming that they want such integration. European states such as France and Belgium are not helping their Muslim citizens feel fully at home when they enact illiberal laws against public displays of religiosity such as banning the hijab in public schools or try to appoint Imams at certain Mosques. On the other hand, even in the most multicultural societies in Europe such as Britain and Denmark integrating Muslim immigrants has become very problematic, with some Muslim youths resorting to terrorism. More than a 100 Danish jihadists may have joined ISIS in Syria, one of the highest rates per capita in Europe.

Eventually, European Muslims would be compelled to develop a European Islam that tries to respect the ethos of the countries the Muslim immigrants are adopting, and the very core values of Islam. The diversity of Islam in history can be explained by its phenomenal ability to adjust to the different cultural milieus it found itself confronting. The way Islam developed in the Levant, Egypt and North Africa, is different than the way it developed in Al-Andalus (Spain), or the Balkans, or South Asia and China. Puritan Islamists refuse to acknowledge this diversity and insist against history and facts that there is one uniform Islam. Islamic civilization prospered and evolved not when it was onto its own, but when it collaborated and learned and competed peacefully with other cultures and religions.

Yes to life

The Umayyad Dynasty in Damascus benefited tremendously from the Christian Arabs who were steeped in Byzantine culture and learned a lot from the more advanced Byzantine and Persian civilizations. In the eighth century, The Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid and his successor son al-Ma’mun established Baghdad’s reputation as the capital of learning and scientific endeavor in the world. The sprawling city, the largest outside China, was open and welcoming to diversity. Caliph al-Rashid established his famed House of Wisdom – a medieval version of a modern think tank- to translate the great works of Greek Philosophy and to have Muslim scholars comment and build on it. In those golden days, classic Arab poetry, including that unique Arab literary genre known as Khamriyat, (the glorification of wine making and wine drinking, with bold references to the realms of religion politics, and ethics) reached its zenith.

Other great Muslim cities, from Cordoba to Istanbul achieved greatness only because of their “liberal” environment and because they embraced intellectual diversity and enjoyed and reveled in the material world. In all of these cities, the Political realm and not the religious was the dominant one. The German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who had strong negative views of Judaism and Christianity and contradictory views of Islam, nonetheless made a striking comment about the “wonderful world of the Moorish culture of Spain,” and he found it admirable that Islam “said Yes to life even with the rare and refined luxuries of Moorish life.” From this perspective, there is no greatness in asceticism, or in fake religious puritanism or in fear of the material world. Yes to life.

Hard truths

After each terrorism act in Europe last year, people asked where are the moderate Muslims, or where the outrage in the Muslim world is, or why it is that many Arabs don’t admit that ISIS has deep roots in Arab-Muslim traditions? Arabs and Muslims, who live in denial, usually give the standard answers which dredge up western colonialism and discrimination, or support for Israel and Arab despotism, by way of putting things in “context.”

Historic Western sins notwithstanding, Muslims should face some hard truths about most of their polities and societies. According to the State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2013, of the ten countries with the most terrorist attacks, seven were Muslim, and of the top ten groups that perpetrated terrorist attacks, seven were Muslim. According to a study by the Pew Research Center (2014), of the 24 most restrictive countries on the free exercise of religion 19 are Muslim-majority. Some of the bloodiest terrorist groups in the world wrap themselves with an Islamic garb, such as ISIS and Boko Haram. An arc of upheavals and violence in majority Muslim states stretching from North Africa, through Syria and Iraq, and all the way to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Beyond the violence, the status of women, children and minorities is very troubling. One cannot wish away these hard truths.

It is true that there are no autonomous institutions in the Arab world where Muslim reformers can develop and defend their views, but the fact remains that there are Arab reformers in the Arab world and in the West. This is a battle the West cannot and should not fight for Arabs and Muslims. The fight against ISIS and other forms of religious repression and extremism requires sharp swords as well as sharp and honest words. The challenge of the reformers is enormous and dangerous. But first they have to say YES TO LIFE.

When Worlds Collide: Unassimilable Muslim Migrants Crash Europe’s Fantasy Islam. By Andrew C. McCarthy.

Asylum seekers at a government center in Berlin, December 1, 2015. (John MacDougall/AFP/Getty)

When Worlds Collide: Unassimilable Muslim Migrants Crash Europe’s Fantasy Islam. By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, January 9, 2016.

McCarthy:

What happens when the West’s fantasy Islam collides with the reality of an imported critical mass of unassimilated — and defiantly unassimilable — Muslims?

Cologne happens.

Nor is it only Cologne. That was just Ground Zero of the New Year’s Eve rape jihad in Germany. As National Review’s Ian Tuttle notes in an alarming column about the predictable — and, if I may say, predicted — surge of sexual assault in a Europe overrun by “migrants,” the jihad included similar episodes, albeit on a smaller scale, in Stuttgart, Hamburg, and even astride the Brandenburg gate in Berlin.

We are finally learning about the magnitude and harrowing details of the attack after days of Stasi-like information suppression. Chancellor Angela Merkel may not be big on German security, but she is a bulwark when it comes to fantasy Islam.

First there was no news; then, a few disturbing hints of gropings and robberies by gangs of “Middle Eastern or North African” men. Now, we know it was a mass atrocity — the only remaining question being: How massive?

Upward of a thousand men, overwhelmingly Muslim, executed a coordinated series of attacks on an obvious target of opportunity: street celebrations in the major cities of a reviled Western state, where they were certain to find throngs of young women and a police presence grossly inadequate to provide security — certainly not against a critical mass of Islamic supremacists.

The participation of Muslim migrants in the rape jihad is, of course, the fact most desperately suppressed by German officials. Mrs. Merkel earned her “Person of the Year” honors from left-leaning relic Time magazine by rolling out the red carpet for a staggering 1.1 million migrants in 2015 — infuriating the German public and spurring the migrant tsunami now washing over neighboring countries. In this information clampdown, the nightmare of the victimized women turns out to be the chancellor’s good fortune: Police on the scene were so outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the assailants that it was physically impossible for them to get near most of the women being savaged, much less make arrests. Most of the perps will never be identified.

The media are already using this to cast doubt on migrant culpability. “It was not clear,” the New York Times opaquely explains, “that any of the men involved were among those who arrived in Germany over the past year from conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.” Sure. In southern Germany, after two teenage girls (ages 14 and 15) were raped, police tripped over themselves to announce that the three Syrians arrested were not recently arrived asylum seekers. What a relief.

Nearly 200 women have filed criminal complaints in Cologne, the vast majority charging all manner of sexual assault. There have been few arrests, though, and nearly none involving sex crimes.

The Muslim men used a tactic that has escaped the notice of fantasy Islam devotees but is well known to those of us who’ve followed the scant reports on the rape jihad as it has proceeded from Tahrir Square to Malmö to Rotherham: A group of men encircles the targeted woman or girl, trapping her while walling off police and other would-be rescuers. Knowing they are a protected class, the Muslim men have no fear of the cops — “You can’t do anything to me,” and “Mrs. Merkel invited me here,” are just some of the reported taunts. By the time “help” reaches one victim, the assailants have moved on to the next.

It is not very effective law enforcement . . . but at least the cops can’t be accused of “Islamophobia,” right?

Still, Europe is not Nigeria — not yet. In the regressing advanced world, nothing on the scale of the New Year’s Eve siege can happen without tweets and pictures filtering out. Try as they might, German officials have been unable to put a lid on accounts from police explaining that “the large majority” of assailants they were able to identify were “from Syria,” or observing that “there were thousands of people who could not be specifically identified but who had an immigrant background, and were most probably refugees.”

Truth being the first casualty of war, it was left to Henriette Reker, the fantasy Islam–drenched mayor of Cologne, to blame the victims for their ordeal. Such assaults could be prevented, she declaimed, if German women adopted a “code of conduct” tailored to the new, multi-culti Deutschland.

In the spirit of multiculturalism, I have such a code just off the shelf (on which rests The Grand Jihad, in which I outlined it a few years back). It goes like this:

To be absolved from guilt, the raped woman must have shown some sort of good conduct . . . Islam addresses women to maintain their modesty, so as not to open the door for evil . . . The Koran calls on Muslim women in general to preserve their dignity and modesty, just to save themselves from any harassment. So for a rape victim to be absolved from guilt, she must not be the one that opens . . . her dignity for deflowering.

These pearls of wisdom come from none other than Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s renowned sharia jurist. He proclaimed them on his popular IslamOnline website about a dozen years ago, right before he was welcomed into Britain — as a trustee of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies — despite his fatwas supporting Hamas suicide attacks in Israel and terrorism against Western troops in Iraq. Though he resides in Qatar, Qaradawi currently heads the Ireland-based European Council for Fatwa and Research.

Qaradawi is the most influential Muslim intellectual behind the strategy of, as he puts it, “conquering” Europe and America by “dawa” — the aggressive proselytism of Islamic mores. The plan calls for flooding the West with Muslim migrants, directing them to resist assimilation, establishing Islamic enclaves, and pressuring the host country to concede the enclave’s right to govern itself in accordance with sharia — Islam’s societal framework and legal code.

As I’ve previously explained, when Muslims are seeking conquest, Islamic scripture endorses sexual assault as a weapon to establish their dominance. “O Prophet,” Allah is said to have announced (in the Koran’s sura 33:50), “We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou has paid their dowers, and those whom thy right hand possesses out of the captives of war whom Allah has assigned to thee.”

In the Western ministries of fantasy Islam, the pols and their note-takers will thumb their chins and wonder what could possibly have motivated the German attacks — just as they wonder what could possibly explain the European sexual-assault crisis that has, by some mysterious coincidence, coincided with mass Muslim migration.

The rest of us will know that there is a strategy: conquest. Just as in the Middle East, women and girls in the West are the spoils of jihad, the vehicle for intimidating non-Muslims into surrendering sovereignty over the streets. If they want to be safe, Sheikh Qaradawi warns, they must submit to Islam’s sartorial suffocation. If not, well, they have it coming.

By the way, since President Obama entered office, the United States has issued over 100,000 green cards per year to migrants from Muslim-majority countries. That’s just green cards — it doesn’t count the thousands of visas issued to students, tourists, and temporary workers. With the Republican-controlled Congress fully funding the effort, the government is on pace to award another 680,000 green cards to Muslim migrants — with their entitlement to lifetime residency, federal benefits, and a path to citizenship — in the next five years.

As Sheikh Qaradawi and Mayor Reker might say, I’m sure it won’t be a problem . . . as long as the women “maintain their modesty.”

Identity Politics Makes a Comeback in America. By Robert W. Merry.

Identity Politics Makes a Comeback in America. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, January 7, 2016.

Merry:

Forces are agitating American politics in ways that were not anticipated by most of the liberal elites.

When the Rev. Jesse Jackson ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984, he defined his constituency as a “rainbow coalition” of racial and ethnic minorities—blacks, browns, yellows, reds—as well as women. Few noted at the time that Jackson’s colorful coalition included everybody in America except for one group—white men. He would accept white women so long as they were willing to separate themselves politically from their husbands and fathers.

Jesse Jackson was ahead of his time. There was little indication in 1984 that white men felt particularly beleaguered by the reverend’s sly locution aimed at isolating them and implicitly identifying them as the enemy. Jackson lacked the political force to generate that kind of unease. But now, three decades later, white men do indeed feel beleaguered by a host of social, cultural and political trends that are transforming the country more rapidly and forcefully than it has ever experienced before. And this feeling is agitating American politics in ways that were not anticipated by most of the liberal elites, though they were entirely predictable.

This feeling of anxiety is particularly intense among working-class whites, which has some commentators scratching their heads. After all, they reason, these are people who should welcome big governmental programs aimed at providing largess for citizens such as themselves, at the expense of people who are richer than themselves. As New York Times reporter Eduardo Porter puts it, “What’s going on with working-class whites?”

Porter explored that question in a recent Times article entitled “Racial Identity, and Its Hostilities, Return to American Politics.” The piece manifests a fair amount of ignorance and a lot of underlying bias. In seeking answers to his question, he looks at the white working-class rather as an entomologist might inspect an insect under a microscope—such a fascinating specimen posing such a research challenge.

His conclusion is that racial and ethnic animosity has grabbed these people and directed them toward embracing presidential candidates such as billionaire Donald Trump and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, both a far cry from the kinds of liberals that Porter apparently thinks would be the more appropriate recipients of working-class support.

Porter notes that President Obama and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders have speculated that job and wage stagnation have contributed to blue-collar support for Trump and other conservative populists. But he finds this explanation “not quite satisfactory.” He’s more inclined to attribute white Americans’ support for Trump’s “xenophobic, anti-immigrant” message to anxiety over the loss of the country they lived in fifty years ago, when non-Hispanic whites made up more than 83 percent of the population compared to today’s 62 percent.

Porter is not entirely unsympathetic to this sentiment. “Their fear is understandable,” he writes, noting that Hispanic and black Americans “often care about different things than white voters do.” But he adds that the “reaction of whites who are struggling economically raises the specter of an outright political war along racial and ethnic lines over the distribution of resources and opportunities.”

In other words, it’s all about race—more specifically, the racial attitudes of whites. Race, after all, he notes, has shaped American politics for a long time. The GOP, he says, captured the South politically because of whites’ “sense of betrayal” over Lyndon Johnson’s desegregation policies. And it was race, he avers, that led to the “unique mistrust of government among white Americans.” Indeed, he declares that America’s “unusually minimalist state” is attributable “in large measure to racial mistrust.”

Here’s where Porter’s line of reasoning gets squishy. Yes, race is ever-present in American politics. And Johnson’s civil rights initiatives no doubt made possible the Republican “Southern strategy” that followed. But does that mean that race dominates the political consciousness of whites in the South today? If that’s the case, how is it that the South currently has two Hispanic senators, a black senator, and two Indian-American governors. Clearly, many white voters in that region are comfortable voting for people of color.

And the idea that America’s tradition of limited government is attributable primarily to racial sentiments is ludicrous on its face. Porter needs an immersion course in American history, which would reveal to him that this political philosophy is a product of the Western heritage. It was a fundamental philosophical underpinning of the Constitution. As the debates of the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia attest, they were obsessed with the challenge of keeping in check a government that they knew would seek to aggrandize its power whenever possible.

Porter devotes a considerable part of his article to a pastiche of studies purporting to establish that race drives the politics of white Americans. He quotes one paper as saying, “Racial animosity in the U.S. makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters.” He quotes another as saying that white taxpayers oppose welfare because they don’t want to be “forced, through taxes, to pay for stuff for blacks that many of them could not afford for their own families.”

This is all very flimsy. Since the beginning of the Republic, Americans have been rallying to philosophical arguments against redistributionist policies, and those arguments animated political debate long before the emergence of the country’s current racial mix. And you don’t have to be motivated by race to resist being forced, through taxes, to pay for stuff for people when you can’t afford such things yourself.

Which brings us to the underlying motivation of this kind of social commentary—to delegitimize the sentiments and feelings of white Americans, particularly working-class white Americans. Racism is not tolerated in our country, which represents a profound cultural shift within just a few decades. It also provides a weapon for liberal commentators. If a political impulse can be shown as emanating from racial sentiments, it becomes ipso facto illegitimate. That’s why writers such as Eduardo Porter toss around such value-charged words as “xenophobic” and “anti-immigrant” to portray white political sentiment.

What’s interesting about the Porter piece, as in so much liberal thinking these days, is how lopsided it is. If a black American at the lower rungs of the economic ladder votes for redistributionist policies because they benefit him—at the expense, let’s say, of his working-class neighbor across town who is struggling economically—then that’s just fine. No racial implications there. But, if that working-class stiff complains, then he gets placed under the microscope of those liberal entomologists and dissected for signs of errant thinking.

If someone from Mexico comes to the United States, even illegally, and promptly embraces a political outlook calling for more immigration so his outlook and his ethnic group can overwhelm the politics of old, that’s natural. No one suggests such behavior could “raise the specter of an outright political war along racial and ethnic lines.” He’s merely looking out for his own people in the political arena. But, if a white man resists that development and wants his government to enforce its own immigration laws, then he’s a xenophobe.

This double standard suffuses the output of the liberal media in America—NPR, MSNBC, the New York Times and many more. It renders impossible a measured, balanced interpretation of what’s really going on in American politics and American society.

Yes, many white Americans feel beleaguered these days. They see the progressive transformation of the country they grew up in, and their parents grew up in, and their grandparents. And they don’t like it. They don’t expect Chris Matthews, for example, to agree with them. But they do wish he would stop maligning them for wanting to employ American politics to protect their interests, just as Americans of other races and ethnic groups do.

In his Times piece, Porter points to Europe as a place also where “voters are increasingly drawn to xenophobic politics.” Former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, notes Porter, attributes this to fears “based on the instinctive realization that the ‘white man’s world’—a lived reality assumed by its beneficiaries as a matter of course—is in terminal decline.”

The white man’s world is indeed in decline throughout the West. Perhaps it’s even in terminal decline. If so, that would be a development of immense dimension in the history of Western Civilization. In America, that question will be answered in the political arena, where those who lament that decline have every bit as much legitimacy as those who celebrate it.

Europeans Studiously Ignore Muslim Mobs. By John O’Sullivan.

Mayor of Cologne Henriette Reker arrives for a press conference on January 5, 2016. (Oliver Berg/AFP/Getty Images)

Europeans Studiously Ignore Muslim Mobs. By John O’Sullivan. National Review Online, January 8, 2016.

O’Sullivan:

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 honour 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.


[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.]