Who's Afraid of Islam?

To my knowledge the Obama White House has not commented on the gang assaults on women in Cologne, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Berlin, Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Vienna and the rest of Europe. As everyone knows by now, the violence is being committed by Syrian and other Muslim refugees.

You would think that an administration that regularly attacks Republicans for their war on women would take a stand for women. And, you would think that feminists who have been railing about rape culture would be denouncing the Arab and North African men who have brought this culture to the streets of Europe.

Had it been a question of using bad words or politically incorrect pronouns, the feminist matriarchy would have risen up to smite the oppressors. Had the attackers been Republicans they would have been marching in the streets. Had the attackers been white police officers the White House would have joined the chorus.

Alas, the White House and most international feminists have said very little about the attacks, beyond some perfunctory observations that the attackers were males from a patriarchal culture and that the fault did not lie with the attackers but with the attacked.

Now, the White House has made one significant gesture. It invited a Syrian refugee to sit with Michelle Obama at the President’s State of the Union address.

It takes your breath away. Again, the president is siding with Islam. He truly seems to believe, with his predecessor, that Islam is a religion of peace and that Muslim misogyny is an aberration, not the true meaning of Islam. Given the chance to take the side of the women who were assaulted in Europe, Obama takes a stand for Syrian refugees.

Because, America would be a kinder and gentler, a  more inclusive and caring place if only we had more Syrian refugees. Anyone who voted for Obama should hang his head in shame.

It sounds as though the Obama administration is reading from the same chapbook as the idiot mayor of Philadelphia. Recall that Friday evening said mayor watched, with all of us, as a self-proclaimed follower of ISIS gun down a Philadelphia police officer. Upon hearing that the perpetrator said that he was doing it for Islam, the mayor proclaimed that it had nothing to do with Islam.

Some American political leaders have passed beyond stupid. Theirs is the face of fear, even the face of terror. They are, obviously, phobic about Muslims. Has anyone else noted that Islamophobia means, fear of Islam… not hatred of Islam or Muslims.

In truth, some feminists have denounced what has happened. They have noticed that they are no longer free to move about on their own on the streets of Europe. These women might as well be living in Saudi Arabia where they are not allowed to go out alone at all or in Egypt where they are most likely to be sexually assaulted on the streets.

Two days ago the Daily Mail reported:

Security authorities are growing increasingly concerned by the rising number of sex attacks by gangs of migrants which appear to be spreading across Europe.

Finland and Sweden today became the latest European countries to issue warnings to women to be wary of the threat of sex attacks following fresh reports of sexual assaults in the last week, while the Viennese police chief adviced women not to go outside alone in Vienna.

The warnings come as reports emerged that Austrian and German police tried to cover-up the issue over fears of reprisal attacks on asylum seekers and damage to the countries' tourist trade.

Muslim refugees are turning the clock back on women’s liberation. And they are often doing it with the connivance and sympathy of feminists. One German feminist, Alice Schwarzer has stood up against the Muslim invaders. For her troubles she has been denounced by her feminist cohorts.

This, from a long story in Der Spiegel (via Maggie's Farm):  

Schwarzer is speaking the language of all the people who see the events of New Year's Eve as proof that sexual violence is an imported problem -- a result of failed immigration. Young German feminists see it differently.

They argue that sexual violence is not a migrant phenomenon at all, but a long-standing, societal problem. Young feminists like Anne Wizorek criticize that Schwarzer -- along with many others -- is using the New Year's violence to fuel racist sentiment. They also criticize that broad swathes of society are acting as though there wasn't any sexual violence in Germany before the refugees arrived.

Here we have another appalling incidence of moral equivalence. The difference is, let’s be very clear about it, that now women all over Europe cannot safely go out at night alone. In many instances, they cannot even go out accompanied by men. That is the difference. Riddled with fear, feminists do not see the difference. They have gotten back in touch with their feminine mystique and have muted their outrage.

In Germany, the silence of the feminists has become a story in itself. Der Spiegel continues:

Young feminists are being asked why they haven't been showing their outrage over the latest attacks as strongly as they did three years ago with the hashtag "#aufschrei," German for "outcry." At the time, a politician with the FDP party named Rainer Brüderle made a lewd comment to a female journalist and set off a wave of criticism on Twitter. Is it because many of the attackers this time around were migrants? Is that what they call political correctness?

Lewd comments, we cannot have that. Wrong pronouns, we certainly cannot have that. Yet, when women are sexually assaulted on the streets of Europe feminists are so completely terrorized—let’s call it by its name—that they cannot manage to show any outrage at all. Be clear, these feminists believe that empathy, sympathy and compassion will calm the fevered loins of Syrian and other Arab refugees.

A German writer named Anna Sauerbrey  has written an appalling column in The New York Times:

Integration will fail if Germany cannot resolve the tension between its secular, liberal laws and culture and the patriarchal and religiously conservative worldviews that some refugees bring with them. We cannot avoid that question out of fear of feeding the far right. But integration will also fail if a full generation of refugees is demonized on arrival.

The real question we should be asking is not whether there is something inherently wrong with the refugees, but whether Germany is doing an effective job of integrating them — and if not, whether something can be done to change that.

Again, this counts as pathetic. Sauerbrey is oozing fear. The problem is not with the refugees, but with Germany. The problem is not with predatory young males but with a lack of empathy by everyday Germans. Or perhaps, Germany has not given them jobs that they do not want and are not qualified to perform. Or, is it that Germany has not given them enough blankets and benefits? Anything, but blaming Islam. You must not demonize the Muslims, no matter what they do.

Why does Sauerbrey not know that these immigrants do not want to be integrated, that they consider assimilation a sellout? Why does she not know that all efforts to integrate them have failed and that the larger their number the less likely it is that they will be integrated?

She does not know because she does not want to know. She does not want to know because she is afraid. Terrorists target women because women are easier to intimidate.

Again, the feminist attitude is, that the fault lies with all men equally and that they all need a warm bath of empathy. These new refugees need to be unmanned in exactly the same way that Western men have been unmanned by feminism.

The problem here, as I have mentioned, is that these unmanned Western men are no longer willing to fight to protect women. And, strong powerful feminists do not want the protection anyway.

This morning in the New York Times Ross Douthat remarks sagely that it’s time for Angela Merkel to go. (It’s also time for the mayor of Hamburg to resign.) One notes that Doug Kass did predict this a few weeks ago in his list of surprises for 2016. Douthat provides an excellent response to Sauerbrey's drool:

If you believe that an aging, secularized, heretofore-mostly-homogeneous society is likely to peacefully absorb a migration of that size and scale of cultural difference, then you have a bright future as a spokesman for the current German government.

You’re also a fool. Such a transformation promises increasing polarization among natives and new arrivals alike. It threatens not just a spike in terrorism but a rebirth of 1930s-style political violence. The still-imaginary France Michel Houellebecq conjured up in his novel “Submission,” in which nativists and Islamists brawl in the streets, would have a very good chance of being realized in the German future.

This need not happen. But prudence requires doing everything possible to prevent it. That means closing Germany’s borders to new arrivals for the time being. It means beginning an orderly deportation process for able-bodied young men. It means giving up the fond illusion that Germany’s past sins can be absolved with a reckless humanitarianism in the present.

It means that Angela Merkel must go — so that her country, and the continent it bestrides, can avoid paying too high a price for her high-minded folly.