Topic: Decline of the West
The congenital dishonesty and bad faith of the Left—in this case of its feminist faction—has been well on display recently:
(1) For some time now feminists have had their knickers in a twist over something called “the campus culture of rape”—shorthand for the claim that US college campuses are the happy hunting grounds of predatory males who sexually assault and rape women with promiscuous abandon while university administrations close their eyes to the horror. That this narrative is incredible in the literal sense of the word seems not to faze its partisans, who have, with some success, substituted stridency for logic and evidence. Relying on bogus statistics and slippery redefinitions, campus activists have succeeded in creating an administrative mincing machine in the Stalinist mode. Is an accusation of sexual assault unaccompanied by evidence? No problem! University tribunals will adjudicate them anyway. Hauled before one of these kangaroo courts the accused, typically a male student, will find that he has no right to legal representation, no right to confront and cross-examine his accuser, no right to introduce evidence and witnesses, and no right of appeal. In short he can have his name blackened and his life ruined on someone’s mere say-so. Because, you know, women don’t lie about these things…
(2) On the evening of December 31, 2015, something rather shocking occurred in the German city of Cologne. A mob of around 1,000 men, mostly of Muslim/Middle Eastern background, converged on the city’s central square to launch a series of sexual assaults against the non-Muslim women gathered there to celebrate the coming of the New Year. Operating in organized gangs, the men followed a preset playbook: First, surround a target, walling her off from bystanders and the police; second, molest and rape; third, move on to the next target. The Polizei, present in inadequate numbers, did nothing to stop them and neither did anyone else. Even worse, though, was the conspiracy of silence that followed this carnival of sexual abuse. The authorities were mute; nothing appeared in the media. Even so the story could not be suppressed: Too many people had seen what happened. But when German officialdom did finally speak in the person of the (female) mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, it was to advise women that in the future they should travel in groups, taking care not to provoke potential assailants. That way, they might avoid getting raped.
We now know that similar New Years Eve attacks took place in other European cities, and that the perpetrators were mostly Muslims, including recent arrivals. In Germany the federal government, which at first seemed principally worried that the story would tarnish the image of “migrants” from Muslim countries, has been forced by public outrage to review and tighten its deportation rules for criminal aliens.
You might think that this sorry episode would have been greeted with righteous indignation by feminists everywhere. Surely they would rise up to demand that immigrants from wherever they come be made to conform to Western standards of behavior concerning women. And surely feminists would be outraged by the Cologne mayor’s proposition that women should take care not to “provoke” Muslim immigrants by dressing and acting in ways condemned by the Qur’an.
Nah.
It’s one thing, apparently, to emote over the sexual depravations, real or imagined, of white male college students like the members of the Duke University lacrosse team. But to call out Muslims for similar misdeeds raises the specter of that dreaded thought crime, Islamophobia. Besides, condemning Muslim gang rape might further the cause of conservatives. Consider the argument in this example of left-feminist handwringing by Anna Sauerbrey, opinion page editor of the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel and a New York Times contributor: “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.”
This may seem reasonable but it’s not. Why should Germany—or any Western nation—be required to “resolve the tension between its secular, liberal laws and culture and the patriarchal and religiously conservative worldviews that some refugees bring with them”? Ought not refugees, migrants and immigrants be informed on arrival that they’re expected observe the legal and cultural norms of the host nation? For instance, shouldn’t they be pointedly reminded that in Germany, France, America, etc. women are free citizens, not chattel?
On the other hand Ms. Sauerbrey’s preferred policy—multicultural groveling in the European mode—is a sure and certain recipe for the demonization of Muslim migrants, signaling new arrivals that they can impose their cultural norms on the host nation. Such misbegotten sensitivity might not be very harmful when such immigrants are relatively few in number. But when they’re flooding in, clustering together, establishing cultural enclaves, etc. bad things will happen—inevitably. I suspect that Ms. Sauerbrey realizes this but shrinks from the obvious conclusions. She prefers to split the difference, even if women’s rights get sent to the back of the bus.
Set against its hysteria over a non-existent “culture of campus rape,” feminism’s extreme reluctance to acknowledge a real and troubling Muslim culture of rape adds the charge of hypocrisy to that of pusillanimity. The sisterhood’s refusal to confront the number-one human rights issue of our time, the oppression of women in which Islam plays so prominent a role, would be scandalous if it weren’t so boringly familiar. The Left, feminism included, has a dismal habit of obsessing over minor or even imaginary injustices—“income inequality,” “institutional racism,” “microaggressions”— to the exclusion of actual atrocities like the Cologne rape riot.
