Cologne

Consider the following fictional account: It's New Year's Eve in a major city in the United States. The city's mayor has worked hard to make the city a progressive icon. As the old year winds down a very large group of almost 1,000 young white males becomes very rowdy in the downtown area. They break into smaller groups of 12 to 30 men and begin to accost females who are walking on the street. They grab them sexually and tear off their clothes in some cases stripping them naked. In at least one and possibly more cases, they sexually abuse and rape the women.

It's highly unlikely that the above scenario would occur in the United States, but if it did, the outrage would be lightning swift and volcanic, police actions would be assertive, hundreds would be arrested, feminists would argue that their claims of a "rape culture" in the United States had been vindicated, the federal government would conduct investigations, the media would provide 24-7 coverage.

But here's the thing: Change the city to Cologne, Germany and the phrase "1,000 young white males" to "1,000 young Muslim males and many part of the recent immigrant wave from Syria" and the fictional account becomes reality.

There only one real difference. Outrage was muted for five days, the Mayor of Cologne essentially blamed the victims, the police did little, and the media coverage was tepid at best. That changed, but it took almost a week before serious reporting began to emerge.

Here's the story from the UK Telegraph:

Dozens of women trying to see in the New Year in the centre of Cologne found themselves trapped in a crowd of some 1,000 men, who groped them, tore off their underwear, shouted lewd insults and threw fireworks at them.

To make matters worse, a series of sexual assaults that would normally make headline news went almost completely unreported for five days - and the scale of what happened that night in the western German city is only now emerging.

Women looking for reassurance from the authorities, therefore, were shocked when Henriette Reker, the mayor of Cologne and a survivor of a far-Right assassination attempt, said that German women should behave according to a certain ‘code of conduct’.
She made a public announcement advising women to travel in groups and stay at “arm’s length” from men they did not know to avoid such attacks happening to them.

'This means they should go out and have fun, but they need to be better prepared, especially with the Cologne carnival coming up.
'For this, we will publish online guidelines that these young women can read through to prepare themselves,” she said.

It appears that bogus accusations of a rape culture in the United States aren't so bogus when "asylum seekers" from Syria and Libya are concerned.

The actions of the Muslim immigrants in Cologne runs counter to the prevailing left-wing narrative that the immigrants will be a net plus for Germany and Europe—hence the tepid reaction by authorities.

But as bad as this story is, there's an even bigger story here. In reality, there have been troubling increases in rape and sexual abuse in cities and countries that have seen significant increases in Muslim immigration. Scott Greer reports:

In the Norwegian capital of Oslo, a disturbing news report from 2010 found that all of the aggravated rapes in the city had been committed by “non-western immigrants.” The majority of non-western immigrants in Norway hail from Muslim states like Somalia, Pakistan and Iraq.

The situation is even worse in neighboring Sweden, which has now become the rape capital of the West due to mass immigration. Sweden currently takes second place in the category of highest number of rapes relative to its population, only behind the small African state of Lesotho. The Swedish government blames the problem on part to, ridiculously, men reacting violently to increased equality. But a 1996 report from that same government provides a better explanation for why sexual assaults have risen in the Nordic country.

The study found that North African Muslims were 23 times more likely to rape than ethnic Swedes. Considering that the country has opened its doors to more North Africans and Arabs since then, it’s reasonable to conclude that there’s some kind of relation between the immigration and the sexual assault figures.

And it’s not just adult women that may find themselves prey to these predators.

In 2014, the world was shocked at the uncovering of a large-scale child sex ring in the British town of Rotherham. The men behind the ring that victimized at least 1,400 young girls were all of Pakistani origin. But the Rotherham scandal wasn’t a lone outlier in showing men of Muslim heritage exploiting children in the U.K., as a disturbing number of other similar operations can testify.

Like all stories that address Islam, it's only right to state that most Muslims do not participate in and would condemn actions like those in Cologne, but it is truly troubling that a distinct pattern of sexual predation and abuse seems to correlate with a rising Muslim immigrant population. The real question is why.

UPDATE - I (1/8/16):
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It looks like Syrian asylum seekers in Finland (another country that extended a welcome to Muslims trying to escape the carnage in Syria) had planned to commit the same sexual assaults at a New Year's celebration in Helsinki. The Telegraph reports:

Asylum seekers who met in central Helsinki to celebrate New Years’s Eve “had similar plans” to commit sexual assault and other crimes as those who targeted women in the Germany city of Cologne, Finnish Police have reported.

Three Iraqi asylum seekers have been arrested for committing sexual assaults during the celebrations in the city’s Senate Square, where some 20,000 had gathered.

Security personnel reported “widespead sexual harrassment” during the celebrations, police added, with women complaining that asylum seekers had groped their breasts and kissed them without permission.

“This phenomenon is new in Finnish sexual crime history,” Ilkka Koskimaki, the deputy chief of police in Helsinki, told the Telegraph. ”We have never before had this kind of sexual harrassment happening at New Year’s Eve.”

He said that the police had received tip-offs from staff at the asylum reception centres.

“Our information from these reception centres were that disturbances or other crimes would happen in the city centre. We were prepared for fights and sexual harrassment and thefts.”

In this case, the police acted to thwart the attacks and largely succeeded. But I suppose that's not the point. Here we have immigrants who have been granted asylum in a countries that are under no legal obligation to do so. This is how these immigrants repay the hospitality. Disgraceful.

UPDATE - II (1/8/16)
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Mark Steyn thinks back to the earlier Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack and the more recent events in Cologne. He writes:

Both Paris and Copenhagen were twofers: the attacks on free speech were followed by attacks on Jews, at a kosher supermarket and a synagogue, respectively. To Obama, this second group of victims were merely a "random" "bunch of folks". Couldda been anyone, but just so happened to be "a bunch of folks" who like kosher food. As I commented:

Bank robbers rob banks because that's where the money is. In Europe, Islamic supremacists shoot up kosher markets, synagogues, Jewish museums and Jewish schools because that's where the Jews are.

I think most of us understand that a huge percentage of Muslims really hate Jews. I have a high degree of tolerance for hate: I spent a lot of time in Northern Ireland during a period when many Catholics and Protestants seriously hated each other, and I came rather to appreciate the way they were entirely upfront about their mutual hatred. The problem here is that in the biggest resurgence of Jew-hate since the Second World War we're not allowed to say who hates Jews.

That's why free speech matters. Without free speech, there are only the official lies - about who's killing Jews in Copenhagen, who's sexually assaulting women in Cologne - and there is nothing to say in response to either except to crank up the old joanna for one more chorus of "Imagine".

What happened on January 7th 2015 was terrible. But our response to it made it more terrible, and emboldened civilization's enemies. With respect to the late Charb, the choice is not between dying standing up or living on our knees - for those who choose to live on their knees will die there, too, cringing and craven. As I said a year ago:

The weepy passive candlelight vigils - the maudlin faux tears and the Smug Moral Preening overdose - aren't enough. If you don't want to put out the fire, it will burn your world to the ground.

Why is it, I wonder, that the Left outright refuses to see the gathering smoke and argues that the flames will not burn us but instead, bath the world in the righteous glow of multiculturalism? Dangerous fools—whose willful ignorance may act as an accelerent for the fire.