I guess Muslims don’t rape European women at a high rate? Or is it that we should not notice?
Ishaan Tharoor writes in the Washington Post:
A popular right-wing Polish newsweekly, wSieci or “The Network,” published a deeply provocative magazine cover this week. It shows a young blonde woman, garbed loosely in the flag of the European Union, being groped by three men. Only the six swarthy arms and hands of the assailants are in view, but the message is clear and barely needs the brutal cover line: “The Islamic rape of Europe.”
According to the Daily Mail, the Polish magazine said it was focusing on “what the media and the Brussels elite are hiding from the citizens of Europe.” An editorial in its pages, entitled “Hell Europe,” inveighed against a culture of “tolerance and political correctness” that supposedly led to the grim scenes on New Year’s Eve in the German city of Cologne and other northern European town centers.
Groups of men, many apparently of Arab or North African descent, went on a shocking criminal rampage that led to hundreds of complaints to the police of rape, sexual harassment and other abuse. The incidents fed into an already growing backlash against European policies welcoming migrants and refugees, particularly an influx from war-torn Syria.
Breitbart, the far-right American news website, picked up on wSieci’s cover story and detailed its message of a clash of civilizations:
Outlining the fundamental differences between eastern Islam and western Christianity — “culture, architecture, music, gastronomy, dress” — the editorial explains these two worlds have been at war “over the last 14 centuries” and the world is now witnessing a colossal “clash of two civilisations in the countries of old Europe”. This clash is brought by Muslims who come to Europe and “carry conflict with the Western world as part of the collective consciousness”, as the journalist marks the inevitability of conflict between native Europeans and their new guests.
The narrative of an Islamic or Arab takeover of Europe, though hardly new, has gained real traction in recent months, propagated by both xenophobic activist groups as well as populist political leaders and parties.
To be sure, there are legitimate security concerns posed both by the surge in new arrivals as well as the continuing instability and conflicts in the Middle East. The attacks in Cologne, writes the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud, were a reminder to the West of the Muslim world’s “sick relationship with women” — a product both of patriarchal and religious norms as well as the stifling legacy of authoritarian rule.
But perverse, misogynist behavior is not the province of just one culture or society. And much of Europe’s anti-refugee hysteria, as my colleague Adam Taylor charted this week, has been overblown and fueled by often misleading innuendo and rumor circulating on social media.
