In Cologne, Multiculturalism More Important than Protecting Women from Rape

By Dennis Prager

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Since the scores of sexual attacks on German women carried out by hundreds of men identified as Arab on New Year’s Eve, the Left in Germany has faced a dilemma: Which ideal should they fight for first — women’s human rights or multiculturalism?

This is the same dilemma British authorities faced between 1997 and 2013. During those 16 years at least 1,400 girls from the age of eleven were raped by gangs of men, nearly all of whom were immigrants (mostly from Pakistan) or sons of immigrants, in just one English city: Rotherham, population 275,000.

But British authorities kept silent. Why?

In 2014, the reason finally was revealed: the perpetrators were Muslim, and British authorities were therefore afraid to publicize — or often even investigate — the crimes. They feared being branded Islamophobic and racist. Politicians on the Left and Right acknowledged this fact.

As I wrote in a column in 2014:

    In 2002, a Labor Party MP from nearby Keighley, Ann Cryer, complained to the police about “young Asian lads” raping girls in her constituency. In her words, she “was shunned by elements of her party.” And note, that as is demanded by the Left in the U.K., she didn’t even mention that the rapists were Pakistani, lest Muslims be blamed for this evil. They were “Asian lads.”

The British Home Secretary, Theresa May, told Parliament that “institutionalized political correctness” was responsible for the lack of attention given to the mass rape.

In other words, faced with the choice of protecting over a thousand girls from repeated gang rape and protecting Muslims from being identified as the rapists, British authorities chose to protect multiculturalism and “diversity.” In the competition between multiculturalism and one of the most elementary instincts and obligations of higher civilization — the protection of girls and women from sexual violence — higher civilization lost.

The U.K. is, of course, not alone in letting multiculturalism and the fear of being branded racist or Islamophobic take precedence over protecting girls and women. Some German authorities’ reaction to the events of New Year’s Eve in Cologne exemplified this same tendency.

After the attacks in Cologne, the mayor of Cologne suggested, in the words of the New York Times, “that women can protect themselves from men on the streets by keeping them more than an arm’s length away.” In the mayor’s words: “It is always possible to keep a certain distance that is longer than an arm’s length.”

Aside from the moral foolishness of the comment, it is factually incorrect. It is often impossible to keep an arm’s length distance from others — as, for example, on a crowded bus or train, or, as in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, on crowded streets.

It is important to note two things about the mayor. One is that she has been among Germany’s most vociferous advocates of accepting 800,000 Syrian refugees into the country. The other is that she is a woman.

One would assume that a woman would instinctively wholly condemn the sexual predators rather than lecture women on the distance they should always keep from men in order to avoid being attacked. But the mayor, like the British authorities, has opted for multiculturalism over human and women’s rights; for fighting Islamophobia over fighting to protect women.

A related example is Ralf Jaeger, the interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, the German state in which Cologne is located. The left-wing minister said: “What happens on the right-wing platforms and in chat rooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women.”

All the isms of the left — multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, socialism, Marxism, egalitarianism — distort the individual’s and society’s moral compass. But, as the minister’s comments make clear, none do so more than the Left’s loathing of conservatives and conservative values.

As with multiculturalism, the left-wing priority of destroying the Right has distorted the Left’s moral compass. How could anyone in his right mind say that right-wing platforms and chat rooms are “at least as awful” as women being sexually attacked and even raped by gangs of men? The answer is that you cannot be in your right mind; you have to be in your left mind.