By John O’Sullivan
Friday, January 08, 2016
Many years ago I read a thought-provoking science-fiction
short story about a sociologist who specialized in the important field of
bureaucratic expansionism. I can’t recall the story’s title, and I haven’t
found the story on the Web, but a colleague better schooled in sci-fi can
probably identify it.
Through my hazy memories, however, it goes something like
this. The sociologist is excited because he thinks he has gone farther than
anyone else in discovering the sociological laws of organizational success. But
how can he be sure? Inspired by a blend of scientific curiosity and a sense of
fun, he makes friends with his mother’s sewing circle and persuades its members
to reorganize it along his scientific lines.
At the close of the story the sewing circle has got three
Senate seats, 55 House seats, and a credible contender for the presidency.
Which brings me not to Donald Trump but to the New Year’s
riots in Cologne and two other German cities, in which one woman was raped,
about 90 others grossly assaulted sexually, and New Year revelers of both sexes
jostled, attacked, robbed, and threatened by an estimated 1,000 men of North
African and Middle Eastern appearance in “organized” criminal gangs.
Whatever Mohammed’s virtues or defects as a prophet, he
was one helluva practical sociologist.
Not that the riots and sexual assaults in Cologne stemmed
from the Koran or Islamic doctrine, any more than the sewing circle’s rise
stemmed from its favored technique of knitting. But the founder of Islam imbued
his new religion with a number of rules and practices that made it the
formidable militaristic force that conquered an empire from Spain to India in
its first 100 years and that is advancing in Africa and Asia today.
If we exclude divine favor as an explanation of this long
advance, as Christians and post-Christian secularists presumably should, the
rules that explain it include capital punishment for leaving Islam (a.k.a.
apostasy), which is presumably a disincentive to doing so; strict rules for
regular public prayer, which strengthen group solidarity; a privileged position
for men over women, amounting in practice to ownership of them as either wives
or concubines; a hierarchical structure within Islamic society that places
Muslims in a position above non-Muslims in law, government, and social life;
and a religious orthodoxy that endows Muslims with a general superiority (and
sense of superiority) over others in non-Islamic societies.
Taken together, these rules help to shape a Muslim
community that is cohesive, conscious of its separation from the rest of
society, resistant to influences likely to undermine its cohesion,
self-policing through its male members, and — because its sense of superiority
is not reflected in its actual status either locally or globally — prey to
resentment and hostility toward those whom it blames for its unjust
subordination.
To be sure, a hundred qualifications should be added to
this picture. Other religions also have rules to keep their adherents from
drifting away or being corrupted into apostasy, but in recent centuries none so
brutally — or so effectively. In practice, Muslim-majority societies of the
past have sometimes shown tolerance to minorities and even allowed non-Muslims
to hold high military and political positions, as under the Ottomans. And the
majority of ordinary, decent Muslims, especially in non-Muslim Western
societies, are far more interested in getting good jobs, raising happy
families, and getting on with their neighbors than in martyrdom or advancing
the interests of the umma or the
local mosque. And much else.
That said, the minority that supports aggressive jihadism
(or is simply contemptuous of non-Muslim society) is not just larger but, as
opinion polls show, far larger than similar tendencies in other religions and
ideologies. That minority seeks to impose its rules both on fellow Muslims and
on the wider society. And it has had remarkable success in areas where Muslims
predominate locally, making U.K. state schools conform to Islamic teaching and
practices, including the separation of the sexes; establishing “no-go areas” of
European cities where police go only by agreement and where in their absence
Muslim rules on alcohol and modest female dress are enforced by violence; and
turning local governments into reliable Muslim fiefdoms through levels of voter
fraud not known in England since the mid-19th century.
But the most disturbing effects occur when the Muslim
sense of superiority over non-Muslims combines with the Muslim males’ sense of
superiority over women. Last year that combination produced the scandal in
Rotherham, in which no fewer than 1,400 young women, most of them white,
working-class “Christian” girls, were raped, tortured, beaten, abused,
prostituted, passed from hand to hand, and abused in almost every conceivable
way by gangs of Muslim men of Pakistani background who despised their victims
as sluts and “worthless.” Their story, which is heart-rending, is told here.
But the same basic narrative, varying only in the details, was replayed in
Oxford, Birmingham, Oldham, and about 20 more medium-size English provincial
towns in the last decade.
The shame of such widespread sexual abuse is not confined
to its Muslim male perpetrators. It is shared by the police, by local
councilors, by social workers who were supposedly caring for some of the
victims, by MPs who didn’t want to know what was happening, by the negligent
media, and by local Muslim leaders. These different “facilitators,” however,
were driven by different motives. The police, the local authorities, the
child-protection agencies, and the media turned blind eyes to the scandal (even
when distressed girls directly sought their help) from fear of being accused of
racism and Islamophobia; local Muslim leaders employed that fear to deter
investigations and to protect the good name of their community.
As for the perpetrators, they were driven not solely by
lust but also by communal politics and a particular contempt for non-Muslim
girls. It was not derived from Islamic doctrines, which they were too
uneducated to know. As the distinguished Welsh sociologist Christie Davies has
pointed out, however:
What they did know is that
under Islam women are inferior beings who should be denied autonomy —
particularly over their own bodies — sexual property, the property of their
male relatives. If Muslim women step out of line, they are liable to be the
victims of an honour killing. If they suffer a sexual assault, they are forced
to say nothing, lest disgrace fall on their families, even when they themselves
are entirely innocent.
For Muslims, non-Muslims are in every way inferior and the freedom
enjoyed by their womenfolk is the worst aspect of that inferiority. In
consequence non-Muslim women may be attacked and exploited without compunction.
There is a direct link between the insistence on the wearing of a hijab for
those within the fold and the raping of those outside, between an obsession
with modesty for those women who are family property and the utter disregard
for the rights of those women who are free.
What happened this week to the women in Cologne differs
in important ways from the abuse of the young girls in Rotherham. But it
proceeds from the same Muslim group loyalty and sense of superiorities inherent
in Islam. What the rioters in Cologne demonstrated in the crudest possible way
was that among the things they wanted to take were “our” women. Our own society
finds such logic hard to follow: In what sense are modern independent women
anyone else’s property? But by the logic of the societies and religion from
which the rioters and most migrants come, women are either behind the veil, and
thus the property of the family, or on the street, and thus the property of
anyone. And the rioters were imposing their logic, values, and identity on us
on the significant date of New Year’s Day.
Nor did the initial reaction of the German authorities
differ very much from that of various Rotherham officials. The police did
little at the time; no one was arrested. Indeed, they announced that the night
had been a peaceful one. The media made no mention of the event. All told, the
story was suppressed for three days by the media, the police, the Cologne
authorities, and the federal government until it began to seep out through
social media. When it could no longer be denied, the local (female) mayor
warned women to travel in groups in future, and federal ministers were
concerned mainly to warn that these crimes should not be linked to the “welcome
policy” that Chancellor Merkel had extended to migrants. It would be, said one
minister, an abuse of debate to do so.
I don’t think German officials have quite thought this
one through. Either the misogynistic rioters included a significant number of
recently arrived migrants or they did not. If they did, then the migration fed
directly into the riots; if they did not, then the rioters were people of
“North African and Arab appearance” who had previously been law-abiding but who
now felt able and entitled to assault local women in public without much fear
of the consequences. What changed them? What gave them that confidence? The
obvious answer is that those rioters who had been living in Germany for some
years, maybe even having been born there, have been emboldened by the arrival
of many others of similar origin, faith, or “appearance,” and the potential
arrival of many more. They sense that the German authorities are restrained
from halting immigration or imposing Western values on the migrants, or even
preventing them from imposing their values on the locals. And as the feminists
say, they feel “empowered” as a result.
Policy in Germany, the U.K., France, and the U.S. since
the late 20th century has been one of killing the Muslim sense of superiority
with kindness and expecting Muslim migrants to gradually surrender to the lures
of Western liberal-democratic capitalism. It’s not an unreasonable policy; it
was adopted in part from sympathy for ordinary, respectable Muslim families,
some of whom did adapt; and I can understand why governments pursued it. But it
simply hasn’t worked. And it will fail more and more as more and more migrants
arrive to strengthen Muslim solidarity and to weaken pressures for
assimilation. Germany is today in a state of shock; France on the verge of
serious communal conflict, even perhaps a low-level civil war; the European
Union dithering, with no idea of how to cope with the expected future levels of
mass migration; the Brits wondering how they can regain control of their border
whether they are in or out of the EU.
Which brings me finally to Donald Trump. His policy of
simply halting Muslim immigration has been denounced all around. It is, of
course, discriminatory and thus a mortal sin in today’s politics. Fine. Let’s
rule it out. But if his critics don’t want a blanket moratorium on all immigration — which I assume they
don’t — and if they don’t want to repeat the experiences of France and Germany
in 30 years’ time — which I also assume they don’t — shouldn’t they tell us
what they will do?
And, for once, that’s not a rhetorical question.
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