By John Daniel Davidson
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
On Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she would
not limit the number of refugees coming into the country. “On the issue of an
upper limit, my position is clear,” Merkel said. “I won’t accept one.”
Setting aside the electoral implications of Merkel’s
statement, which defied her party’s long-term coalition partner just two months
before federal elections, it perfectly captured the refusal of European leaders
to face the migrant crisis head-on—a refusal that in turn epitomizes the slow
suicide of European civilization.
President Trump’s Warsaw speech earlier this month
provoked predictable cries of racism and xenophobia from a mainstream media
worried that even the term “western civilization” was a dog whistle for
alt-right nationalists. Implicit in such criticism is the dubious notion that
western values are not really western, that people of all cultures and
religions desire more or less the same thing.
His critics say Trump was playing on white Europeans’
fears that Muslim migrants won’t adopt western values and won’t assimilate into
European society, and therefore pose a direct threat to western civilization.
But there’s another group that Trump no doubt had in mind, a group that also
rejects western civilization and has little interest in defending or preserving
it: European elites.
European Elites
Refuse to Defend Women
Without splitting hairs over what we mean by “western
civilization,” let’s stipulate that, at minimum, it encompasses things like
freedom of speech and religion, equal rights for both sexes, and democratic
rule of law. One could argue that these are elements of western civilization
most people in Muslim-majority countries don’t
share with the denizens of Europe. But let’s set that aside and ask an
equally pressing question: do European political leaders believe in them? Do
their policies reflect a desire to defend and preserve these principles?
Increasingly, the answer is no. Take women’s rights, for
example. In Europe as in America, the equality of the sexes has for decades
been held as an immutable fact. But Europe is even more militant about its
feminism than America. For Europeans, the very idea of a housewife is backwards
and oppressive; mothers are expected to work and send their children to
state-subsidized child care, not opt out of the workforce to raise a family.
This is the official policy of the EU, which has entire commissions dedicated
to ensuring more women enter the workforce.
For Muslim immigrants to Europe, who come from societies
in which women are generally subordinate to men, this comes as a shock. Yet for
a long time Europe insisted that newcomers adopt western attitudes regarding
women’s rights and sexual freedom. As Christopher Caldwell has noted, this was
the only non-negotiable demand Europe made of its immigrants. The European
ruling class might have been willing to look the other way on free speech and
denounce as fascist anyone who worries about Islam and terrorism, but on
feminism there was no room for negotiation: “It is the litmus test according to
which assimilation—and even membership in the national community—is judged. It
is the one area where Europeans retain both a deep suspicion of Muslim ways and
a confidence in their own institutions that is free of self-doubt.”
At least, that’s how it used to be. Caldwell wrote those
lines in 2009, long before the migrant crisis coincided with a spike in sexual
assaults perpetrated mostly by Muslim men. The mass sexual assault in Cologne
and other German cities on New Year’s Eve last year made headlines—not just
because of the brazen nature of the attacks but also because German authorities
tried to suppress information about them. It was only after rumors and
eyewitness accounts began cropping up on social media that authorities
acknowledged what had happened.
The most infamous case of this kind is perhaps the
Rotherham child sex exploitation ring, which first came to light in 2010. An
independent inquiry found in 2014 that British men of Pakistani origin had
groomed at least 1,400 underage girls for sexual exploitation over the previous
16 years. The girls, some as young as 12, were variously abducted, raped,
tortured, and forced into prostitution. Even more shocking than the details of
the sex ring is why it persisted for so long: police and city officials knew
what was happening but didn’t take action for fear of being accused of racism.
You would think this would be enough for the government
to take action and protect the women and girls being preyed upon by these men,
but you’d be wrong. Two years after the inquiry, an investigation by the Daily
Express found that nothing had changed; the exploitation was still happening
“on an industrial scale.”
The Rotherham case predated the migrant crisis, but there
are signs that the ongoing influx of Middle Easterners and North Africans—more
migrants have already arrived in Europe this year than in all of 2016—is making
the problem much worse.
Last week, Cheryl Benard, who spent years working with
refugees all over the world, wrote about the growing incidence of sexual
assault committed by refugees against local women. The vast majority of
such assaults are reportedly being committed by young Afghan men, sometimes in
broad daylight. In some cases, passersby have intervened to prevent women from
being raped by multiple assailants. As in the Rotherham and Cologne cases, the
fact of the assaults was disturbing, but equally disturbing was the reaction of
the media and government officials. Writes Benard:
It took a while for the pattern to
be recognized because, until recently, western European media deliberately
refrained from identifying an assailant’s refugee or asylum status, or his
country of origin. Only when the correlation became so dramatic that it was
itself newsworthy did this policy change. At that point, it became clear that
the authorities had known about, and for political reasons had deliberately
covered up, large-scale incidences of sexual assault by migrants.
The Migrant Crisis
Exposes a Morally Exhausted Europe
The inability or unwillingness of Muslim migrant men to
conform to the sexual mores of Europe is of course just one of the problems the
migrant crisis has brought to the continent. But the knee-jerk reaction of
European elites to either ignore or deny these sorts of problems speaks volumes
about their commitment to western civilization.
In his new book, “The Strange Death of Europe,” British
journalist Douglas Murray documents his travels across Europe reporting on the
migrant crisis, and concludes that Europe is so morally exhausted that it rejects
its own right to exist. “Europe today has little desire to reproduce itself,
fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument,” writes Murray.
“Those in power seem persuaded that it would not matter if the people and
culture of Europe were lost to the world.”
According to Murray, the migrant crisis perfectly
encapsulates this exhaustion. In some ways, it’s a case of competing virtues:
the desire to be virtuous to the rest of the world is competing against justice
for the people of Europe. Increasingly, virtue is winning out over justice
because a misguided commitment to hollow notions of “respect,” “tolerance,” and
“diversity” has supplanted the deep roots of European civilization. The
problem, argues Murray, is that European values have “become so wide as to
become meaninglessly shallow.”
As the crisis deepens, it’s become obvious that Europe’s
leaders are now so ambivalent about the survival of their own civilization
they’re unable to speak of the bad things that have come, and will keep coming,
with mass migration.
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