On New Year’s Eve, large gangs of Arab, North African, and Muslim men sexually assaulted women in a large number of cities in both Germany and in Austria.
These attackers, often a thousand strong, simultaneously stuck their fingers into every female orifice; groped, licked, hit, and terrified every vulnerable woman who was out celebrating the holiday.
The traumatized women did not all report these assaults to the police because they were traumatized and because many could not identify their attackers; there were so many of them. The media also under-reported these rapes—not until one hundred German women in the city of Cologne, a number that grew to close to 400 by the weekend, reported their assaults to the police, did the matter become public.
Some media have refused to name the perpetrators as being Muslim or of Arab descent.
Some media, including feminist media, refused to name the perpetrators as being of Arab or North African descent or as “Muslims.” They do not wish to be demonized as “racists” or “Islamophobes” but there is also a legitimate feminist reason.
European men rape European women every single day. But make no mistake: the pattern of sexual harassment and rape in the Muslim world in general is vastly different. Muslims in Sudan and Nigeria have perpetrated similar horrific attacks upon Christian, animist, and Muslim women. Similar atrocities took place in the former Yugoslavia, perpetrated by both Serb and Croat Christians and Muslims. Nevertheless, in an Islamist era, such Muslim-perpetrated attacks have assumed monstrous proportions.
Recall the roving gangs in Egypt in Tahrir Square in 2011, the mass groping and the assault of blonde American journalist Lara Logan. Realize that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Egyptian Muslim and Christian women were also groped and sexually assaulted, whether or not they were wearing headscarves or face masks.
I am haunted by an Algerian story that took place in Hassi Messaoud in the summer of 2001. A mob of three hundred men, incited by a Friday sermon in the mosque, embarked upon a three-day pogrom against women whom the Imam had targeted as “immoral.” The women had been bussed in from another province. Some owned hair dressing salons but most cleaned the offices of foreign companies. Shouting “Allahu Akhbar,” the men went to war against 39 impoverished Muslim women.
They tortured, stabbed, mutilated, gang-raped, buried alive and murdered these innocent but vulnerable women. Unsurprisingly, some of the women who survived became mentally ill. Algerian-American lawyer, Karina Bennoune, writes: “Terrorist attacks on women in Algeria have had the desired effect: widespread psychosis among the women; internal exile—living in hiding, both physically and psychologically, in their own country.” In Bennoune’s view, “the collective psychosis” is due to the “escalation of violence” by the “soldiers of the Islamic state.” (This is pre-Daesh in Iraq and Syria).
Will Muslim attacks on women become regular features of European life?
In addition to what happened in Germany and Austria, similar male Muslim group gropings and assaults of women on New Year’s Eve have now been widely reported to the police in Finland and Sweden.
If Germany and Austria—if all Europe--does not find, prosecute, and deport all the men who took part in the recent New Year’s Eve atrocities, they will soon discover that such attacks might become regular features of European life and will occur on most holidays; that, like Muslim women, European women will increasingly live in fear; begin to stay indoors; and that female workers will increasingly suffer from post-traumatic stress symptoms. A European woman’s quality of life and efficiency at work may decrease. This will be true for women of every ethnicity and religion.
How can one educate a barbarian lynch mob? In my opinion, only through the mosques and the Islamist media.
That is not likely to happen any time soon.
Until it does—or failing that—elimination of the growing threat to the West will be required. That will only begin to happen when people realize that such mass public gang rapes represent the normalization of “Islamist” ways and are also another face of jihad.
Phyllis Chesler, a Shillman-Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East Forum, is an emerita professor of psychology and women’s studies and the author of sixteen books.
