Groping, Raping, Gang-raping, Eve-Teasing and “Taharrush” in Europe

My ancestors—at least on the paternal side—came from a small village named Pennington in Cumbria, located in northwestern England. Presbyterians, they crossed the water to the Isle of Man and then on to Ireland. They lived a few generations among their fellow Protestants before moving to colonial America. In time, they trekked through Kentucky, Tennessee and Louisiana before reaching Texas. The point is, I am White and a proud son of Europe. I value highly European culture and history. This being the case, I am deeply concerned about all that is happening there now and what the future may hold for the entire continent. I will discuss two separate but related events, both of which can be traced to massive immigration from South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Leaving aside ominous demographic projections and the rise of Mohammedanism in a “post-Christian” Europe (a single district in London has more than 40 mosques), my focus is sexual abuse.

Rotherham is a city of about 110,000 in the United Kingdom’s South Yorkshire region. In the mid-1960s, it was prosperous although not especially beautiful due to steel, iron and mining industries that predated the Victorian era. Rotherham was a warm and close-knit community until Pakistani immigrants arrived in the early 1970s. While I do not mean to impute a simple cause-and-effect relationship, the place started to decline about then. Today, unemployment is high and 23% of the residents live in public housing. Rotherham is about 12% minority; Pakistanis comprise most of those, along with some Kurds, some Kosovars, some black people from the Caribbean, some Chinese and others.

This is a story so vexing that I cannot bear to delve into it very deeply. As such things do, it started small and mushroomed. Over a period of 3 1/2 decades, some 1,400 children—overwhelmingly White, female and working class—were abused by Paki men. Some of the victims were as young as 12, and they were “groomed” and made dependent on their subjugators. The stories varied, but these English girls were seduced, raped, gang-raped (if the news reports can be believed, sometimes by dozens of guys), and were forced to watch other girls being raped; some were trafficked to neighboring towns in South Yorkshire and the Midlands to be abused by other Pakis. Compounding the horror is the fact that two White women, Karen McGregor and Shelley Davies, took part, serving as facilitators!

Can it get any worse? It can, in that the Rotherham media, the police and the city council knew about this outrageous state of affairs. They were willing to keep it quiet because such a revelation “might hurt the town’s reputation” as one mousy local politician said and some, at least, feared being accused of racism.

There were unwanted half-breed babies, abortions, sexually transmitted diseases and beatings aplenty. Listen to the awful story of Laura Wilson. A pretty but low-IQ White girl, she lived from 1993 to 2010. “Groomed” since age 11, she was impregnated by a man and then given to another. (Yes, these depraved Pakis talked about “ownership.” That is why, when the story came out, they were said to have engaged in White slavery—in a White country!) After they disputed, Wilson was stabbed to death by one of them and cavalierly tossed into a canal in Rotherham.

A local woman, Jayne Senior, began investigating and rabble-rousing. She was stonewalled and threatened but persevered. With Senior’s cooperation, Andrew Norfolk of the London Times wrote an eye-opening series which led to long-delayed governmental inquiries. Finally, arrests were made and trials held in 2010, 2016 and 2017. This so infuriates and depresses me that I can stand to identify only one of the men: A violent predator named Arshid Hussain. He got a 35-year sentence for offenses that included rape, conspiracy to rape, aiding and abetting rape, sexual intercourse with a girl under 13, false imprisonment and procurement.

(This is slightly off-topic, but I must say a word about female genital mutilation, a dreadful practice to which more than 100,000 girls and women in the UK have been subjected. The police, in the name of cultural sensitivity, turn a blind eye to it. And between 12 and 15 “honor killings”—is there a greater euphemism in all the world?—take place there every year.)

While the Rotherham cases were being adjudicated, something else disturbing happened 392 miles to the southeast, in Cologne, Germany. It was New Year’s Eve 2015—ordinarily a happy time, a fun time, a time of communal celebration. The trouble started around 10 p.m. in the plaza between the central train station, the Hauptbahnhof, and towering Cologne Cathedral. (Germany’s most-visited landmark, it draws some 20,000 people per day and has been called “a powerful testimony to the strength and persistence of Christian belief in medieval and modern Europe.” Would that the Holy Spirit had entered the hearts of 2,000 male infidels outside its doors that night!)

Moroccans, Algerians, Syrians, Iranians, Somalis, Eritreans and other migrants, many of them drunk and/or under the influence of drugs, started shooting off fireworks. That is a normal thing on New Year’s Eve, but they were often shot not up into the sky but horizontally, at people. Fights broke out, purses were snatched and then it really spun out of control. Alone, in pairs or even in groups, White women were grabbed, jostled and lewdly fondled. Those who suffered just that indignity would later call themselves lucky.

In what some (although not all) observers described as a planned and coordinated attack, White women were surrounded, cursed, spun around, disoriented and assaulted. Many were stripped of some or all of their clothing, raped and/or gang-raped. Pity the poor White females who were ravaged by as many as 40 of these brown and black men. I don’t know, but they may have chanted “allahu akbar” all the while. The misogynist culprits formed an outward-facing ring—a defensive perimeter, if you will—to preclude interruption of their fun and games. This and related outrages went on for hours, well into New Year’s Day.

An estimated 1,200 White women were assaulted that night in Cologne; there had been similar, albeit smaller attacks in Stuttgart, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Dortmund, Bielefeld, Dusseldorf and Paderborn, not to mention in Austria, Sweden and Switzerland. The police were slow if not reluctant to respond, letting the male foreigners (most of whom had arrived in 2015 after Chancellor Angela Merkel essentially threw open the doors to one and all) run amok. There was a media cover-up as initial reports just said that “men” had behaved badly—no reference to their ethnic origins. Local, regional and national politicians urged the police to tone down their reports and the media not to use the word “rape.” This, of course, caused Germans to bemoan the lugenpresse (“lying press”).

Around 150 men were arrested, but—as in Rotherham—it was only a fraction of those who committed crimes against White women that night. Some Germans demanded stiff penalties, like massive and quick deportation, or at least long prison terms. Eleven months later, only six had been found guilty; legal proceedings against most were dropped.

Some of the immigrants made light of these events. To wit: An imam blamed the women, saying they were “perfumed and half-naked.” Another Mohammedan writer sounded a similar note, calling it nothing but an Orientalist fantasy about White women and men of darker hues. Europeans had always dreamed about the harem and what happened there, he opined rather snarkily. A more thoughtful response came from Kamel Daoud, a Paris-based Algerian writer. In a New York Times column entitled “The Sexual Misery of the Arab World” dated February 14, 2016, he admitted that immigrant men had done shameful things in Germany on New Year’s Eve. For that, Daoud was in effect called an Arab Uncle Tom.

Many people—Germans as well as non-Germans (including Turks who have been there since the early 1960s)—speculated about why things had gotten out of hand in Cologne. In fact, it was not something new, only on a larger scale. The excuse was often mooted that male sexual aggression was the norm in the immigrants’ home countries. In India—Delhi is a particularly dangerous place for women—it is given the innocuous name of “Eve-teasing.” More frightening and common are episodes that have transpired in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Talaat Harb Street the last several years. Egyptians call mass sexual assault taharrush, and more than 500 documented cases took place in Cairo and Alexandria between 2012 and 2014. Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015 was an imported version of taharrush.

I have a German friend, Ursula Schmidt, who lives in Flensburg and works as a technical writer. Via e-mail, I asked Ursula her thoughts on the social and cultural changes being forced on Germans and Europeans by this tsunami of newcomers. Here is an abbreviated version of what she said:

“The attacks in Cologne were shocking. Ever since then, we have felt vulnerable. If you point out that the guys who did it were immigrants, you are called a racist. It is not politically correct to do so.

“The immigration situation has gone too far in Germany. The day will come when blue-eyed, blond-haired people like me will disappear. Women are fair game to these guys. We have lost our freedom to go whenever (at night) and wherever we want as foreign cultures have been given so much room that women can’t be safe anymore. Although I have never been attacked by an immigrant, some of my female friends have.

“I suppose Angela Merkel had the best intentions with her ‘humanity strategy,’ but Germany was not prepared for this. Now we have the feeling of being flooded with foreign ideas, and the system is changed completely to suit the immigrants. I wish these young men would show some gratitude to the country that allowed them to enter and have a chance at life here.”

#colognecathedral #rotherham #angelamerkel #sexualabuse #immigrationcrisis #deathofeurope #jaynesenior #taharrush #eveteasing #TahrirSquare #kameldaoud #migrantsingermany