Here are some excerpts as requested.
If you leave meat uncovered on the street and a cat eats it, whose fault is it? The problem is not the cat, but the uncovered meat. Growing up, Ayaan Hirsi Ali heard this kind of attitude from her grandmother in Somalia. It’s a loathsome attitude widespread in societies defined by Islamic culture: if only the victim of a sexual assault or rape had stayed at home, or worn her hijab, then no problem would have occurred.
Why have European feminists been conspicuously silent about the rise in sexual violence against women? Part of the answer is that within the feminist movement “the concept of women’s rights yielded to the new ideals of multiculturalism and intersectionality.” Europeans broadly have been impacted by the notion of “multiculturalism,” which I think of as teaching people that it is wrong to judge certain ideas — notably, individual freedom — as superior to the ideas of other cultures, such as the Islamic subordination of women.
“Talking about violence by Muslim men against European women is unfashionable in an age of identity politics, when we are supposed to operate within a partly historical matrix of victimhood.” It is even harder when the topic is a “favorite of Russian agents of disinformation as well as ‘alt-right’ trolls.” She rejects both fashionable denial and xenophobic fearmongering, and instead strives to understand the actual scale of the problem and its causes.
The rates of “either rape or sexual assault went up between 2014 and 2017 in every European country for which data are available” and “in some countries — notably Denmark and England — they went up a lot, roughly doubling in the case of Denmark.” In that country, Hirsi Ali reports, “‘non-Western’ immigrants and their descendants” account for “around two-fifths of rape convictions and between a quarter and a third of groping convictions — even though they make up less than 13 percent of the population.” In Germany, asylum seekers constituted only 1 or 2 percent of the population from 2015, but they were “disproportionately responsible for sex crimes included in the statistics, making up nearly 12 percent of suspects by 2018,” and responsible for 16.3 percent of grievous sex crimes, such as rape.
Many asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries brought with them their society’s endemic contempt for women. She cites a UN survey of more than four thousand men in Morocco, Egypt, Palestinian areas, and Lebanon which found that between one-third and two-thirds of men admitted to sexually harassing women in public. Women are reduced to commodities, useful only for their capacity to bear children, and therefore subjected to a “modesty doctrine.” Hirsi Ali regards such attitudes as tied to and reinforced by Islamic ideas. “More than any other major religion,” she writes, “Islam formalizes the subordination of women.”
Hirsi Ali describes a pattern of government officials looking the other way and staying silent, lest they appear to be xenophobic. Take the incident in Cologne. What was the official response? Police officers on the scene reportedly ignored women who came to them with complaints or else turned them away. A police statement on New Year’s Day claimed the evening had been “largely peaceful.” It was only after a groundswell of posts on social media and coverage in news outlets, that the authorities released information about the attacks and the perpetrators. Moreover, it turned out that smaller-scale gang assaults had occurred that night in Hamburg, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, and Bielefeld.
The pattern extends beyond Germany. That same year in Sweden, at the “We Are Sthlm” summer festival, a group of some fifty young asylum seekers preyed on women at the event. Even though “thirty-eight sex offenses had been reported on girls as young as 14,” Hirsi Ali writes, Swedish police stated that the event had had “relatively few crimes.” Months later, “fearing a backlash like the one that had followed events in Cologne, Swedish police came clean. Revealingly, Södermalm police chief Peter Ågren said that one reason for the cover-up was to avoid provoking racism or ‘play into the hands of the Swedish Democrats,’ Sweden’s rightwing populist party.” Hirsi Ali believes that European leaders have come to fear that if they speak about the rise in sexual violence against women, they would be seen as “xenophobic” or as appearing to give “ground to actual xenophobes.” Instead, they would rather “cover up the problem and leave victims at risk.”
European statistics on sex crimes are a maze, if not a minefield, of inconsistent and changing definitions. Denmark is unusual for making it relatively easy to distinguish immigrant offenders. Since 2015, the country’s share of immigrants from “non-Western countries,” excluding their Danish-born descendants, has risen from around 5% to 6%. Yet from 2015 to 2019 they have accounted for around 11% of convictions for sex offenses and 34% of convictions for rape.
In Germany a new category of “rape, sexual coercion and sexual assault in especially serious cases including resulting in death” was introduced in June 2016, making it hard to measure the effect of the migrant influx. Even so, in 2017 and 2018, more than a third of the suspects in the new category were non-Germans. For all sexual-abuse cases, the share of non-German suspects rose from 15% in 2014 to 23% in 2016, 2017 and 2018, and 21% in 2019.
“Non-German” is a broad category. In Germany’s crime statistics, the term zuwanderer, or “newcomers,” was used until 2016 to identify suspects who were asylum applicants, failed asylum seekers and illegal residents. This definition was expanded in 2017 to include successful asylum seekers. From 2017 to 2019, zuwanderer accounted for between 10% and 12% of sex-crime suspects, and around 16% of suspects for rape, sexual coercion and sexual assault in especially serious cases. It is unlikely that zuwanderer accounted for much more than 2% of the German population.
In Austria, “crimes or offenses against sexual integrity and self-determination” increased by 53% between 2015 and 2018. Between a quarter and a third of suspects were foreign, but in 2018 only 19.4% of the population was foreign-born. Between 4% and 11% of the suspects were asylum seekers; the share of the population born in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria—among the largest sources of asylum seekers—was only 1.2%.
In the absence of official statistics, the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reviewed the gang-rape cases heard in Swedish courts between July 2012 and December 2017. Of the 112 men convicted, it found that three-quarters were foreign-born (almost all of those from outside Europe), and 30% were asylum seekers.