The Knights of Cologne
Old Post: New Years Eve 2016
I’m abroad and on the road in South America at the moment, for reasons that will be explained in a future post. So I will be writing when I can. At a time when the rights of ‘our’ women are once again being used by the far right as a justification for terrorising asylum-seekers across the UK, I’m recycling an older blog post from January 2016, when very similar arguments were used in response to the horrific events that took place in Cologne.
No one should be surprised that the same essentialist arguments and accusations are still being used now against asylum seekers, in some cases by the same people who used them then, because these arguments have been around for a long time, and with the far-right and their ‘patriot’ cohorts, it’s always deja vu all over again
As a sixty-year-old man, I obviously can’t speak with much authority on what it’s like to be a young woman in Europe. Nevertheless I am the parent of a twenty-year-old daughter who likes to go out at night. Recently she told me how she was at a club when a stranger propositioned her. When she responded that she had a boyfriend, this fine upstanding specimen of twenty-first century manhood ordered her to kiss her boyfriend to prove it.
My daughter rejected these orders too, on the not unreasonable grounds that she didn’t have to prove who she ‘belonged’ to any man, let alone a complete stranger. This episode was one of countless similar incidents that she and her friends have experienced ever since she started going out. Over the years I have become accustomed to stories of her visits to clubs and pubs where men routinely grope and sexually bully young women with an alarming sense of entitlement.
Contrary to accepted wisdom in certain quarters, such behaviour is not limited to any particular age, nationality, culture or ethnic group. It includes the middle-aged Spanish men who somehow managed to infiltrate the Benicassim festival and ground themselves up against my daughter and her dancing friends when she was seventeen, and the middle-aged Italian who harassed her and a friend in a Genoa park when she was eighteen.
So my daughter, like so many young women, has learned to live with such behaviour. She knows that it is not safe to be on the streets unaccompanied at night in any European city, because a woman can be attacked anywhere and by anyone.
A YouGov survey for the End Violence Against Women Coalition found that 43 percent of women aged 18-24 were sexually harassed in public places in 2012, including girls as young as 12. According to Rape Crisis, 85,000 women were raped in the UK last year.
Today, in the early twenty-first century, violence, harassment and the sexual intimidation of women is as common as it was when the first wave of feminists began to challenge it with the ‘reclaim the night’ marches of the early 70s.
To point out that such behaviour is routine and even universal does not mean that it is acceptable, or that it should be treated as an inevitable expression of masculinity. When men behave like this, society needs to find ways to make them stop and ensure that women can feel safe from sexual violence and intimidation wherever they are.
Needless to say, that is not the debate that we have been having since the grim events that unfolded in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. The reports of what took place that night have been confused and contradictory. Nevertheless it is now clear that hundreds of mostly MENA-region men embarked on a drunken and semi-organized spree of robbery and rampant sexual violence, in which hundreds of women at the city’s train station were terrorised and assaulted, while the local police apparently stood by and did nothing about it.
This brutal and deeply depressing episode has acted as a wake-up call to chivalrous warriors across the continent, who have ridden out on their white steeds like modern-day Galahads and Lancelots to defend the flower of European womanhood from the infidel hordes.
They include men like Tommy Robinson, who flew in to a Pegida rally to tell protesters that ‘Islam is a cancer and Pegida is the cure’ and that ‘it is our God-given right and duty to protect our women. It’s what men do.’
And the group of ‘bikers, hooligans, and bouncers’ who organized a ‘human hunt’ in Cologne three days ago beating up any ‘foreigner’ they could find in order to ‘clean up the city’, because naturally the only logical response when ‘our’ women are attacked is to go out and beat up any dark-skinned man who may or may not be a ‘foreigner.’
And then there is Nigel ‘I’ve got so many women pregnant over the years’ Farage, who has linked the Cologne attacks to the ‘refugee crisis’ and said that we need to uphold ‘our values’ and prevent more of them from coming to Europe. And the Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who has cited the Cologne attacks as evidence that ‘multiculturalism has failed’ and declared that ‘the migrants cannot be integrated. It’s impossible’.
Elsewhere men have been pouring forth their rage on comments columns, and Internet websites, such as “Hans-Werner Link” who wrote on Facebook: ‘Where were the girls screaming welcome this time? Those whores would certainly have loved to have their crotches or tits grabbed by countless hands.’
Noble sentiments, and the women of Europe can only be thankful they have champions like this to fight for them. There is a lot more where this came from. No one can be surprised that this horrific episode has been seized upon by the European right and far-right, because this is what always happens.
Just as paedophilia only becomes a ‘cultural’ problem when it is associated with ‘Muslim grooming gangs’, it seems that sexual violence against women is only significant when it can be blamed on the barbarian ‘sex mobs’ who are targeting ‘our’ women - and linked to a supposedly politically-correct liberal establishment intent on facilitating and protecting such behaviour.
Does this mean that the horrific events in Cologne should be minimized or downplayed? No. The men who carried out those attacks clearly regarded German women as fair game and somehow deserving of such treatment. It also seems clear that some of the perpetrators were asylum seekers, including Syrians. This shouldn’t be entirely surprising. Just because men have fled war zones to escape death or persecution doesn’t make them innately virtuous, and just because you have been a victim of oppression and violence does not mean that you become purged of unreconstructed sexism.
Refugees who come to Europe with attitudes like these will have to learn to think and behave differently, and when they break the law they should be punished according to the law. But the same expectations should be placed on all men.
The outrageous thuggery of hundreds of Middle Eastern or North African men, some of whom may have been recently-arrived migrants and asylum seekers, does not signify the ‘death of multiculturalism’, except in the minds of people who never wanted a multicultural Europe in the first place.
Let’s not allow ourselves to deluded into an us-and-them fantasy that presents sexual harassment as a uniquely Muslim, North African or Middle Eastern trait, and depicts asylum seekers as some kind of Trojan horse for ‘sex mobs’ and ‘rape gangs’ to enter Europe.
According to UNHCR, 49 percent of refugees worldwide are women, many of whom have been subjected to far worse sexual violence than what was seen in Cologne. The knights of Cologne who are buckling on their swords to defend Europe’s women would like to exclude and deport them too.
They would, in fact, like to exclude and deport all the migrants and refugees who have come to Europe if they could, and the Cologne ‘sex mob’ is just one more pretext and justification for doing that.
So let’s be angry at what happened on New Year’s Eve. But let’s not allow crucial issues of sexual violence and harassment to be hijacked and instrumentalized by the likes of Robinson and Fico and so many others, who only seem to be concerned with women’s rights in order to fuel the toxic hatred of the Muslim/Arab Other that is coursing through Europe right now.