The headline of the recent comment piece by Frida Gustafsson was explicit, obvious and correct: ethnicity had nothing to do with the alleged sex attacks witnessed in Cologne, and other German cities, on New Year’s Eve. However, the headline is not only where the clarity and veracity begin, but also where they end.

The first error made is to establish a wholly false dichotomy, which is this: if you are critical of feminism, you cannot also express outrage about industrial-scale sexual assault. This is not only exclusionary, but is also illogical in the extreme.

In the UK, only 19% of people identify as feminist, and so to exclude all those who are not feminist, or are even anti-feminist, from being permitted to voice justified anger at mass sexual assault is to exclude 81% of British people from doing so.

I, and many of my friends, acquaintances and even enemies, are deeply critical of the petty gutter down which modern feminism has descended, but our derision and rejection of an ideology with an obsessive interest in the complete non-issue of “man-spreading” does not somehow disbar us from being vocally angry, upset and worried when we see such horrific crimes visited upon cities we are used to holidaying in.

Feminist or not feminist, we 81-percenters have mothers, sisters, daughters, wives and female friends, and we wish them to be protected from the suffering that will now haunt hundreds of German women for the rest of their lives.

We don’t have to subscribe to all the zany ideological excesses of the third-wave movement that now dominates the feminist platform to want our loved ones to be safe from harm.

It is ironic, thus, that such an avowed feminist would be so intransigent in her refusal to accept even the possibility that a significant factor in these attacks was the vast diaspora to Northern Europe of people from countries where the persecution, rape and murder of women are not only overlooked, but actively condoned by an explicitly misogynist culture.

Of course, as the piece highlights, women are assaulted by men of every culture and nationality, every day. But I challenge Frida – or anyone reading this – to find an incident of sexual assault on such a perversely industrial scale in any other Western country in modern times. I could be wrong, but I’d wager they’ll struggle.

The most disingenuous premise of the argument, however, was its failure to establish a clear distinction between ethnicity and culture.

The conflation of the two is at the heart of all left-wing rhetoric on issues of immigration, but the refusal to separate nature from nurture is quite simply wrong.

A person’s ethnicity is determined solely by their genes, and to associate certain behaviours with certain ethnicities is undeniably racist.

However, culture is different; culture is learned. We might have little more control over the culture we are brought up in than the ethnicity we are born, but a learned trait is one that is recognised as the responsibility of the individual to foster or eradicate.

Put simply, you can never change your ethnicity, but you can always change your culture.

And this is why it is so unbelievable that feminists the world over are refusing to acknowledge that these shocking incidents might, just might, have had something to do with the culture of the people who perpetrated them.

Surely, to a feminist, the priority must be the protection of women from sexual assault, rather than the vanity-laden moralistic quest to avoid anything ever being blamed on immigration?

Would it not be safe to assume that an ideology which continually underlines the alleged existence and potency of a supposed “rape culture” would question the wisdom of open-door immigration from continents where marital rape is still almost universally legal, and rape is clearly implicit in the actual culture?

Unfortunately not; the words of Robin Thicke are apparently more conducive to rape culture than the legality of a man holding down his wife and forcing himself upon her again, and again.

It’s also not opportunistic in any way for parties opposed to mass, uncontrolled immigration to highlight the credibility their arguments have been given by the attacks in Germany. Why? Because it is this sort of unmitigated horror that such parties have warned against from the very beginning.

Frida can lambaste Nigel Farage as an opportunist all she likes – the fact is that his fears are being proved logical and founded. To imply that there is something inherently exploitative about a politician standing up and pointing out that he was right all along is plainly ridiculous.

However, whether such proclamations are exploitative or not has absolutely no relevance to whether or not they are true; our opponents are only too happy to capitalise on any evidence that repudiates our claims, and so they cannot cry foul opportunism when we hold aloft evidence that shows these arguments to be valid.

So where does this refusal to accept obvious truth come from? The answer is this: shame. For many years now, Europe’s extreme left have, with every swing of their hammers and scythe of their sickles, sought to imbue a deep and insidious sense of shame in the peoples of this continent.

Rather than stand resolutely proud of the liberal, democratic values our societies have pioneered in the post-war period, we have been ground down to the nib, to the point where any expression of national pride is attacked as an anachronistic throwback to colonial times.

You don’t have to be white to be British, but when the fact that 77% of the perpetrators of sexual assaults and rapes in Britain are white is held up, an attempt is being made to try (deliberately or otherwise) to erode our belief that, on the whole, Britain has a proud record of standing up for women’s rights.

It’s a base attack on our ability to be confident in asserting our liberal values, and it’s designed to make us question whether we really are all that better than the Middle-Eastern and north-African countries where women are routinely subjected to the horrors of forced marriage and genital mutilation, and are frequently executed for having sex.

I’ll say it now: our societies are better, and women in Western European countries enjoy lives of far greater freedom and protection from violence than their counterparts in the Middle East and north Africa.

Incidentally, it should be considered that, in a country where 82% of the population are white, if only 77% of the perpetrators of sexual violence are white, then white people are actually under-represented.

Ultimately, our views on feminism are irrelevant; ideology is not the answer to this issue. Europe owes it to the women who were assaulted on New Year’s Eve to be ruthlessly objective in its search for answers, and not bow to the noisy protest of a far-left terminally obsessed with destroying the borders that protect our liberal democracies.

Only when we can dispense with the misleading rhetoric of the anarchist crowd, will we be in a position to recognise the sheer absurdity of suggesting rape is not made more likely by the importing of hundreds of thousands of people from countries where it is an accepted fact of life.

It’s time to stand up and recognise that, if we want to oppose alleged “rape culture”, then we really ought to be far less tolerant of those whose culture approves of rape.

Will Saunders

Categories: Comment Opinion

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