True to form, the New York Times examines the mass sexual assaults by Muslim refugees in Cologne on New Year’s Eve and decides that they’re the fault of German authorities for not integrating the poor dears, most of whom arrived in Germany no farther back than about four months ago. The Leftist media, while it espouses multiculturalism, is actually quite ethnocentric, and considers non-white non-Western non-Christian people incapable of acting of their own accord; all they can do is react to the depredations of the Big Bad West. Anna Sauerbrey here assumes what Leftist writers always assume: that in any conflict between Westerners and non-Westerners, it is always the Westerner’s fault, because only he has the ability to act in a responsible manner.
“Germany’s Post-Cologne Hysteria,” by Anna Sauerbrey, New York Times, January 8, 2016 (thanks to Steve):
Berlin — ON New Year’s Eve, hundreds of men gathered in the plaza at the main train station in Cologne, Germany, groping and robbing scores of women as they passed by. By the end of this week the police had received 170 complaints, including 120 related to sexual assault.
Despite the fact that the attacks occurred in the center of Germany’s fourth-largest city, it took days for the news to surface in the national media. Even stranger, the police seemed to know little about the attacks. No arrests were made, and authorities claimed that nearby surveillance cameras offered little help in identifying suspects. The Cologne police chief was forced from his job on Friday.
The police have since identified 31 suspects. They are a multinational lot, including Germans, a Serb and even one American. But 18 of them are asylum seekers from the Middle East and North Africa.
This latest news is merely fuel for what many Germans already suspected, and witness accounts had already indicated: that the crowd was composed largely of men of North African and Middle Eastern descent, and that they were among the one million refugees that Germany has accepted over the last year….
But as quick as the right was to use the attacks as a wedge against refugees, the left moved just as fast to deflect the blame. Heiko Maas, the minister of justice and a member of the Social Democrats, said on Tuesday that “organized crime” was behind the attacks, though no evidence exists for such a connection (he has since threatened to deport foreigners found guilty in the attacks).
In other words, precisely when the country needs a coolheaded conversation about the impact of Germany’s new refugee population, we’re playing musical chairs: Everybody runs for a seat to the left and to the right, afraid to remain in the middle, apparently undecided.
The irony is that the Cologne attacks, by highlighting the issue of refugees and their culture, raise an incredibly important question and at the same time make it almost impossible to have a reasonable conversation about it.
Integration will fail if Germany cannot resolve the tension between its secular, liberal laws and culture and the patriarchal and religiously conservative worldviews that some refugees bring with them. We cannot avoid that question out of fear of feeding the far right. But integration will also fail if a full generation of refugees is demonized on arrival.
This isn’t the first wave of migrants to postwar Germany, and it’s not the first time that the left and the right have played their respective roles of under- and overestimating the challenges of integration.
The left has long ignored the established correlations between crime and the poverty and poor education that plague refugee communities; the right has long overestimated the link between the refugees’ culture and criminal activity, even when studies show no such link exists (excepting so-called crimes of honor, which are extremely rare).
The real question we should be asking is not whether there is something inherently wrong with the refugees, but whether Germany is doing an effective job of integrating them — and if not, whether something can be done to change that….