Does European Multiculturalism Threaten Women’s Rights?
Aayan Hirsi Ali. Photo courtesy of AHA Foundation.
“Prey” by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Published by HarperCollins, 2021.
(REVIEW) Somali-born writer Aayan Hirsi Ali sees Dec. 31, 2015 as a turning point in Europe’s fraught relationship with multiculturalism. On that date, 1,500 men, mostly newly arrived asylum seekers of Arab and North African backgrounds, converged on downtown Cologne, where thousands of Germans had gathered to welcome in the New Year. The men mobbed together to entrap and sexually assault women and girls, often stealing their wallets and mobile phones in the process. In the months that followed, 661 women and girls reported being separated from their male companions and being pushed inside “hell circles” of young men who groped them without regard to their age, appearance or circumstances. Some women said they were pinned to the ground for 30 minutes of continual assault.
On New Year’s Day, the Cologne police issued a statement that the evening had been largely peaceful. An outpouring of reports on social media left the authorities–and the media–no choice but to discuss the attacks publicly and release information on the background of the assailants.
The police claimed to be taken by surprise by the New Years’ events, but the tactics used by the young men in Cologne were not new in Germany. In 2015, German women and girls had reported being encircled by groups of migrant men, who groped and robbed them at festivals in Berlin, Darmstadt and Breman.
Soon after the Cologne case, the Swedish police admitted to a cover-up of their own. A mob of 50 young male asylum seekers, mainly Afghans and Moroccans, had assaulted women in the same way as they had in Cologne. Police issued statements that the event had been peaceful, and they hid the fact that 38 sex offenses had been reported on girls as young as 14. Södermalm police chief Peter Ågren said that one reason for the cover-up was to avoid provoking racism or “playing into the hands of the (conservative) Swedish Democrats.”
Ali sees these events as harbingers of things to come in Europe. In the past 70 years, Europeans have created the world’s freest societies, and one of Europe’s biggest achievements has been the equality of women. Today in Europe, more women than ever are in leadership positions as prime ministers, chancellors and executive directors. Westerners see this state of things as a given, but Ali argues that these achievements are fragile and can be quickly reversed.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Muslim women in urban areas enjoyed many of the same freedoms as Western women. Photographs of Afghan, Egyptian, Turkish and Iranian women taken in the 1960s show “women in shift dresses with bare arms, their legs visible from the knee down; women walking in streets unchaperoned, with elaborate 1960s coiffures and Jackie O-style bobs; girls seated alongside boys in classrooms.” In the last 30 years, Islamist patriarchs have rolled back the freedoms that these women enjoyed with shocking speed. Ali fears that the same fate awaits Europe as bureaucrats who are more committed to multiculturalism and intersectionality than to universal human rights try to accommodate migrant cultures.
Ali writes, “Walking in certain neighborhoods in Brussels, London, or Paris, you notice that only men are visible.” The shop assistants, waiters and patrons in cafes are all men. In parks and in communal areas of apartment buildings, only men and boys socialize. Women have erased themselves from public places. Those who enter face harassment, intimidation and sexual violation. It is taboo in Europe to point out that the perpetrators of these crimes are disproportionately Muslim immigrant men who operate in groups and make it increasingly dangerous for women to venture into a growing number of neighborhoods in European cities.
Demographic trends are reinforcing this transformation. Three million people have arrived illegally in Europe since 2009, close to 2 million in 2015 alone. Two-thirds of these newcomers are male, and 80% of the asylum applicants are under the age of 35. Native populations of Europe are aging fast and have among the world’s lowest fertility rates. If current trends continue, Muslims will soon be the majority in large swaths of Europe. A popular T-shirt among European Muslim youth warns, “2030–and then we take over.”
“Prey” is a meticulously researched book, and Ali offers us page after page of grim statistics to support her thesis that the surge of immigration into Europe in 2015 has led to a surge in sexual violence. There was a 17% increase in rapes in France from 2017 to 2018; the number of victims of rape and sexual coercion rose by 41% in Germany in 2017; in Sweden, there was a 12% increase in reported sex offenses in 2016.
In her review of “Prey”, New York Times opinion writer Jill Filipovic accuses Ali of “latching onto the trope of men of color threatening virtuous white women.” Ali acknowledges that the data she presents could be used by alt-right extremists for nefarious purposes, but she believes that the left’s conspiracy of silence and dissembling about the problems of immigration are a much more immediate cause of right-wing extremism. Her hope is that mainstream politicians will take the challenges posed by “Prey” seriously so that they can develop more effective and more responsible immigration policies.
Ali proposes a raft of solutions to Europe’s immigration problem. First, Europe must scrap the current asylum system and replace it with a framework in which migrants are selected on the basis of their likelihood of flourishing in the West. Ali commends the Austrian government for adopting such an approach. Since 2018, migrants have had to sign an Integration Declaration committing them to meeting obligations in order to continue to receive residential status in Austria. Those who do not comply with integration requirements, such as German language proficiency, values training and workforce participation, face sanctions. After two years, those who still do not comply will be deported to their home countries. Ali also calls on Europeans to address push factors by beefing up their militaries so that they can help restore order to the eastern and southern parts of the Mediterranean. She writes, “only seven European NATO members spend more than two percent of their gross domestic product on defense, while the United States spends just over 3.4 percent.”
Ali is especially alarmed at the failure of Europeans to defend their own civilization because she came to Europe to seek refuge from Islamists in Africa. In her first book, “The Caged Virgin”, Ali shares this journey. She suffered genital mutilation at the age of 5, and she was beaten so severely by her Qur’an teacher that he fractured her skull. In 1992, Ali’s father ordered her to marry a distant cousin she had never met. To escape the marriage, she fled to the Netherlands, where she enrolled in college. Her studies of Spinoza, Voltaire and Freud introduced her to an alternative, liberating moral system. Ali was elected to the Dutch Parliament in 2003, and she became a U.S. citizen in 2013. She is currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Ali has to live with round-the-clock security, as her abandonment of the Muslim faith has made her a target for violence by Islamic extremists.
“I was once an asylum seeker,” Ali writes. “The last thing I want to see is more obstacles put in the way of those who seek to escape religious oppression, civil war, and economic collapse . . . I am writing this book not to help the proponents of closed borders but to persuade liberal Europeans that denial is a self-defeating strategy.”
Robert Carle is a professor at The King’s College in Manhattan. Dr. Carle has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, The American Interest, Religion Unplugged, Newsday, Society, Human Rights Review, Academic Questions and Reason.