By Ashe Schow
January 10, 2016 | 6:26pm
In the wake of horrifying tales of sexual assault perpetrated by potentially up to 1,000 men on New Year’s Eve, German officials have made two stunning decisions.
The first, from Cologne, Germany — where the attacks took place — was Mayor Henriette Reker telling women to adopt a “code of conduct” to prevent further sexual assaults, which crossed the line into “victim blaming.”
The second, from the broader German government, was to crack down hard — not on those responsible for the assaults, but for those criticizing the Muslim immigrants who may have perpetrated them.
Let’s take a step back and remember how all of this started. On New Year’s Eve, women celebrating in Cologne were reportedly groped, sexually assaulted and/or robbed as they walked the streets.
More than 100 criminal complaints have been filed, 75 percent of which were reports of sexual assault. Two women reported being raped by the men, who were allegedly of North African and Arab appearance. Women in Hamburg and Stuttgart also reported similar attacks.
So far several dozen have been identified, most of whom were asylum seekers.
But due to Germany’s desperation to prove not only that it’s the most tolerant country in Europe but also that letting in hundreds of thousands of immigrants would have no disastrous consequences, the female victims of the attacks were initially ignored by the political class. Had the alleged perpetrators been white members of a fraternity, the international response would have been completely different, as the Atlantic’s David Frum noted.
Suddenly the presumption that accusers of sexual assault must be automatically believed has gone out the window, the latest victim of European “multiculturalism” and Western political correctness.
Gone, too, are the demands that women receive no crime-prevention tips, since that amounts to blaming the victim, instead insisting we “teach men not to rape.”
