This is not an article that has been fun for me to write. I have worked on issues related to refugees for much of my professional life, from the Pakistani camps during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to Yemen, Sudan, Thailand, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Lebanon, Bosnia, Nicaragua and Iraq, and have deep sympathy for their plight.Her description of the rape and the subsequent fate of the victim is horrific, and, as she adds, it's just a solitary example of what is an epidemic of outrageous attacks by refugees on women all across Europe (See here, for example)
But nowhere had I encountered a phenomenon like this one. I had seen refugees trapped in circumstances that made them vulnerable to rape, by camp guards or soldiers. But for refugees to become perpetrators of this crime in the place that had given them asylum? That was something new.
A few weeks ago, the Austrian city of Tulln declared a full stop to any further refugee admissions. As the mayor made clear, that decision was aimed at Afghans, but for legal and administrative reasons it could only be promulgated in a global way. That had not been the city’s intention—to the contrary, it had just completed the construction of an expensive, brand-new facility for incoming asylum seekers, which would now, the mayor declared, be given over to another purpose.
His exact words: “We’ve had it.” The tipping point, after a series of disturbing incidents all emanating from Afghans, was the brutal gang rape of a fifteen-year-old girl, snatched from the street on her way home, dragged away and serially abused by Afghan refugees.
It took a while for the Austrian media, cowering before the intimidating visage of political correctness, to start identifying the perpetrators as refugees, but the situation is now so bad they can no longer ignore it. It's not only assaults on women that these ungrateful wretches are subjecting the Austrian people to, there's also widespread abuse of their welfare system as well.
When young men have been taught all their lives that women are essentially property, when they've been taught to hate the West and everything about it, the only surprise in what Dr. Bernard describes is that anyone would be surprised:
This brings us to a third, more compelling and quite disturbing theory [for why these crimes are happening] — the one that my Afghan friend, the court translator, puts forward. On the basis of his hundreds of interactions with these young men in his professional capacity over the past several years, he believes to have discovered that they are motivated by a deep and abiding contempt for Western civilization.Dr. Bernard concludes with this thought:
To them, Europeans are the enemy, and their women are legitimate spoils, as are all the other things one can take from them: housing, money, passports.
Their laws don’t matter, their culture is uninteresting and, ultimately, their civilization is going to fall anyway to the horde of which one is the spearhead. No need to assimilate, or work hard, or try to build a decent life here for yourself — these Europeans are too soft to seriously punish you for a transgression, and their days are numbered.
And it’s not just the sex crimes, my friend notes. Those may agitate public sentiment the most, but the deliberate, insidious abuse of the welfare system is just as consequential. Afghan refugees, he says, have a particular proclivity to play the system: to lie about their age, to lie about their circumstances, to pretend to be younger, to be handicapped, to belong to an ethnic minority when even the tired eye of an Austrian judge can distinguish the delicate features of a Hazara from those of a Pashtun.
Finally, the Left has to do a bit of hard thinking. It’s fine to be warm, fuzzy and sentimental about strangers arriving on your shores, but let’s also spare some warm, fuzzy and sentimental thoughts for our own values, freedoms and lifestyle. Girls and women should continue to feel safe in public spaces, be able to attend festivals, wear clothing appropriate to the weather and their own liking, travel on trains, go to the park, walk their dogs and live their lives.We have a moral obligation, I believe, to help those who suffer, but let's be sure that those we're helping are genuinely in need of our assistance, and let's help them where they are. No one has a duty to succor the homeless by bringing them into their homes, neither must we bring millions of moral illiterates into our communities, putting our wives and daughters at risk, in order to rescue them from tyranny in their homelands.
This is a wonderful Western achievement, and one that is worth defending.
If there are those who think it too strong to call the perpetrators of the crimes described in Dr. Bernard's essay "moral illiterates" then her article is, for them, "must reading".