It’s easy for feminists in the US to avoid the topic of Islam; there aren’t nearly as many unassimilated migrant men from Muslim-majority countries in America as there are in Europe. But European feminists, influenced by the racial absolutism of the American Left, are also failing women – both Muslim and non-Muslim – who suffer horrifically at the hands of Islam.
Self-described feminist and former leader of the UK’s Green Party, Caroline Lucas, has a long history of censuring “Islamophobia,” instructing her constituents to “call out Islamophobia wherever we see it” in 2022. Meanwhile, Lucas embraced the #MeToo movement, working on a report into sexual harassment in Parliament in 2018. The glaring, but typical, inconsistency here is that sexual harassment is indeed on the rise in the UK and Europe, but the culprits are not Members of Parliament. Inconveniently for feminists on the Left, who think race trumps sex in the hierarchy of victimhood, there is a huge problem of unassimilated young men from Muslim countries who regard Western women as mere objects. How dissonant must the mind be to read this and still consider Islam compatible with feminism?
While the Western Left defends the absolute validity of all asylum seekers, over 70% of asylum applicants to Europe are men and most children are boys. Aren’t women considered particularly vulnerable in warzones, from which these migrants ostensibly flee? It’s strange how all the vulnerable people who come to the West are young, healthy men, isn’t it?
In my book Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights (2021), I show the causal connection between increased sexual coercion and rape in countries like Germany (which experienced a 41% increase in 2017 alone) and this influx of young male migrants from North Africa and the Middle East. The 2015-16 New Year’s Eve assaults, when a large group of North African men assaulted approximately 1,200 women in a single night, starkly revealed the ways in which unassimilated migrants treat Western women, whom they view as ripe for the picking.
But asylum seekers and undocumented migrants who have entered Europe in the last decade do not represent all unassimilated Muslim men. South Asian populations in Europe are not known for their feminism! South Asian grooming gangs in the UK have historically targeted young British girls from vulnerable backgrounds: girls who are considered sexual objects for the use and abuse of men who will never marry them.
Between 2008 and 2010, a voracious grooming gang in Rochdale comprising of British-Pakistani men was made known to British police. The cops failed to clamp down on its activity, largely out of fear of being condemned as racist (which, no doubt, would have happened). As a result, hundreds of white working-class girls, many of whom were from vulnerable backgrounds and lacked parental support, were made victims of sex trafficking. Rochdale was by no means the only grooming gang; grooming gangs have recently been exposed in Rotherham, Huddersfield, Bradford, Oxford, and other areas with notable South Asian Muslim populations and enclaves. In 2017, it was found that 84% of those convicted for grooming gang offenses in the UK were South Asian, despite representing only 7% of the population. Noah Carl, who enjoys the freedom to research the thorny reality of demographics after being banished by Cambridge University, discusses this overrepresentation here.
As the Rochdale debacle shows, leftist ideologues are not alone in turning a blind eye to the problem: police and establishment media are complicit. “Centrist” media outlets routinely ignore the inconvenient trends I describe in Prey, instead framing migrants as victims of Islamophobic bigotry when the topic arises. In 2016, the BBC produced a gushing documentary about Omar Badreddin, a Syrian refugee who was charged with sexual assault but found not guilty. Badreddin, cast by the BBC as a victim, was recently found guilty of repeatedly raping a 13-year old girl—alongside two other men. All three were members of a grooming gang in Newcastle.
Similarly, rather than grappling with unpleasant case studies or statistics which risk seeming critical of Islam, Western feminism paradoxically condemns “Islamophobia” and sexism in the same breath. The Department of Gender Studies at the LSE recently compared the French radical feminist group Femen with the “far-right.” Why? For criticizing patriarchy within Islam and the sexually aggressive behavior of migrants from Muslim countries.
Western women and girls who are victimized by unassimilated migrants are not the only women in need of advocacy. Muslim women in European diasporas suffer the risk of female genital mutilation, honor killings (a recent Italian case is linked), and isolation from mainstream society. Only a decade ago, 190,000 Muslim women (22% of their population at that time), despite having lived in the UK for decades in some cases, spoke little to no English.
More recently, statistics show that over half of British Pakistani couples are in cousin marriages. Cousin marriage increases the rate of congenital disability in offspring, and mothers are expected to care for these children at home, leaving them effectively housebound. In Muslim enclaves (densely populated urban areas occupied by a single ethnic or national group) there is little hope of assimilation: women are isolated, while men see no reason to change.
Why Don’t Progressives Care?
Christopher Hitchens’ comments on leftist hypocrisy regarding unassimilated Muslims remain relevant. There’s little wonder why these young men don’t consider it their moral duty to assimilate to the normative condemnation of sexual assault in the West: as Hitchens pointed out in a 2007 article, “Londonistan Calling:” “Traditional Islamic law says that Muslims who live in non-Muslim societies must obey the law of the majority. But this does not restrain those who now believe that they can proselytize Islam by force, and need not obey kuffar law in the meantime.”
For Western feminists, Islam is the elephant in the room. While many feminists refuse to address the ways in which Muslim women suffer all over the world, they even more anxiously avoid the topic of sexual abuse by migrant men from Muslim countries on their own turf. To point out the data on sexual assault by migrant men in Europe, as I did in Prey, won me the baffling label “absolutist” in the New York Times. Another review in The Standard condemned my book for implying that “sexism” is in the “DNA” of migrant men who mistreat women. Nowhere do I make such an essentialist claim. Cultural norms, uncorrected by assimilation, drive the phenomenon of migrant-perpetrated sexual assault. The Left have a serious problem grasping the implications of per capita calculations: for my critics, noticing demographic trends means painting every single member of that group with the same brush.
A constructive feminism would not be angered by the contents of my book Prey; it would confront the problem, lobbying for pragmatic solutions and tough borders in response to the unmanageable numbers of asylum applicants who enter Europe for economic purposes. Above all, it would demand that all men in Europe, no matter their creed or colour, assimilate to the cultural norms which allow women to walk the streets in safety.