Cologne changes everything

I am very pleased that migrants committed the Cologne mass sexual assaults this New Year's Eve and not in two or three years' time, when millions more refugees had been admitted to Europe. The same logic makes me grateful that Muslim fanatics murdered many innocent people in Paris in November, rather than waiting ten years. 

Cologne might be of lasting and huge significance to European history. Europe, or rather
Germany, has been given a chance to step back from the precipice. Will it?

Or will the stream of migrants continue, leading to more violence, even to war?

Why did these attacks happen? 

A large number of Muslim boys, sexually frustrated, drunk because unused to drink, surrounded by attractive, unveiled infidel girls, these are part of the reason. But I think part of it is a desire to demonstrate that they are conquerors. And this partly on a conscious, partly on a subconscious or symbolic level. And conquerors is what they may well be, what in fact they already are. After all they may have fought their way across borders without papers, even lobbed bricks at frontier guards. 

I wonder what Mircea Eliade or Carl Jung would have said, or Sir James George Frazer of the Golden Bough.

It is also, of course, simply a repetition on German soil of behaviour which is commonplace in the lands from which the migrants come. 

The best thing I have read on this (and I have read very much) was an opinion piece by Shamil Shams, a Pakistani journalist working in Germany, headlined

Cologne attacks on Muslims show incompatibility of cultures.

It said:

I have been very sceptical about the German government's decision to allow thousands of refugees into the country without much scrutiny of their backgrounds...
...I was sure that the migrants' influx would ultimately disturb the harmony and balance of German society. I feel that Islamic culture and European norms are not compatible...
What happened in Cologne happens regularly in my homeland, Pakistan. The men are never ashamed, never feel guilty, never show remorse about the way they treat women in that part of the world.The men who sexually harassed girls in Cologne were not demented; they knew what they were doing. And I am sure they did it with absolute contempt for the European culture, its norms and its people.

These are his comments on the recent migrants. He also says he knows Salafists who

have been living in Germany for decades, speak fluent German, yet they harbour deep resentment against secularism and Western values.

A Syrian woman friend of mine tells me that Syrian girls are routinely insulted, harassed and groped by young Muslim men in Syria. It makes no difference whether the girls are Muslim or Christian, she says, or to what social class they belong.

What was more extraordinary than what happened in Cologne was the fact that it was carefully covered up by the police, the city hall and the Rhineland-Westphalia government. They all lied and lied and lied. News got out in the end because of the social media, which Mrs. Merkel is intent on censoring, and in particular a pugnacious and informative news website called Breitbart. 

The authorities tried then to deny that the culprits were recent migrants. Most extraordinary, to me, was that finally the left of centre press and the BBC had to run with the story, albeit five or six days after it happened. In the end, after avoiding saying this for a long time, even the BBC had to admit that the alleged assailants were of North African or Middle Eastern appearance, not drunken Teutons. 

The Cologne cover up also turned out to be a very good thing, because it has taught Germans not to trust the media or their leaders on the subject of migrants. The authorities, who were not able to prevent the attacks (fair enough - they had no warning), 'sprang into action' to censor 'hate speech' on social media.

Rhineland interior Minister Minister Ralf Jaeger said that, while the attacks were bad, Germans must not allow right-wing anti-immigrant forces to gain legitimacy.

What happens on the right-wing platforms and in chat rooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women. This is poisoning the climate of our society.

Think about that. He was saying what he, and others in authority, really think. Comments on the internet about migrants are at least as awful as the attacks on women. It's pretty clear that the German political class are more scared of Germans than they are of Arabs.

All sorts of political opinions are, I imagine, being censored by Twitter and Facebook. An English barrister friend of mine, of unimpeachable respectability, got into trouble with Twitter for referring to 'Muslim rape gangs'. Many other people say nothing on social media for fear of being informed on by their friends or the fear of being thought to be racists. 

The police, unprepared on New Year's Eve but fresh from having sprang into action against hate speech, were ready with water cannons to fire at PEGIDA, when they protested about what had happened. 

And yet, despite all this, hope creeps into my breast by degrees. 

Despite it all, this crisis has shown us that freedom of speech and freedom of thought are not dead yet in Europe. They (the establishment, the cross-party liberal consensus, call it what you will) are not all powerful.

Can Germany summon up the courage to recognise how naive they were, to see that no more migrants should be admitted and to discard Angela Merkel?