ANALYSIS: National Review Massacres Cologne Story; Were The Sexual Assaults In Germany A Muslim Brotherhood Plot?

It has long since ceased to be in any way enjoyable processing the flood of media reporting on the Global Muslim Brotherhood. Just last week, the GMBDW examined an irresponsibly shoddy article from Vanity Fair on Huma Abedin, a top aid to Hillary Clinton with a history of personal and family ties to Saudi Islamists. In that post, we strongly defended former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy’s comments on Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradwi, comments which the Vanity Fair journalist cited as an example of “rightwing hysteria” on the subject. However, yesterday Mr. McCarthy published an article on the National Review website that very much does qualify as rightwing hysteria concerning Qaradawi, and that of a particularly ugly variant. The article is titled “When Worlds Collide: Unassimilable Muslim Migrants Crash Europe’s Fantasy Islam” and begins as follows:

January 9, 2016 What happens when the West’s fantasy Islam collides with the reality of an imported critical mass of unassimilated — and defiantly unassimilable — Muslims?

Cologne happens.

Nor is it only Cologne. That was just Ground Zero of the New Year’s Eve rape jihad in Germany. As National Review’s Ian Tuttle notes in an alarming column about the predictable — and, if I may say, predicted — surge of sexual assault in a Europe overrun by ‘migrants,’ the jihad included similar episodes, albeit on a smaller scale, in Stuttgart, Hamburg, and even astride the Brandenburg gate in Berlin.

We are finally learning about the magnitude and harrowing details of the attack after days of Stasi-like information suppression. Chancellor Angela Merkel may not be big on German security, but she is a bulwark when it comes to fantasy Islam.

First there was no news; then, a few disturbing hints of gropings and robberies by gangs of ‘Middle Eastern or North African’ men. Now, we know it was a mass atrocity — the only remaining question being: How massive?

Upward of a thousand men, overwhelmingly Muslim, executed a coordinated series of attacks on an obvious target of opportunity: street celebrations in the major cities of a reviled Western state, where they were certain to find throngs of young women and a police presence grossly inadequate to provide security — certainly not against a critical mass of Islamic supremacists.

The participation of Muslim migrants in the rape jihad is, of course, the fact most desperately suppressed by German officials. Mrs. Merkel earned her ‘Person of the Year’ honors from left-leaning relic Time magazine by rolling out the red carpet for a staggering 1.1 million migrants in 2015 — infuriating the German public and spurring the migrant tsunami now washing over neighboring countries. In this information clampdown, the nightmare of the victimized women turns out to be the chancellor’s good fortune: Police on the scene were so outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the assailants that it was physically impossible for them to get near most of the women being savaged, much less make arrests. Most of the perps will never be identified.

By calling the assaults in Cologne part of a “rape jihad”, McCarthy joins the ranks of reprehensible rightwing commentators such as Frontpage writer Daniel Greenfield, hate monger Pamella Geller, and extremist Robert Spencer who was likely the source of the term “rape jihad” in 2004. Before turning to McCarthy’s “evidence” on the subject, it is first worth noting his statement about the Mayor of Cologne:

Truth being the first casualty of war, it was left to Henriette Reker, the fantasy Islam–drenched mayor of Cologne, to blame the victims for their ordeal. Such assaults could be prevented, she declaimed, if German women adopted a “code of conduct” tailored to the new, multi-culti Deutschland.

Instead of doing his own due diligence on the subject, McCarthy is rather repeating the claims of the Western media lynch mob that labeled Ms. Reker’s comments a proposed “code of conduct.”  However, Ms. Reker explains in an interview with German media, her statement in question was a single sentence excerpted from a long press conference in which she was asked what preventive advice could be offered. In  response, Ms. Rekker said she simply offered a short example taken from the City of Cologne rape prevention guidelines. The wisdom of even taking on that topic during the press conference aside, there is no evidence whatsoever that she proposed any kind of “code of conduct” or that she in any way tried to blame the victims for the assaults. (It is also worth mentioning that Ms. Rekker is a courageous public servant who was herself stabbed in the throat by a man with an extremist background claiming to be angry over the country’s refugee policies. According to knowledgable sources in Germany, German media has not accused her of blaming the victims).

Turning to McCarthy’s implication that it is the the views of Youssef Qaradawi, the most important leader in the Global Muslim Brotherhood, that are somehow related to the assaults, he writes:

In the spirit of multiculturalism, I have such a code just off the shelf (on which rests The Grand Jihad, in which I outlined it a few years back). It goes like this:

To be absolved from guilt, the raped woman must have shown some sort of good conduct . . . Islam addresses women to maintain their modesty, so as not to open the door for evil . . . The Koran calls on Muslim women in general to preserve their dignity and modesty, just to save themselves from any harassment. So for a rape victim to be absolved from guilt, she must not be the one that opens . . . her dignity for deflowering.

These pearls of wisdom come from none other than Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s renowned sharia jurist. He proclaimed them on his popular IslamOnline website about a dozen years ago, right before he was welcomed into Britain — as a trustee of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies — despite his fatwas supporting Hamas suicide attacks in Israel and terrorism against Western troops in Iraq. Though he resides in Qatar, Qaradawi currently heads the Ireland-based European Council for Fatwa and Research.

Given his thinking on other social issues, it is no surprise that Qaradawi holds such views but in fact, those same views are held widely throughout the world. For example, in 2014 Brazilian media reported:

 …a survey released this week by the government’s Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA), found that most Brazilian – about 65 – percent agree that it is justified to rape women “wearing clothes showing their bodies.” About 58 percent of respondents also agreed that “if women knew how to behave, there would be fewer rapes.”…

Closer to home, a 2015 EU survey found that 46-48% of all males and females completely or partly agreed with the statement “Women cause their victimisation or rape by their clothing.” (A brief search did not find a similar study for the US, but evidence that was found is not encouraging.)

So given the global and pervasive attitude blaming women for being sexually assaulted, is there any reason to introject religion into the debate or even a shred of evidence that the Cologne attackers were operating under some kind of influence from Youssef Qaradawi or the Muslim Brotherhood? In fact, the GMBDW is highly skeptical that any of the young men involved in the attacks would ever have even heard of Qaradawi much less being familiar with IslamOnline,  a site that ejected Qaradawi in 2010 and which has not published his fatwas since that time. (This is not even to mention the question of how seriously the attackers could have taken Islamic theology when they since they were widely reported as a “drunken mob.”)

Yet, McCarthy is not content at musing about Qaradawi’s alleged role in bringing about the Cologne assaults. Worse, and in accord with the theorists of the so-called “anti-Shariah” movement, he traces the attacks back to the Koran itself:

As I’ve previously explained, when Muslims are seeking conquest, Islamic scripture endorses sexual assault as a weapon to establish their dominance. “O Prophet,” Allah is said to have announced (in the Koran’s sura 33:50), “We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou has paid their dowers, and those whom thy right hand possesses out of the captives of war whom Allah has assigned to thee.”

While the GMBDW does not engage in debate about the meaning of religious scriptures, a subject better left to actual scholars on the subject, we note that even if the cited Koranic verse were taken as a justification for rape in modern times, it clearly refers to “captives of war” which is why McCarthy needs to postulate that the Cologne victims would have so-viewed by their assailants. Once again, McCarthy turns to Qaradawi;

Qaradawi is the most influential Muslim intellectual behind the strategy of, as he puts it, “conquering” Europe and America by “dawa” — the aggressive proselytism of Islamic mores. The plan calls for flooding the West with Muslim migrants, directing them to resist assimilation, establishing Islamic enclaves, and pressuring the host country to concede the enclave’s right to govern itself in accordance with sharia — Islam’s societal framework and legal code.

It is certainly true that Qaradawi has said, as we ourselves published in 2008, that  “Islam will conquer Europe without resorting to the sword or fighting. It will do so by means of da’wa and ideology.” Yet, despite 15 years of extensive GMBDW coverage on Qaradawi, we are aware of no plans he has ever made public for “flooding the West with Muslim migrants” or anything of the kind and he famously created a new designation for Europe precisely to exclude the continent from the Dar Al Harb (House of War.) Yet, are we still expected to believe that the Cologne attackers were part of an organized Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy to fulfill Qaradawi’s prophecies  and that those same migrants viewed the women in Cologne as “captives of war.”? Where is the evidence for this extraordinary claim when on the contrary, everything we know suggests that the overwhelming majority of migrants are fleeing collapsed or collapsing states and/or seeking much improved economic opportunities? Is there even a single known example of a Muslim migrant who even thought of themselves as part of an Islamic conquest much less actually acting under the instructions of any organized effort, Muslim Brotherhood or otherwise?

Let us call these these theories of McCarthy precisely what they are- preposterous lunacies designed to appeal to the vast rightwing audience in the US which is apparently prepared to believe that all Muslims are part of an organized and Muslim Brotherhood dominated conspiracy to conquer the country and impose “Shariah Law.” The GMBDW wrote the following in 2014 regarding another viral rightwing conspiracy theory and that applies in principle to McCarthy’s latest contribution, the notion that legions of Muslim invaders are being sent to the West under the instructions of the Muslim Brotherhood in order to rape and conquer:

In order to combat the pernicious influence of the Global Muslim Brotherhood, it is vital for there to be a realistic understanding of the network that is based on actual evidence about who or what is involved and how it actually functions. While we are fully aware of and since 2008 have posted about GMB deception strategies, fanciful and exaggerated claims about legions of Muslim Brotherhood “infiltrators” with narratives that are constructed for the benefit of ideological communities do nothing to further this understanding and do a disservice to this important cause. They also run the risk of serious damage to the civil fabric in the US by promoting suspicion and hatred among fellow Americans. The GMBDW very much regrets any misuse of the information we have provided that is being used for unsavory ends.