In a fainthearted west, we're all asking for it - and we're going to get it, good and hard

ASKING FOR IT

By Mark Steyn July 2002

Last week in Sydney, the pack leader of a group of Lebanese Muslim gang-rapists was sentenced to 55 years in gaol. I suppose I ought to say “Lebanese-Australian” Muslim gang-rapists, since the accused were Australian citizens. But, identity-wise, the rambunctious young lads considered themselves heavy on the Lebanese, light on the Australian. During their gang rapes, the lucky lady would be told she was about to be “fucked Leb style” and that she deserved it because she was an “Australian pig”.

But, inevitably, it’s the heavy sentence that’s “controversial”. After September 11th, Americans were advised to ask themselves, “Why do they hate us?” Now Australians need to ask themselves, “Why do they rape us?” As Monroe Reimers put it on the letters page of The Sydney Morning Herald:

As terrible as the crime was, we must not confuse justice with revenge. We need answers. Where has this hatred come from? How have we contributed to it? Perhaps it's time to take a good hard look at the racism by exclusion practised with such a vengeance by our community and cultural institutions.

Indeed. Many’s the time, labouring under the burden of some or other discriminatory municipal policy, I’ve thought of pinning some gal down and sodomising her while 14 of my pals look on and await their turn. But I fear in my case the Monroe Reimers of the world would be rather less eager to search for “root causes”. Gang rape as a legitimate expression of the campaign for social justice is a privilege reserved only unto a few.

Mr Reimers, though, will be happy to know his view is echoed across the hemispheres. Five days before 9/11, the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that 65% of the country’s rapes were committed by “non-western” immigrants – a category which, in Norway, is almost wholly Muslim. A professor at the University of Oslo explained that one reason for the disproportionate Muslim share of the rape market was that in their native lands “rape is scarcely punished” because it is generally believed that “it is women who are responsible for rape”.

So Muslim immigrants to Norway should be made aware that things are a little different in Scandinavia, right?

Not at all! Rather, the professor insisted, “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes” because their manner of dress would be regarded by Muslim men as inappropriate. “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.” Or to modify Queen Victoria’s wedding-night advice to her daughter: lie back and think of Yemen.

France? Well, I can’t bring you any ethnic rape statistics from the Fifth Republic because the authorities go to great lengths not to keep any. But, even though the phenomenon of immigrant gang rape does not officially exist, there’s already a word for it: the “tournante” – or “take your turn”. Last year, 11 Muslim men were arrested for enjoying a grand old tournante with a 14-year old girl in a cellar. It’s now a widely accepted communal “rite of passage” in the North African quartiers of French cities.

Whether or not certain cultures are more prone to rape is a delicate question. But what’s interesting is how easily even this most extreme manifestation of multiculturalism is subsumed within the usual pieties. Norwegian women must learn to be, in a very real sense, less “exclusionary”. Lebanese male immigrants, finding refuge in a land of peace, freedom and opportunity, are somehow transformed into gang rapists by Australian racism.

After September 11th, a friend in London said to me she couldn’t stand all the America-needs-to-ask-itself stuff because she used to work at a rape crisis centre and she’d heard this blame-the-victim routine a thousand times before: America was asking for it. Like those Norwegian women, it was being “provocative”. Even so, it comes as a surprise to find the multiculti apologists doing exactly the same to actual rape victims. In a fainthearted west, we're all asking for it - and we're going to get it, good and hard