Thursday 14 January 2016

"Germany on the brink" -- Ross Douthat, International New York Times

I thought "Germany on the brink" by Ross Douthat was rather good.  Haroon Moghul didn't.
From Douthat's piece:
In Sweden, for instance, which like Germany has had an open door, 71 percent of all asylum applicants in 2015 were men. Among the mostly-late-teenage category of “unaccompanied minors,” as Valerie Hudson points out in an important essay for Politico,” the ratios were even more skewed: “11.3 boys for every one girl.”
Telling, that, isn't it. The hugely skewed number of boys per girls.  A reflection of the low status of women in Islamic countries.
And:
In the German case the important number here isn’t the country’s total population, currently 82 million. It’s the twentysomething population, which was less than 10 million in 2013 (and of course already included many immigrants). In that cohort and every cohort afterward, the current influx could have a transformative effect.
This is a key insight, the impact of young Muslim men on the young cohort in Germany, not on the whole population.

From Douthat critic Haroon Moghul's Douthat on the Brink:
Douthat describes the terrible assaults in Cologne as not the fault of several dozen youth, but Arab and Muslim culture entirely, the kind of conclusion we’d expect from a Pamela Geller, or a Tommy Robinson.
But that's plain wrong.  There were thousands of migrants involved, not just "several dozen". And of course the culture plays a key part.
And:
Speaking of the large numbers of mostly male refugees entering Germany and Western Europe, Douthat writes that “many of these men carry assumptions about women’s roles that are diametrically opposed to the values of contemporary Europe.” How, exactly? He coyly cites a Norwegian curriculum for migrants which notes that “in Europe, ‘to force someone into sex is not permitted.’”
Where, I wonder, is it permitted?
Answer: within marriages in Islamic countries.
Of course the assumptions about women in Middle Eastern Countries are different from those in the West.  Pew in 2013 found, for example, the following: 92% of Moroccans and 87% of Palestinians believe a woman should always obey a man.  Only 14% of Iraqis and 22% of Egyptians believe that women should have the right to divorce their husbands.  And intra-marital rape is not recognised.  Rape generally?  Look at ISIS.  Their justifications are Koranic.
For more on women in Islam, there's the WEF's Global Gender Gap report, which have Islamic countries filling all the bottom 18 countries out of 145 of the world!  Howzat, Haroon? Or are the folks at Pew and the World Economic Forum all Islamophobes, out to get Muslims?
See also my Page above: "What Sharia says about women"
There are other absurdities in Moghul's article but I'm just too plain lazy right now to pursue them.  Save to say it's more of the usual Islamist obscurantism and victimhood.  Moghul is just another Islamopologist.