Programming note: I'm still very poorly, but tomorrow, Wednesday, medicated to the hilt, I shall endeavour to rouse myself from my sickbed for what I assume will be a Mamdanipalooza of a Clubland Q&A. I'll be taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is is now back to its usual transatlantic airtime of 8pm Greenwich Mean Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~I'm old enough to remember when stand-up comedians did rape jokes. Not very good ones, but jokes nonetheless. Ricky Gervais revived this one to discuss its contemporary acceptability or otherwise on a Netflix special a few years back, but I heard it first time round on telly back in the Seventies, when no one batted an eyelid:
So the missus comes back from the park and says, 'I've just been graped.'
I said, 'Don't you mean raped?'
She said, 'No, there was a bunch of them.'
Got a big laugh. Of course, in those days, out in real life it was statistically highly unusual for there to be "a bunch of them". Now, in the New Eutopia, it's routine. Plucked at random, news from Pamplona. Not the running of the bulls, but the running of the "irregular" migrants:
Tres de los cuatro hombres detenidos por la violación grupal y simultánea de una universitaria en Pamplona el pasado viernes están en España de manera irregular. Todos ellos son de origen magrebí y tienen abiertos los correspondientes expedientes de expulsión a sus países.
The poor girl - a university student - was found by passers-by lying semi-conscious in a central Pamplona park showing signs of what police categorise as a "high-impact" sexual assault by four North African men, three of whom are in Spain "illegally", if that's still a thing anymore. As I wrote of Germany two years ago:
According to the latest rape numbers ...well, tell you what, let's not even bother with common-or-garden rape. Without wishing to go all Whoopi Goldberg and start drawing distinctions about 'rape rape', let's cut straight to gang rape, which the Germans define as rape by more than one perpetrator: last year, in the country's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, it was up by forty-three percent to 246 - which is roughly one gang-rape every working day. 'We can do this!', as Angela Merkel likes to say - and she's right, if by 'do this' you mean the fourteen-year-old girl walking home from school...
And this is in a country where the rape of local women by soldiers of the Soviet occupation lingered in the folk-memory for half-a-century - because gang-rape in particular was understood as an act of war and the spoils of victory.
On the streets of a newly colonised Europe, it still is.
As longtime readers may recall, almost a decade ago the hinge moment of the Munk Debate on immigration came when Mme Louise Arbour and Professor Sir Simon Schama made the strategically ill-advised decision to mock Farage and me for our weird "obsession" with the epidemic of sexual assaults across the Continent. This was a careless lapse by Mme Arbour, who as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights was the first prosecutor to charge rape as a war crime. But no doubt she assumed it was low-hanging fruit and the crowd of Toronto liberals would enjoy it. As Barbara Kay wrote in The National Post:
Steyn dwelt excessively on the sexual crimes we've all read about in Cologne, Hamburg, Malmö and elsewhere. So it apparently seemed to Arbour and Schama, because they mocked Steyn for it in their rebuttals. Arbour sneered at both Steyn and Farage as 'newborn feminists' (she got a laugh), while Schama disgraced himself with 'I'm just struck by how obsessed with sex these two guys are, actually. It's a bit sad, really.' (That got a very big laugh.) I took one look at Steyn's glowering face after that remark — Schama will regret having said it to his dying day, I know it — and I kind of felt sorry for those two liberals, because I knew what was coming.
Steyn slowly rose...
I doubt Professor Schama regrets having said it for a moment. Being the first British comedian to do rape gags on stage since that bloke telling the "graped" joke at a working men's club in the 1970s got him a knighthood.
Even when bunch-of-them jokes became socially unacceptable to TV impresarios, many western men had difficulty comprehending rape as anything other than bad and unwanted sex. But, as I had cause to remind Mme Arbour, for first-generation feminists rape isn't about sex, it's about power - unless, of course, you're Bill Clinton and his executive branch. Here's me in The Spectator in April 1998 - that's twenty-seven sod-bollocking years ago:
In the New York Times, Ms Steinem has now issued a definitive ruling: 'It's not harassment and we're not hypocrites.'
The founder of Ms magazine and the National Women's Political Caucus says 'for the sake of argument' she's willing to believe all the women. But, even so, what's the big deal? After considering both Kathleen (a 'reckless pass at a supporter during a low point in her life') and Paula ('he asked her to perform oral sex and even dropped his trousers'), Ms Steinem comes to the same conclusion: 'It never happened again. In other words, President Clinton took "no" for an answer.' He showed a fine understanding of 'the commonsense guideline to sexual behaviour that came out of the women's movement 30 years ago: no means no; yes means yes...'
I'm not such a "newborn feminist" as Mme Arbour sneered. In fact, back in 1998, I was ready to sign on with Gloria Steinem very enthusiastically:
For years, the more straightforward feminists have stomped around in T-shirts demanding, 'What Part of NO Don't You Understand?' Quite a big part, it seems. I didn't realise NO includes one free grope with optional pants-drop and positioning of feminist hand on aroused male genital area. If she doesn't go for it, well, no hard feelings (except on your part): just extricate your fingers from her underwiring and move on to the next broad... If this is feminism, hey, let's have more of it!
My lasting takeaway from the bollocks of the Clinton years was that feminism is entirely transactional: there are no principles and so, if the predators happen to advance your political interests, no victims. Thus, a generation on, one is not surprised to find the dispensation accorded by Gloria Steinem to Bill Clinton's executive branch now extended more generally in the cause of the multiculti utopia. You can't make a diversity omelette without breaking a few chicks:
🚨 | An asylum seeker has been jailed for strangling and sexually assaulting a woman under a bridge in Cardiff.
Fawaz Alsamaou attacked a 24-year-old walking home alone.
Labour & Plaid Cymru back plans for Wales to be a 'Nation of Sanctuary' for Asylum.
💥 What about victims? pic.twitter.com/C2WnP9hSMd
— Jamie Jenkins (@statsjamie) November 1, 2025
It's all part of the general vibrancy of "cultural differences":
#BREAKING: Muhammad Hussain, from Pakistan, was arrested for attempting to rape a 14-year-old British girl.
He justified himself: "I just moved here, I don't know UK laws, I only follow Sharia law. pic.twitter.com/uo5g4p1ZA3
— William Smith 🇬🇧 🏴 (@IamWilliamSmith) November 4, 2025
Are you starting to get the feeling that the answer to "What part of NO don't you understand?" is "I'm Somali. We don't have a word for NO"? Hey, not to worry; your rapist's government-provided mobile telephone now has an app for that:
A small boat migrant allegedly used a translation app to tell a woman 'I want to f**k you' before raping her twice, a court heard.
Moustafa Elbohy, 31, a failed asylum seeker from Egypt, reportedly attacked the victim after an encounter at Charing Cross station in London.
Mr Elbohy is a fine example of what I called in America Alone the "state-of-the-art primitive": yes, he's a savage, but he's savvy enough to know that a smartphone is morally neutral and can advance and streamline one's savagery.
Meanwhile, his barrister argues that Mr Elbohy cannot be gaoled because he suffers, like Bill Clinton's penis, from claustrophobia:
Nimrah Ashraf, defending, told the court Elbohy should be given bail because he has depression, insomnia and anxiety.
She said: 'He suffers from claustrophobia which will naturally be a problem within the prison environment. He gets extremely anxious.'
This is a very transitional phase in the accelerating evolution of the post-western west: female lawyers... female judges... female politicians... female police officers... all protecting the barbarian incomers. Yet many of the New Europeans are impatient to move to the next stage:
Muslim orders German policewoman to keep quiet because she is a woman. Why do they force us to live with them? pic.twitter.com/wKHnNBFMg9
— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) November 4, 2025
The daily violence against women on the streets of western cities is the logical consequence of public policy. Twenty years ago, when I first wrote of the late Samira Bellil and her book Dans l'enfer des tournantes, it was just about possible - just - to believe that the normalisation of gang-rape in western Europe was one of those unforeseen consequences of well-intentioned public policy. That has not been the case for a long time. So a child born over a decade after Samira Bellil's death gets raped on the streets of Dublin because western governments refuse to stop importing legions of men from the rapiest cultures on the planet.
The uniparty consensus is objectively pro-rape. Why? Perhaps because of the opportunities the chaos on the streets affords for the total imposition of a 24/7 panopticon state that will make any effective dissent impossible. Your mileage may vary, but at this stage it would be prudent to operate on the assumption that they want this to be happening.
One of the first people to speak out against the rise of sexual violence against girls and women in Diversistan was Tommy Robinson, who just a couple of hours ago was acquitted in court of the latest trumped-up charge ("terrorism") against him by an evil and corrupt state. Here's the BBC report:
Far-right activist Tommy Robinson...
Whoa, hold up right there! "Far-right", huh? As I have noted for however many sodding years in an American context, not so long ago gun rights (the Second Amendment) used to be a non-partisan thing; then it became "far right". More recently, as I learned in my battles in Canada and elsewhere, free speech (the First Amendment) was once non-partisan and then retreated to a "far-right" fetish. Now, as foretold by Louise Arbour at the Munk Debate, women's rights is also a "far-right" thing.
Aside from a few interventions such as Emily Maitlis telling Rupert Lowe that he's only making a fuss about Pakistani Muslim gang-rape of white working-class English girls because he's a racist, the bigshot feminists and their institutions have been utterly silent even as western women have been delivered into a world of random daily brutal violence:
A North African man beats women for fun in Barcelona. pic.twitter.com/HcPFNiTKDC
— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) November 4, 2025
If you're a woman, that's your future. If you're a man, they're your wives and daughters. But diversity is our strength! So, if it's a choice between the video above or speaking out against the import of barbarians, the sisterhood is fine with it.
~Thank you to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club in this our ninth year, and thank you to those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
