Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch is the latest to weigh in on last Friday's clash of, er, titans:
Tragically, most people don't know what is happening, but as the Munk debate proved, when we have the opportunity to present the truth, we have a very strong likelihood of winning people over to the side of reason and righteousness and the defense of Western civilization.
Andrew Lawton also has some thoughts on his podcast.
As noted yesterday, at issue during the debate was whether the alleged Northern Europe gang-rape epidemic was merely a kinky sex fantasy for me and Nigel Farage. Is it even happening? The National Post's Jonathan Kay:
Mark Steyn seems to suggest that Muslim refugees raped 500 women and girls in Germany in single night. Seems very dubious
If you're going to present yourself as a fact-checker, you could at least get off your arse and check facts. Actually, I said there were 500 "sexual assaults", a crime which includes not just penetration by an unwanted penis, but apparently trivial and unimportant stuff like, for example, being surrounded by a dozen menacing, predatory men and finding that "Ich hatte Finger an allen Körperöffnungen" - I had a finger in every orifice.
Nor did I say there were 500 sexual assaults "in Germany". I said there were 500 in Cologne alone. From Süddeutsche Zeitung:
Bislang wurden laut Staatsanwaltschaft Köln 1139 Anzeigen gestellt, davon 485 wegen einer Sexualstraftat.
That's to say, the Cologne state prosecutor's office is (as of a fortnight ago) up to 1,139 New Year's Eve attacks, of which 485 are for sex assaults. So you got me there, Jonathan. I ballooned it out of all proportion and alleged there were not a footling 485 sexual assaults in Cologne in a single night, but a grossly exaggerated and "very dubious" 500. As for the number throughout Germany, there were also mass coordinated gang assaults in Bielefeld, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Stuttgart - totaling just shy of 2,000 victims.
But let's keep it with Cologne. Jonathan Kay was a colleague of mine at The National Post for many years, and we have shared a stage and, on one occasion, a synagogue podium together. So I'm reluctant to go full shagged-sheep on an old friend. I will, however, observe that the great liberal virtue of "empathy" appears to be all but entirely absent among a certain type of Toronto male. Perhaps I've spent more time in Continental cities than Jonathan has, but the reality of what happened in Germany that night is very vivid to me. To translate it into local terms, given that Toronto is roughly two-and-a-half times the size of Cologne, it's the equivalent of about 1,200 women being sexually assaulted on New Year's Eve in front of Union Station or Queen's Park.
Would that not be ...unusual? And worthy of note?
Apparently not. As the debate progressed, Jonathan found himself fighting vainly the old ennui:
At
#MunkDebate, Mark Steyn returns to his theme of Muslims raping "3-year-old girls." He's already mentioned this three times.
Oh, dear. Since attacks on three-year-olds are such a bore to him, he'll be glad to hear that this week in the new Europe they've advanced to targeting two-year-olds:
Asylsökare satte kniv mot tvåårig flickas hals
Which means: Asylum seekers put a knife to two-year-old girl's neck. That's a Tuesday night in a small Swedish town (population 4,000) hitherto noted mainly as the birthplace of England footie manager Sven-Göran Eriksson.
[UPDATE: Still not young enough? Okay, here's a migrant threatening to hurl a newborn baby at police.]
We didn't do a lot of strategizing before the debate, mainly because Nigel had leaned on the Munk minders to fish out a rather decent bottle of Niagara vin rouge for the green room, and he kept nipping out for a fag, which I tried to explain meant something entirely different in Toronto. (He was amused to find you weren't allowed to smoke within nine meters of a building, and marveled at the lengthy negotiations into the small hours that had produced such a finely calibrated exclusion zone.) But we did at one point mull over what our audience might be expected to be familiar with on this topic and agreed that it would not be much: Sentimentalism certainly, class attitudes, virtue-signaling, but it was more than likely that, for CBC listeners and Globe & Mail readers, Cologne on New Year's Eve would be an entirely novel topic.
Still, I don't feel writers who purport to be experts on the subject have the same excuse. The Globe & Mail's Doug Saunders:
A very large part of his [Steyn's] debate argument involved retailing urban myths involving refugees and rape etc
By "urban myths", Mr Saunders means hundreds and hundreds of Continental media reports. If you recall (from the aforementioned clash of titans) that flurry of child-rape stories I cited from a week's worth of German newspapers in January, I could have read out similar individual European headlines until the end of the debate at 9pm, and never repeated myself.
But no doubt Saunders' agent is already pitching his next book. Forthcoming from Knopf Canada:
Hey, What's The Big Deal About Gang Rape?
by Doug Saunders
"Spirited!" - Jonathan Kay
At a certain level, Louise Arbour is right: Nigel and I are not the best spokespersons for the raped and battered women and children of the new Europe. We are, after all, as Mr Saunders says, mere bigoted cartoon characters. It would be much better for the victims if all the respectable people - like Louise and Simon and Doug and Jonathan - were to take up the cause.
But they don't.
And they mock those who do.
Yet the final score of that debate suggests that at least some of the women in Roy Thomson Hall took it seriously. And it was striking that among the valiant Twitter warriors cheering the Doug Saunders line afterwards there was a very pronounced male bias. The Munk tag line is:
The Munk Debates provide a lively and substantive forum for leading thinkers to discuss the pressing issues of our time.
"Feminist" Cameron MacLeod found that hilarious:
"The Munk Debates provide a lively and substantive forum for leading thinkers & also Mark Steyn to discuss the pressing issues of our time."
Funny. But perhaps not as funny as Mr MacLeod's earlier Tweet of a brand new cardboard hashtag he'd painstakingly created a few days before:
#IBelieveSurvivors
#IBelieveWomen
#IBelieveMyself
You can take that to the bank, ladies. Cameron MacLeod has whipped out his cardboard hashtag and he's there for you: #IBelieveSurvivors, #IBelieveWomen ...except women from Cologne, Oldenburg, Bad Münstereifel, Solingen, Chemnitz, Salzburg, Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo, Brussels, etc. They're just "urban myths". [UPDATE! Mr MacLeod objects to being associated with Doug Saunders: See here.]
Those cities are not so distant to the liberal châtelaines in Roy Thomson Hall: Toronto 2016 is far closer in its social attitudes to contemporary Scandinavia or Germany than it is to 1867 British North America. And so perhaps those women intuit, in a way that Messrs MacLeod and Saunders do not, what Barbara Kay articulated:
A civilized culture, which takes centuries of painstaking collaborative work to create, can be easily destroyed, and quickly.
Very true. One of the questions asked of Germany in the weeks after New Year was a simple one: Where are all the men? Well, here's one answer from Stéphanie Kay - no relation to either Barbara Kay or Jonathan Kay, I think, but we're all Kay all the time at SteynOnline; as they said in the Seventies, you're a Kay, I'm a Kay. If you see someone in a Kay-Kay-Kay robe wandering around Indiana University, it may just be a Barbara-Jonathan-Stéphanie fan. Anyway, Mlle Kay writes:
So men concerned about sex crimes against women and children are either pathologically obsessed with sex (Schama) or frauds (Arbour). Have we got that? Well maybe that's why, after 40+ years of feminism, no Western men seem to have been on hand to defend the women and children when these crimes occurred.
It turns out the new men - the ones Louise Arbour doesn't laugh at - aren't there for all those German women. And on the evidence of Munk Debate Tweeters they're unlikely to be there for Toronto women, either.
In my speech in the Danish Parliament a few months ago, I mentioned Molly Norris - mainly because nobody else does. She was the impeccably liberal progressive feminist alternative-weekly cartoonist from Seattle who entirely by accident fell afoul of the Islamic supremacists - and so was obliged, upon the advice of the FBI, to vanish from the face of the earth. Or as her gutless colleagues at The Seattle Weekly put it:
You may have noticed that Molly Norris' comic is not in the paper this week. That's because there is no more Molly.
That bland kiss-off became the title of a chapter in my book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn - "There Is No More Molly". Miss Norris and I had some correspondence in the run-up to the vaporizing of her life, and so, as in Copenhagen last September, she pops up from the back of my mind from time to time:
I think a lot about my poor clueless leftie chum Molly Norris. Where is she? And what did she do to deserve having her life erased? And why do none of her liberal friends ever mention her?
As I wrote in my book, "when the chips are down, your fellow lefties won't be there for you".
And so it goes for thousands of women across the most liberal, progressive cities in Europe. In the Nineties, I took Louise Arbour seriously on gang-rape in the Balkans, because I knew victims of it. As I said on stage, she was the first prosecutor to charge mass rape as a war crime. For her generation, as I was obliged to remind Simon Schama, rape is not about sex but about power. New Year's Eve in Cologne was also about power. And, given the coordination via social media of mass sexual assault by thousands of men from the Tyrol to the Baltic, it was also a weapon of war.
And so, to too many "liberal" men, these women and children are just collateral damage: You can't make a vibrant diverse multicultural omelette without breaking a few eggs, right?
