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Harvard Fellow: ‘Bigots stealing feminism’ after migrant sexual assaults in Europe

Laurie Penny, a 2014-2015 Harvard University International Nieman Fellow, says that we — meaning the West — have only now begun to take sexual assault seriously because migrants from predominately Muslim countries have been the ones committing the attacks.

“After months of dog-whistle xenophobia, European authorities have finally started to treat migrants as they would treat any other citizen. They have achieved this by choosing not to make a fuss when migrants are accused of raping and assaulting women.”

Penny goes on to equate the sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany and elsewhere in Europe with the response of “Islamophobes” and “xenophobes” — because the latter have “jumped at the chance to condemn Muslim and migrant men as savages.”

Via the New Statesman:

It’s a miracle! Finally, the right wing cares about rape culture! Finally, all over the world, from Fox News to 4chan, a great conversion has taken place and men who previously spent their time shaming, stalking and harassing women are suddenly concerned about our rights! And all it took was a good excuse to bash migrants and Muslims and tell feminists they don’t know what’s good for them.

You know what has never yet prevented sexual violence? Unbridled racism.

RELATED: The ultimate irony of feminism

This theft of feminist rhetoric in the name of imperialism and racism has been going on for centuries. It’s been an active part of the political conversation in the West since 2001. In the week since the Cologne attacks have been reported in the global press, a great many men have taken it upon themselves to educate me and other feminists on the point that only Muslim men are sexist. They have chosen to do this by sending orchestrated waves of abuse and sexual slurs to any woman whose opinion they dislike.

She adds that “As usual, white supremacist patriarchy only concerns itself with women’s safety and women’s dignity when rape and sexual assault can be pinned on cultural ‘outsiders’.”

Indeed. Because we all know that there is no difference between, say, a catcall to a pretty woman walking down the street, and a crowd of men groping and fondling women who happened to have walked through the wrong neighborhood, right?

This is what multiculturalism does: It posits that, since no culture is superior to another, somehow examples like that above must be considered … “equal.”

According to The Daily Signal’s Kim Holmes, Ms. Penny is a living example of this “double standard of multiculturalism”:

Many people think multiculturalism is all about defending common humanity. It isn’t. It’s about creating a new power structure that divides humanity into competing and unequal groupings.

In the Cologne case, the losers of this new power game are women. In the current sweepstakes of multicultural victimhood, they are lower in the pecking order than Muslim refugees.

RELATED: Hey American feminists: This is what ‘rape culture’ really looks like

It’s a blatant double standard—one for Western women and another for Muslim refugees. But we really shouldn’t be surprised. After all, radical multiculturalism is philosophically grounded in the logic of the double standard.

“White privilege,” Holmes continues, is also an example — the automatic presumption is that white people are racist, while others simply … are not. They cannot be. A standard for one, a different standard for another.

Read the full Penny and Holmes articles.

RELATED: Feminists threaten Virginia university for not investigating ‘sexism’ on social media

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About the Author
Associate Editor
Dave has been writing about education, politics, and entertainment for over 20 years, including a stint at the popular media bias site Newsbusters. He is a retired educator with over 25 years of service and is a member of the National Association of Scholars. Dave holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Delaware.