Have you ever been to Hamburg's Stadtpark? They call it the "green heart" of the city, over 350 acres of woods and lakes and meadows, playgrounds and sports fields and concert stages, plus Germany's largest planetarium. It's also a great place to rape someone.
So a fifteen-year-old girl gets dragged into the bushes by a gang of four "youths". They rape her, and take the trouble to film themselves doing so. Because, after all, if you gang-rape someone, you want to have something to show to the lads who weren't able to make it. When they're sated and push off, the girl gets to her feet and staggers away only to run into five more chaps, who rape her all over again. And film it all over again, in what by now is enough video for a full-length feature - over two-and-a-half hours. That's getting close to Lord of the Rings - and with a cast to match: the semen of nine different men was found in and on her body. And from all over the map: Egypt, Libya, Kuwait, Iran, Afghanistan, Montenegro, Poland, Armenia... That's a lot of diversity: it's like the UN General Assembly of semen ...although officialdom was eager to characterise most of the rapists as "German", with two said to be of "uncertain nationality". There's a lot of that about.
The rape of a schoolgirl is a terrible thing - especially for the guys. As the eminent lady psychiatrist assigned to the case, Nahlah Saimeh, was at pains to explain, "a migrant background can push offenders to the margins of society" and lead to "fantasies of grandeur as an attempt to compensate for one's own misery".
Yeah, but two-and-a-half hours? That's some fantasy of grandeur.
But what do I know? On Tuesday the court rendered its verdict: Nine rapists aged between nineteen and twenty-three were found guilty, but only one will go to prison - for two years and nine months. The other eight received suspended sentences, so walked straight out onto the streets, perhaps figuring they'd take the scenic route and have a stroll in the park. During one hundred days of trial, none showed any remorse for their victim. Why bother? As the headline on that Spiegel story has it, they're the real victims:
Täter, die am Rand der Gesellschaft leben, kulturell, sprachlich und sozial komplett entwurzelt
"Offenders who live on the margins of society, culturally, linguistically and socially completely uprooted." They don't seem that linguistically uprooted if they can form an ad hoc rape gang comprising Arabs, Persians, Afghans, Poles et al. But, if they are that uprooted (and six of them were supposedly born in Hamburg), wouldn't it have been kinder to leave them (or their parents or grandparents) back in wherever they were rooted and thus presumably less driven to "fantasies of grandeur"?
Oh, well. The Hamburg Judges' Association is concerned about ...the poor girl? The lenient sentences? No, they're up in arms about criticism of the judge, which they characterise as "a direct attack on the rule of law" and worse, "marked by an anti-immigrant undertone". But I don't think young German girls will have to worry about "the rule of law" for much longer: the mitigating circumstances advanced by Nahlah Saimeh are an obvious incentive to anyone minded to get a piece of the already burgeoning gang-rape biz; they're a literal get-out-of-gaol card for anyone from a "migrant background".
And Germany - like Sweden, France, Ireland - has a lot of those. According to the latest figures from the Bundeskriminalamt (the Federal Criminal Police Office), 47,923 Germans fell victim to immigrant violence - defined as violent robbery, assault, rape or murder. That's getting close to a thousand a week.
"Immigrant" in crime statistics is a term of art. As in the BBC's insistence that the Algerian stabber is as Irish as Val Doonican, a migrant who acquires a German passport is as Teutonic as Goethe. So, if you stab Fritz en route to your naturalisation interview and then stab Heinrich after you've signed all the paperwork, you'll be entered in two entirely separate categories. Nevertheless, the average German is four times as likely to be attacked by an immigrant as by a fellow citizen.
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: You can do her with impunity, as that court verdict makes clear.
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. And yet the present epidemic cannot be addressed with any honesty.
The chairman of Germany's police union thinks those latest statistics will be a game-changer: "What many have always suspected has now been proven," he says. "There is no more room for whitewashing."
But, as those German judges and psychiatrists make plain, western officialdom is too heavily invested in the whitewashing to stop now. There is a sense - which the rape gangs certainly pick up on - that European societies are now entirely unmanned. The most vulnerable among us - small groups of infants in an Annecy park or outside a Dublin school, thousands of girls in every medium-sized town up and down the spine of England - are routinely preyed upon by monsters. As my Mark Steyn Cruisemate Eva Vlaardingerbroek says, "European girls are fair game. Sold out by our establishments."
And if, as in Dublin or Romans-sur-Isère in recent days, "far-right elements" are minded to object, the state cracks down on them far harder and faster than it does with the gang-rapists of that poor fifteen-year-old. Because they're the real problem, aren't they? In Limerick, Fianna Fáil councillor Abul Kalam Azad Talukder says the Dublin rioters should be "shot in the head".
Oh, they would be if the authorities thought they could get away with it, Councillor. In the meantime, the Irish government is content to pass an anti-speech law that will decrease further the likelihood of being able to talk openly about migration, crime or any other public policy that matters.
So I'll take those fellows on the street any day over a ruling class that demands we sacrifice our innocents on the altar of multiculturalism. And I would welcome a little more such righteous anger when the alternative is a "justice" system that in Germany marches ever closer to making explicit its disregard for the victims of the state's mad experiment: You can't make a diversity omelette without breaking a few chicks. To modify the apocryphal advice of Queen Victoria and Lady Hillingdon, lie back and think of the multiculti utopia.
Such a society does not deserve to survive. And, indeed, will not. Our present official delusions are a mere interlude.
~On a somewhat related theme, Steyn will be back later today with the first of our Christmas Tales for Our Time.
As you know, Mark was rather heartened by Geert Wilders' victory. As he remarked on our Clubland Q&A, he was cheered to know you can ask Steyn to do the intro for your book and still win the election in a famously liberal European country. We have a few copies available of Marked for Death - but not too many, so don't leave it too late to order. It's a terrific read - not just Steyn's bit, but Wilders writes way better in English than most anglo politicians. The book can be yours at the Steyn store, and Mark will even sign it for you.
Steyn also addresses the resurgence of Islam and the simultaneous decline of core western liberties in his book Lights Out, which for the Christmas season is also available at a special bargain price with one of our limited-edition SteynOnline Liberty Sticks. (The Liberty Stick features both Magna Carta and the US Constitution - and every one is signed and numbered by Steyn. You can order one here.)
