A Response to Jill Filipovic’s New York Times Review of Prey

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s latest book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights (Harper Collins, 2021), has not only altered my perspective on immigration, but it has also—as her epigraph promises—“triggered” me. Her descriptions and documentation of the crimes and sexual abuse by immigrants now taking place on European streets are outrageous. But even more outrageous is her evidence that governments are not only unwilling to counter the violence but also unwilling to openly admit the nature of the problem. I am especially appalled at the response in Sweden, a nation that I deeply respect and often visit. It’s no wonder that Humanisterna Chairman Anna Boergstrom recently told me that street violence in Sweden “terrified” her (“Humanisterna’s Challenges: Nones, 160,000 Refugees, and Its Own Image,” FI, October/November 2020).

Hirsi Ali began her research after noticing that women were no longer visible in low- income neighborhoods of cities such as Brussels, London, Paris, and Stockholm. She spoke to women and girls across Europe who complained of “being harassed walking to shops, at school and university, in swimming pools, in nightclub bathrooms, in parks, at festivals, in parking lots. They say that local streets and public places are no longer safe.” The women said they were being harassed “by a large number of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.” From women’s testimony and her other research, Hirsi Ali concluded that “we are living through a quiet but significant erosion of women’s rights in some neighborhoods in Europe.”

Hirsi Ali’s use of anecdotal evidence led New York Times critic Jill Filipovic to accuse her of bigotry (“Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Muslim Men and Western Women,” New York Times, February 9, 2021). Filipovic wrote that Hirsi Ali “finds stories of individual Muslim immigrants who commit heinous crimes, and by suggesting those stories are broadly representative, uses them to justify curtailing the opportunities afforded to the whole group.” Filipovic said that “If readers didn’t know any better they would come away with the impression that most sex crimes in Western Europe are committed by Muslim migrants against European female strangers. They aren’t.” Like everywhere else, the “biggest threat to women” is “men who women know.”

Hirsi Ali focuses on a very specific, post-2015 problem in low-income European neighborhoods—a problem to which authorities are turning a blind eye. And her evidence extends well beyond individual anecdotes. Filipovic briefly refers to it as “crime data, newspaper articles and social science research” and dismisses it. While Hirsi Ali’s evidence may rub liberals the wrong way, it is convincing evidence.

Hirsi Ali noticed that beginning in late 2015, reports of “sexual assaults as well as rapes and cases of harassment snowballed” in Western Europe. Presenting police data from ten European countries, she demonstrates that “rates of either sexual assault or rape went up between 2014 and 2017 in every European country for which data are available and that in some countries—notably Denmark and England—they went up a lot, roughly doubling in the case of Denmark.” From 2015 to 2017, Germany’s rate of rape and sexual coercion increased by 41 percent.

Contrary to what Filipovic implies, Hirsi Ali is not only well aware but often states that when it comes to sexual violence, the large majority is “committed by intimate partners or persons otherwise known.” But she notes that in France, “220,000 women were sexually harassed on public transport in 2014 and 2015. The incidents ranged from kissing and flashing to groping and rape.” In 2016, “Unusually more than half of sexual offenses in Sweden took place outdoors, suggesting a relatively low level of domestic sexual violence.” In fact, Hirsi Ali reports, “UK estimates that 13 percent of rapes are committed by strangers; in Germany it is 20 percent and in Denmark 32 percent.” Sweden’s National Safety Survey puts its rate at 35 percent.

What accounts for the increase in sexual violence? In 2015 alone, “2 million people, mainly men, arrived in western Europe from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria, and other countries with large Muslim populations.” That year also brought 1.8 million recorded illegal border crossings, “more than half of the total for the decade 2009–2018.” Asylum records indicate that most were young men under the age of thirty-five. Nine of the top ten “sender” countries were Muslim-majority nations. The intensification of the Syrian civil war in 2015, as well as the 2011 toppling of Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi, pushed many Middle Eastern and African refugees to Europe.

Muslims also constituted more than half of all “ordinary” migrants to Europe between 2010 and 2016, i.e., those who came to work, study, or reunite with their families. In 2010, 19.5 million Muslims lived in Europe; by 2016, there were 25.8 million. The United Kingdom, France, and Italy admitted the greatest number; by contrast, “asylum seekers were more likely to head to Germany. Today’s newcomers in Germany are overwhelmingly Muslim in religion.”

Causal Connection

Given these (nonanecdotal) facts, is there a connection between the increase in migration and the increase in sex crimes? Or is Hirsi Ali (as Filipovic implies) just spewing alt-right propaganda? The problem in answering the question—as Hirsi Ali admits—is that “in most European countries, police do not report the migration status, ethnicity, or religion of criminals.” But in countries that do collect and make available this information—Austria, Denmark, Sweden, France, and Germany—“we do see evidence of a causal relationship between increased migration and increased sexual violence.” Evidence is especially striking in Denmark, where about 40 percent of those convicted of rape and 25 to 33 percent of groping comprised “non-western immigrants,” who constitute less than 13 percent of the population. Fearing xenophobia among its population, the Swedish government has increasingly concealed its data. But a Swedish public television documentary looked at convicted sex criminals between 2012 and 2017 and concluded: “In all, 58 percent were foreign born. Of 129 convicted for assault rape, 110 were foreign born. Of 94 gang rapists 70 were born outside Europe.”

To corroborate government reports, Hirsi Ali and her research assistants conducted interviews with European victims and government authorities. These interviews revealed commonalities among the perpetrators: they were young male migrants from Muslim-majority countries; they had previously committed lower-level crimes; they attacked “strangers” in public places; they attacked women of all ages who looked like easy prey. Hirsi Ali also spoke with women such as Alice Schwarzer, who investigated the 2015 New Year’s Eve mob attack in Cologne, Germany. There, around 1,500 asylum seekers assaulted and robbed German women, 661 of whom reported being sexually attacked that night. Seven months earlier, in May, German women had reported being encircled and groped by groups of migrants in Berlin. Because of these and other incidents, Nicola Frank told Hirsi Ali that since 2015, “All the German cities have changed … women are not safe here during the day. … It is a consequence of migration … a problem with culture and the attitudes of Arab men to women.” Frank is no alt-right propagandist. She has a master’s degree in Islamic studies and works as head of Institutional and International Relations at the European Broadcasting Union. Similarly, Swedish journalist Paulina Neuding told Hirsi Ali of numerous reports of group assaults at public swimming pools in Stockholm. Eighty percent of these complaints involved asylum seekers waiting to be processed.

Of course, public safety is ultimately the responsibility of European governments, which ever since immigrants began pouring in have badly handled their presence. The poster child is Angela Merkel, whose incredible “open borders” announcement (in October 2015) resulted in Germany—and most other European governments—losing control of their immigration systems. Since 2015, Europe has inconsistently enforced its laws requiring the deportation of asylum seekers who have committed crimes. For various administrative reasons, European governments have managed to return less than half of those asylum seekers whose applications have been rejected. Germany now houses 240,000 asylum seekers who have been ordered to leave. Many have simply gone underground. Berlin integration officer Arnold Mengelkoch told Hirsi Ali that “newly arrived asylum seekers are confident they will be released quickly after arrest. For them, an overloaded and under-resourced justice system poses no threat.”

European governments are—as Hirsi Ali documents—spewing various narratives of denial. These narratives include accusing academics of bigotry, appealing to the public for compassion, and—above all—victim blaming, which “makes regular appearances in court proceedings.” Hirsi Ai believes that government failures have eroded the “trust between citizens and governing institutions,” a phenomenon I have noticed in conversations with Swedes. These failures have also fostered the rise of right-wing populist parties, who “do a good job of articulating voters’ grievances when no one else is willing to do so.” Hirsi Ali also criticizes feminists who “excuse immigrant crimes against women because the perpetrators are victims of racism and colonialism.” She dryly notes that “Liberal feminists today care more about the question of Palestinian statehood than the mistreatment of Palestinian women at the hands of their fathers and husbands. In the battle of the vices, sexism has been trumped by racism.”

Hirsi Ali’s jab at feminists triggered Filipovic, who accuses Hirsi Ali of hypocrisy for praising the “near paradise of liberalism for women in the Western world” but then accuses feminists “of failing to adequately care about women’s rights because they also want their homelands to open the door to seekers of safe harbor, regardless of religion.” But Hirsi Ali is not opposed to admitting immigrants (Muslims included) to Europe; the question is how to do it without endangering women.

Like Hirsi Ali, European women reporting sexual assault incidents have been accused of bigotry and racism. Cologne victims speaking on public forums have been labeled “racist.” Nicola Frank told Hirsi-Ali she didn’t “dare to come forward and talk about these things with my leftist friends. I didn’t want to be called a racist.” When Sofie Peeters filmed being assaulted on the streets of Brussels, she was threatened and accused of racism because the men were Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian. As a result, she moved out of Brussels.

Immigrant Integration

Throughout Prey, Hirsi Ali emphasizes that a sizable minority of Muslim migrants adapt European values. But the majority do not, and through comparisons with other immigrant groups here in America, she argues that Muslim integration failures cannot be explained by their poor language skills, low education, or past trauma. Rather, she attributes Muslims’ “adaptation deficit” to their belief that Islam is a superior way of life; it is also a religion whose adherents don’t “merely devalue women [as most cultures do]; they treat them as commodities.” Muslims’ integration into European culture is also inhibited by “the dawa”—the transmission of fundamentalist Islamic values—in schools, community organizations, and even prisons. Dawa is fostered by the “parallel societies” (a.k.a. “ghettoes”) Muslims have established.

How can European governments effectively integrate Muslims? Hirsi Ali suggests that nations view any “asylum seeker” as “an economic migrant in search of a better life.” Under this framework, “migrants should therefore be selected on the basis of their likelihood of adapting and flourishing in the West.”

Hirsi Ali’s “insurance policy”—that immigration officers monitor admitted immigrants for a year or two and deport them if they fail to adapt—may be easier said than done given the difficulties all governments have had in tracking migrants. Employing advanced-tracking technology—as Hirsi Ali suggests—might provide a solution. On the other hand, Hirsi Ali’s recommendation that European nations increase their military budgets and intervene in “refugee producing countries—and demand that these nations accept the return of repatriated migrants” seems, to me, pie in the sky.

Most obviously, European governments must reintroduce the carrot and stick—a.k.a. “reciprocity”—into their welfare systems, as Austria has successfully done since 2018. Immigrants there must learn German, attend values training, and participate in the workforce.  Those who fail lose benefits and may be returned to their home countries. Recently Denmark has instituted a similar approach. These nations should consider adding sex education—even “Islamic sex education”—to required training, as Hirsi Ali also suggests.

Most important, European governments must reinstate the rule of law. “They are simply too lenient towards violent offenders and permit unconscionable exceptions to the rule of law for migrants.” In one example in Sweden, an Afghani asylum seeker sexually assaulted a fourteen-year-old girl but was sentenced to only twenty-one days in prison and—more incredibly—was granted a three-year residence permit and refugee status “based partly on his conversion to Christianity”! To facilitate law enforcement, Hirsi Ali recommends national and regional special units “dedicated to the protection of women and girls, not to mention Jewish communities, LGBTQ communities, and the dissidents of Islam.” Like several individuals described in Prey, these units could speak with young men (especially in parallel communities) about European values and acceptable public behavior.

Conclusion

The rise of European right-wing parties is a serious problem to which Filipovic seems oblivious. In Sweden especially, the stakes in reinstating the rule of law go beyond the protection of women. As Carlotta Serioli reported in January, amid the increasing violence of urban street gangs, “The rise of the populist, anti-immigrant, far-right Sweden Democrats party is accelerating the erosion of Swedish exceptionalism as we know it. Today, the central tenets of Swedish politics, culture and identity have never been more threatened.” With Sweden’s 2022 elections approaching, one can only hope that the government there—and elsewhere in Europe—listen to Ayaan Hirsi Ali.