18 of the (only) 31 arrested Cologne bullies are “asylum-seekers”; not a single widow or orphan was found among them; and apparently none was named Hans or Fritz

This New Year’s Eve was a lot less fun in Europe than in previous years

writes Benny Huang,

as violence and threats of violence put a damper on the party atmosphere. … in three German cities—Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Cologne—mobs of men, reportedly of “Arab or North African origin,” allegedly attacked female partygoers.

This is the new Europe. It’s not going to get better.

Cologne stood out among the cities plagued by predatory mobs for the sheer quantity of mayhem on display. As many as a thousand men allegedly robbed, groped and even raped women in and around the main train station and gothic cathedral. One hundred seventy criminal complaints were made, 120 of which had a “sexual angle.” Thirty-one men, a tiny fraction of the estimated one thousand, have been arrested. Eighteen of them are “asylum-seekers.” Not a single widow or orphan was found among them, and apparently none was named Hans or Franz.

The government’s response had been, shall we say, inadequate. On January 1st, a police press release called the New Year’s Eve celebrations “peaceful,” which suggests an official cover-up. When the government was finally willing to admit that something had happened, they still seemed to be in damage control mode. Ralf Jaeger, the Interior Minister for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia said that, “What happens on the right-wing platforms and in chatrooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women.”

Oh, I see—so the people expressing their outrage online are at least as awful the wild hyenas perpetrating sexual violence. He isn’t sure if the online commenters are more awful but they must be equally awful. A more absurd false equivalence has never been drawn.

But the award for the most obtuse public official in this whole affair (besides Angela Merkel of course) goes to Cologne’s pro-asylum mayor, Henriette Reker, who just couldn’t stop putting her foot in her mouth. She originally said that there was “no reason to suspect that they are refugees.” We now know that many of them are, but can we blame her for not wanting to jump to conclusions? Yes. You’d have to be a fool to think that among the thousand or so men, all of whom were obviously not far removed from the Middle East or North Africa, there wasn’t a single one of the 1.1 million “refugees” admitted in 2015.

 … Mayor Reker also angered the public with remarks that she surely meant to be helpful but were nonetheless alarming. She told women that they should follow a “code of conduct” if they wanted to avoid being sexual assaulted and advised women against succumbing to a “celebratory mood”—which I think used to be allowed on New Year’s Eve. As a strategy for not getting sexually assaulted Frau Reker told women to stick together with girlfriends and to “make sure yourself you don’t look to be too close to people who are not known to you, and to whom you don’t have a trusting relationship.”

And some people think that mass immigration reduces social cohesion! Wherever did they get an idea like that?

Not only are Reker’s suggestions insulting but they’re also ineffective.

 … Then there’s the racism angle. Reker’s comments weren’t overtly racist but “dog whistles” never are. It sounds as if she’s enjoining white German women to avoid swarthy Middle Eastern males. That’s raaaaaacist! It also happens to be pretty good advice though it wouldn’t have prevented this attack and the suggestion would also be a lot easier to follow if the swarthy Middle Eastern men weren’t in the white German women’s country in the first place. As more and more refugees arrive, it will be increasingly difficult to find any sanctuary from these shady characters. They will be everywhere, if they aren’t already.

 … This is the New Normal.

I’ll bet that a lot of those women miss the Old Normal. I do too. I spent three years living in Germany and came to love the city of Cologne. I’ve been to the train station many times and I think I even slept on a bench there overnight once, though I slept in a lot of train stations so I can’t be sure. These days I wouldn’t dare sleep at the Cologne train station and I’m not even a girl. [Indeed, Benny Huang is a U.S. army veteran!]

 … If Chancellor Angela Merkel is any indicator, the political will to really do something about this problem is lacking. In response to the sexual attacks in German cities, she said “But we must accept that the number of criminal offenses committed by young immigrants is particularly high.” Yes it’s true that immigrants’ criminality is off the charts, something she might have mentioned before committing her country to unprecedented immigration, but does that mean Germans have to accept it? The chancellor who let them all in says yes. Tomorrow’s Germany will be more Muslim than today’s and, let’s not sugarcoat it, more dangerous. So get used to it.

Resignation has already swept across neighboring France where Islamization is even more advanced. Their New Year’s Eve wasn’t exactly tranquil either; across the country, 1,067 automobiles were set ablaze. Torching cars has become something of a New Year’s Eve tradition among France’s Muslim minority. It’s a nice tradition, don’t you think? Americans sing Auld Lang Syne and kiss at midnight, French Muslims burn Peugeots. That’s just their culture—please don’t judge.

 … Obviously, [French Interior Minister] Manuel Valls is a glass-half-full kind of guy but dour old pessimists like me still think France has a slight problem.

This is how societies die. Little by little they adapt to barbarism, constantly making small concessions until it all seems normal. With the passage of time people forget that it had ever been different. They even convince themselves that nostalgic memories of the “good old days” are mere figments of some racist’s imagination. They never happened!

More immigrants are coming next year. Brace yourself for New Year’s Eve 2016.

Related: Benny H bids Good-Bye to 2015, the year of lies, hoaxes, and outright fakeries