Geert Wilders, Leader of the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) and PVV Parliamentarian Machiel de Graff introduced a new Arabic term epitomizing the vicious misogyny of Sharia culture, taharrush, in an Op Ed in the Dutch daily, The Post reprinted by The Gatestone Institute, “Give Women the rights to protect themselves.” The term taharrush represents a permissive form of male  group sexual assault that we  first saw in the virtual rape of South African CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Larson surrounded by a crowd of 200 men in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in the heady days of the Arab Spring in February 2011.

Geert Wilders. Source: Gatestone Institute

Wilders and de Graff in The Post op ed explain the Sharia underpinnings of this barbaric practice:

Taharrush is the Arabic word for the phenomenon whereby women are encircled by groups of men and sexually harassed, assaulted, groped, and raped. After the Cologne taharrush on New Year’s Eve, many German women bought pepper spray. Who can blame them?

A culture that has a specific word for sexual assaults of women by groups of men is a danger to all women. The existence of the word indicates that the phenomenon is widespread. Frau Merkel, Prime Minister Rutte and all the other open-door politicians could and should have known this.

The Islamic world is steeped in misogyny. The Koran explicitly states that a woman is worth only half a man (Suras 2: 228, 2: 282, 4:11), that women are unclean (5:6), and that a man can have sex with his wife whenever he wants (24:31). The Koran even says that men are allowed to have sex slaves (4:24), and that they have the right to rape women whom they have captured (24:31).

The hadiths, the descriptions of the life of Muhammad, the ideal human being whose example all the Islamic faithful must follow, confirm that women are sex objects, that they are inferior beings like dogs and donkeys, and that there is nothing wrong with sexual slavery and raping female prisoners.

Taharrush is quite common in Islamic countries. Women are frequently surrounded by men and subsequently abused. The Egyptian website Jadaliyya points out that it also happens to veiled women. Women are victims simply because they are women and not because they have provoked the men by their conduct or “provocative” clothing. It can happen in the streets, public transport, supermarkets, or during protest demonstrations.

Protester with “Merkel Must Go” card.

What erupted in Cologne, Germany and other major cities on New Year’s eve when a crowd of 1,000 North African and Arab appearing migrant young men surrounded young women was taharrush resulting in the filing of more than 553 claims by defenseless young women in Cologne, 45% of them for sexual assaults. The preponderance of assailants were migrants. Wilders and de Graaf in the immediate wake of the Cologne incidents confronted  Mark Rutte,  Dutch leader of the ruling coalition in the Hague Parliament and the Justice minister with a list of questions about what they were going to do to protect Dutch women from untoward group sexual assaults from  migrant men in Holland. See our Iconoclast post, “Geert Wilders on New Year’s Eve Sexual Assaults in Cologne Germany by Arab and North African men”.

Angela Merkel in the wake of multiple occurrences of group sexual assaults has had to face a veritable firestorm of criticism arising from the admittance of more than 1.1 million migrants and refugees, in the benighted belief that Germany’s acute demographic deficit and labor shortage might be solved. Instead of compliant asylees respectful of the laws and values of the welcoming German society, they witnessed ingratitude in riots in reception centers, attacks on German citizens and the multiple taharrush episodes.  On January 10th, a migrant from a German reception center was shot and killed in an attempted attack at a Paris police station. The BBC reported that a note found on his body indicated he pledged loyalty to  the Islamic State and perpetrated the attack  in reprisal  for French air attacks on the self-declared Caliphate.

The BBC reported that 2,000 protesters marched in Leipzig at a Legida rally, the local affiliate of  Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization  of the West (Pegida). They were  protesting the Merkel government admittance of the flood of asylees and migrants.  211 extremists at a separate demonstration in the section of Connewitz  were detained  by police for vandalism. The following day , German Justice Minister Hiko Mass announced relaxation of deportation rules:

Speaking days after Chancellor Angela Merkel said “clear signals” had to be sent to potential offenders, Mr. Maas tweeted that the core of the government’s reforms would be to ease extradition of foreign criminals and strip them of refugee status if they had committed particular offences.

Penalties for sexual offences would be appropriate “regardless of current events”, a government statement said (in German).

“We will tighten criminal law to make deportation easier,” Mr. Maas said, adding that binding agreements would be sought with offenders’ country of origin. But he stressed that migrants should not come under general suspicion.

Several women in Cologne were raped and the justice minister said the definition of the offence in German law was too narrow. “There’s no clear answer in law as to how much resistance a woman has to offer for an offence to constitute rape,” he said.

Wilders and DeGraaf in their  op ed responded to  the cavalier suggestion  by the Cologne Mayor about what might be done to protect women facing the fearsome threat of a  taharrush  attack by Muslim men:

Last week, the Mayor of Cologne advised her female citizens to keep strange men at an arm’s length. In Vienna, the head of the police said that in future women better not walk the streets alone. It seems that Austria will soon resemble Saudi Arabia, where women are not allowed alone in the streets. Earlier, in the Netherlands, women from families hosting asylum seekers had already been advised to wear “appropriate” clothes (even indoors), “so no prom dress or bare shoulders,” and to ensure that they are never alone in the room with male asylum seekers.

But the behavior of women has nothing to do with it. Moreover, it is a disgrace that our women are advised to modify their behavior because the government has invited thousands of dangerous men into our country. When one imports Islam in the Netherlands, one also imports the misogynistic culture of Cairo, Damascus, and Riyadh into our cities. Next to headscarves, burkas, mosques, honor killings, and terrorism, we now have taharrush.

The solution is not that our women keep an arm’s length from the male barbarians, but that the government keeps these men thousands of kilometers away from us. Until that happens, other measures are needed. It is irresponsible to turn our country into a jungle and subsequently send women unarmed into the jungle. They must at least have the right to defend themselves. Contrary to countries such as Germany and France, in our country it is illegal to carry pepper spray. With the Netherlands now being overrun by men who see women as inferior sex tools, it is time to legalize pepper spray in the Netherlands as a weapon against taharrush.

RELATED ARTICLE: Germany’s voluntary programs to teach Muslim migrants sex equality and free speech

RELATED VIDEO: Taharrush (collective harassment) of women in Germany.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.