They are doctors, shopkeepers, owners of Japanese restaurants, airport sedan drivers, entrepreneurs, IT experts, salesladies at Macy’s-they’re like everyone else.
Crimes committed by muslims professional#
Further, my personal and professional life has endowed me with many Afghan and Afghan American friends, and there is nothing collectively psychopathic about them. But for refugees to become perpetrators of this crime in the place that had given them asylum? That was something new.
I had seen refugees trapped in circumstances that made them vulnerable to rape, by camp guards or soldiers. But nowhere had I encountered a phenomenon like this one. I have worked on issues related to refugees for much of my professional life, from the Pakistani camps during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to Yemen, Sudan, Thailand, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Lebanon, Bosnia, Nicaragua and Iraq, and have deep sympathy for their plight. This is not an article that has been fun for me to write. But it quickly became obvious that something was wrong, very wrong, with these young Afghan men: they were committing sex crimes to a much greater extent than other refugees, even those from countries that were equally or more backward, just as Islamic and conservative, and arguably just as misogynist. And after that, NATO had been part of the “coalition of the willing.” Europeans were predisposed to be positive towards Afghan refugees. Later everyone had mourned the loss of the Bamiyan Buddhas and felt for the poor people suffering under Taliban rule. Many baby-boomer Europeans had, in their hippie days of yore, traversed that country in the legendary VW buses, and retained fond memories of friendly, hospitable people. Also, Europeans held a baseline positive sentiment towards Afghanistan. Still, European authorities and the public were sympathetic, and could understand why Afghans would want to leave a country rife with suicide bombings and empty of opportunity. Afghanistan, a place of lingering and chronic conflict, is no longer on the official refugee roster-that’s reserved for acute political and military emergencies. Most of the assaults were being committed by refugees of one particular nationality: by Afghans.Īctually Afghans should not even have been part of the refugee tide, at least not in significant numbers. And with the official acknowledgment and public reporting, a weird and puzzling footnote emerged. As the incidents increased, and because many of them took place in public or because the public became involved either in stopping the attack or in aiding the victim afterwards, and because the courts began issuing sentences as the cases came to trial, the matter could no longer be swept under the carpet of political correctness.
At first, the incidents were downplayed or hushed up-no one wanted to provide the right wing with fodder for nationalist agitation, and the hope was that these were isolated instances caused by a small problem group of outliers. These were not of the cultural-misunderstanding-date-rape sort, but were vicious, no-preamble attacks on random girls and women, often committed by gangs or packs of young men. But there was one development that had not been expected, and was not tolerable: the large and growing incidence of sexual assaults committed by refugees against local women.
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