Britain’s Daily Mail must be one of the world’s oddest news sources, but occasionally it does some good original reporting. That is the case with respect to its coverage of the epidemic of sexual assault that has erupted across Germany:

[Michelle] is just one of 120 women who were abused that horrific night in the [cathedral] square, which is dotted with bars, nightclubs and coffee shops, and is where Cologne locals have seen in the New Year for centuries. The men, speaking Arabic and seemingly either drunk or high on drugs, moved around in large groups among a gathering of around 1,000 male migrants and deliberately targeted women. The men easily outnumbered the 190 police officers on duty, who were quickly overwhelmed.

It wasn’t just Cologne:

In other cities across Germany, including Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Munich and Berlin, where a tourist was sexually assaulted by five men right in front of the famous Brandenburg Gate, it was the same disturbing story. Nearly 50 women in Hamburg complained to police about sexual harassment by ‘North African’ men, who called them ‘bitches’, shouted ‘Fikki, fikki’ to indicate they wanted to rape them, and ‘chased’ them ‘like cattle’ around the streets. … In Stuttgart, women complained of sexual attacks by ‘trouble-makers with an immigrant background’ and 15 other ‘Mediterranean men of Arabic appearance’. When one group of young girls refused these men’s advances, their boyfriends were beaten up. One girl who fought off an attacker ended up in hospital with a broken nose and deep cuts to her face.

The common denominator, of course, is that the attackers were recent Islamic immigrants, most of them apparently “refugees.”

The attacks have sounded the alarm bell in Germany over the consequences of mass migration.

One would hope so! But it’s a little late, and DM notes that around 3,200 Islamic migrants are still entering Germany every day.

What is most remarkable about this story is the coverup, which is now being freely acknowledged:

Many Germans, including some of the victims themselves, have accused authorities of a conspiracy of silence over the assaults to stop criticism of the mass immigration policy pursued by Mrs Merkel and her politically-correct supporters. The mainstream media in Germany has, until recently, toed the Government line; a top public broadcaster, ZDF, recently refused to run a segment about a rape case on its prime-time ‘crime-watch’ show because the ‘dark-skinned’ suspect was a migrant. The programme’s editor defended her decision, saying: ‘We don’t want to inflame the situation and spread a bad mood. The migrants don’t deserve it.’

American news outlets also censor the news to advance a political agenda, but they are not quite so brazen about it.

Cracks only began to show just before New Year. Bild, Germany’s largest daily newspaper, broke ranks…

Contemplate that for a moment: “broke ranks.”

…by accusing officials of conducting a campaign of deception on a ‘massive scale’ by burying bad news on migration. It reported that drug gangs involved in organised crime were actively recruiting newly-arrived migrants from the vast temporary camps where they live. The Cologne police force has also been accused of deliberately hushing up the New Year scandal. It issued an official press release the following day describing the celebrations as ‘exuberant, but mostly peaceful’. The release has since been retracted, and last night it emerged that police chief Wolfgang Albers is to resign.

“Mostly peaceful”: interestingly, the same locution that is conventionally used to describe violent Black Lives Matter protests in the American press.

Broadcaster ZDF had to apologise for a ‘cover up’ after it failed to report the Cologne story for three days, even though it knew about it. And until Thursday, a week after the attacks, there had been silence from Mrs Merkel’s ministers about the backgrounds of the perpetrators. Initially, they insisted there was no evidence that new migrants were involved in the violence.

In fact, contemporaneous police reports indicated that all or virtually all of the attackers were recently-arrived Muslims.

Europe’s leftists are clinging bitterly to their illusions, in some instances actually trying to excuse the sex criminals. Some city officials have issued recommendations for how young women should act to avoid “provoking” rapists from “other cultures.” Will non-elite Europeans put up with such nonsense? I doubt it. In Europe, even more than in the U.S., fundamental transformation through mass immigration is a policy that the elites just can’t sell.