Dutch politician Geert Wilders has today called for European women to protect themselves with pepper spray on the back of the Cologne migrant rape scandal.

Mr. Wilders, currently at the height of his popularity following years of being dismissed as an “Islamophobe”, has written for the Dutch Post Online website, stating: “After taharrush in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, many German women bought pepper spray. Who can blame them?”

He asserts that the Islamic world is “steeped in misogyny”, citing Suras 2: 228, 2: 282, and 4:11 as evidence that the Quran places women below men in society, and cites the case of CNN’s Lara Logan in Tahrir Square in 2011 as evidence of the phenomenon of taharrush.

“The elite tried to keep it under wraps,” he writes in Dutch, “but they can not do more.”

And while some on the political left have urged that European women should change their behaviour and perhaps even their dress sense in the wake of the migrant invasion, Mr. Wilders refutes this, stating: “the behaviour of the women has to do nothing with it… whoever imports Islam into the Netherlands imports the culture of misogyny from Cairo, Damascus, and Riyadh straight to our cities. After headscarves, burkas, mosques, honour killings, terror, comes the taharrush.”

In the Netherlands, like in the United Kingdom, pepper spray is currently illegal. In Britain, Section 5(1) (b) of the firearms act 1968 “prohibits any weapon of any description, designed or adapted for the discharge of any noxious liquid, gas or other substance.”

Addressing the claims from Cologne mayor Henriette Reker that the solution to taharrush is for women “keep arm’s length” from migrants, Mr. Wilders says that it should not be up to the public, but the governments of European nations to keep the “barbarians… thousands of kilometres away”.

“Until that happens,” he writes, “other measures are needed.”

“[Women] must at least have the right to defend themselves,” he concludes, noting that “[I]n contrast to countries such as Germany and France, it is in our country illegally to carry pepper spray.”

“Netherlands is now overrun by men who see women as inferior… it’s time to use pepper spray in the Netherlands as a weapon against the taharrush”.