The mass migration into Europe of people from North Africa and the Middle East is one of the most significant cultural, social and economic challenges of our time.

Its repercussions will be of historic significance. And yet, gripped by impotence, we appear to have no coherent strategy for dealing with these seismic events.

We veer from hysteria at the sight of dead children washed up on Greek beaches to xenophobic fury at the news of migrants molesting Western women in public.

Politicians dither and recite cliches, while pressure groups issue politically correct platitudes. We are paralysed by inaction. And it’s easy to see why.

Hundreds of migrants who arrived by train at Hegyeshalom on the Hungarian and Austrian border walk the four kilometres into Austria in September last year

This influx in particular — these poor souls who risk life and limb to cross icy seas in pursuit of something, anything, that is not the brutality of war — are some of the most traumatised people on the planet.

Back home, many of them were doctors, nurses, teachers, artists. But after being cooped up in a rotting boat on the dangerous seas, they are like desperate animals, wild-eyed and shivering in the glare of the TV news camera lights.

How can we, as a compassionate, generous nation, not be alive to their plight?

Their tragedy makes philanthropists of us all. People organise food parcels, schoolgate mothers co-ordinate lorries full of clothes, celebrities pledge their support, pop stars make fund-raising records.

We invite them in, we offer them hospitality. We bask in the reflected warm glow of our good deeds, foreign aid and fine words.

No wonder we’re so hurt and angry when, instead of falling to their knees in gratitude and embracing our way of life, they too often remain segregated within their own communities, refuse to engage with mainstream Western culture and — in extremis — commit acts of barbarity towards some of the most vulnerable in our societies.

Refugees - some with children - walk towards the Serbian border from a nearby transit centre on Friday

I’m talking, of course, of the gangs of Arab and North African men who rampaged through Cologne on New Year’s Eve, accused of terrorising and raping German women.

Of the asylum-seekers accused of attacking girls at a teenage rock festival in Sweden last summer.

Of the gang of Afghan migrants filmed attacking two German pensioners on a train who intervened to stop them harassing a young woman.

Of the Somalian ‘teenager’ recently charged with stabbing to death a Swedish woman helping to run a young asylum- seekers’ hostel in Gothenburg. (This week, a migration agency ruled that the 6 ft migrant is an adult, not the 15-year-old child he claims to be.)

And it is not just the actions and cultural practices of some of the most newly arrived that gives us cause for concern.

In Britain, we have read about case after case of the wicked grooming rings of predominantly Muslim men who preyed on vulnerable white girls in Rotherham, Oxford, Bristol, Lancashire and Manchester.

Last week, three men from Manchester’s Somalian community were jailed for the gang rape of a white teenage girl (none of them showed a scrap of remorse — quite the opposite, in fact).

And this week a gang of 12 men of Pakistani origin were jailed for gang-raping a 13-year-old white girl in West Yorkshire.

Here and across Europe, too, we’ve seen countless examples of forced marriage, female genital mutilation, honour killings and the many injustices perpetrated by Sharia courts — particularly against women.

How we arrived at this unhappy state of affairs in this country is a tale of cultural imperialism in reverse.

Starting out with the best of intentions, over the past century we have invited many other nationalities to the UK.

It most cases, this has been all to the good. British cultural and economic life is all the richer for it. But there are, sadly, a few exceptions. And I’m afraid the most troubling is Islam.

Refugees arrive by train at a transit centre near northern Macedonian village of Tabanovce before continuing their journey to Serbia on Friday

Neither at peace with itself nor with the rest of the world, there are aspects of Islam that seem irreconcilably at odds with the British way of life.

In particular, they run counter to what we believe about the freedom of the individual to practise his or her sexuality and the right of women to equality.

As a woman and the mother of a 12-year-old girl growing up in London whose godfather, one of my oldest friends, is gay, what’s going on frightens me.

My daughter is nearly the same age as some of the young girls so appallingly abused in Rotherham and, indeed, the girls from the Yazidi community of northern Iraq who were raped and sold as sex slaves by Islamic State fighters.

And you can imagine what her godfather thinks of the barbarians of Islamic State who throw from rooftops young men accused of being homosexual.

I know full well that were I not blessed with a British passport, were I unlucky enough to have been born in such war zones, I would probably be dead by now, having been deemed too old for use. My daughter would have been defiled and my son pressed into becoming a murderer.

It’s awful to have to say it like that, but it’s true.

The fact that there are hundreds of millions of sane, decent, perfectly civilised followers of the Prophet Mohammed in this world should not make us blind to this reality. Like it or not, there is an ugly side to Islam.

Now, slowly but surely, it is beginning to insinuate itself into our culture.

Yet even now, with these realities brought into sharp focus by the sex attacks in Germany and Sweden, there are many, particularly on the Left and in the liberal media, who impose an insidious political correctness that prevents us from discussing any of this like grown-ups.

Acknowledging the nature and origin of one particular threat we face in Europe is not intended, nor should it be interpreted, as a slander on the majority of Muslims. It is simply a long-overdue reality check.

Some migrants clutched yellow plastic bags as they left the Macedonian transit centre and made their way into Serbia on Friday

So what is that threat? It’s brutally simple: a culture of misogyny that Western feminists have worked so hard to eradicate within our own societies is starting to re-assert itself. It is invading our shores via individuals and groups who hail from parts of the world — much of Africa and swathes of the Middle East — that are still stuck in an atavistic, patriarchal way of life.

And that instead of standing up for our hard-won freedoms, we allow ourselves to be bullied into ceding ground by an achingly liberal media — particularly the BBC — and cowardly politicians who are running scared of minority pressure groups and fearful of being branded racist.

You have only to look at the response of the German authorities to the New Year’s Eve attacks to realise how real that threat is.

They downplayed events almost to the point of covering up the truth, wary that the situation was too ‘sensitive’ for the public to deal with.

Indeed, worrying evidence is emerging that the German media acted in cahoots with the authorities to censor such stories.

Similar things are happening here. You only had to listen to an absurd apologist on Radio 4’s Today programme, who tried to argue these sorts of attacks were ‘common in many cultures’.

Or the Labour transport shadow minister Jess Phillips, who said that Cologne-style sex attacks are only the kind of thing that goes on in Birmingham every week.

Consider, too, the Labour councillors who, fearful of losing the crucial support of Pakistani voters, failed to act upon what was going on under their very noses in the Rotherham child grooming scandal, in which 1,400 vulnerable girls were routinely exploited by gangs of Asian men for 16 years.

In the words of the former Victims’ Commissioner, Louise Casey, who almost a year ago published her report into the abuse: ‘By failing to take action against the Pakistani heritage male perpetrators . . . in the borough, the council has inadvertently fuelled the Far Right and allowed racial tensions to grow. It has done a great disservice to the Pakistani heritage community and the good people of Rotherham as a result.’

The truth is that multiculturalism — the philosophy that all religions and cultures are equal — has so far not worked.

Allowing very closed immigrant communities to take over parts of cities and, in some cases, entire towns, has not been healthy for the integration of all Britons.

Worryingly, it too often results in racism and the re-emergence of the foul prejudices of the Far Right.

Trevor Phillips, the former head of the equalities watchdog, said recently that Muslim communities are not like others in Britain, that the country should accept they will never integrate and that it is disrespectful to assume Islamic communities would change. Yet isn’t that absolutely the wrong message?

Many indigenous Britons love the thought of living in a vibrant, multiracial Britain; what they don’t love is the idea of having their own traditions and freedoms undermined.

That is why, when we hear of Sharia courts undermining the British rule of law and depriving Muslim women of their rights, we should not simply chalk it up to ‘cultural differences’.

We should denounce such behaviour as wrong and unacceptable in a modern, civilised society.

And when schoolgirls of African heritage are flown to that continent in the summer holidays to have their genitals cut or their Pakistani contemporaries are kidnapped and pressed into forced marriage that, too, must not be tolerated. Not because these are traditions practised by Muslims. But because they are, quite simply, wrong — whatever belief system you happen to espouse.

And yet anyone who dares to point this out is immediately accused of bigotry.

But if we cannot discuss, openly and honestly, how we feel about the growing presence in society of a group of people who openly despise our way of life, how can we hope to find a way through our differences?

It is time to accept the facts, unpleasant as they are, and ask: why is misogyny endemic among certain sectors of Muslim society — and what can we, as women, do about it?

David Cameron was recently heavily criticised when he said it was important for Muslim women in this country to learn English. Yet surely he is right that if the tens of thousands of women who can’t speak English — whether they are 16 or 60 — aren’t helped to learn it, they will not have opportunities in education and employment that should be open to them in our liberal society.

Of course Islam is not the only religion built on misogyny. Christianity, and in particular Catholicism, has historically had a warped attitude to women at its heart.

We venerate the Virgin as the only truly good woman who ever lived, a woman who conceived a male saviour in chastity to deliver us from the actions of Eve, that wicked, weak-willed temptress whose lust and betrayal brought misery upon the world.

When you think about it, that’s pretty anti-women.

French gendarmes patrol the 'Jungle' migrant camp in Gande-Synthe where 2,500 refugees from Kurdistan, Iraq and Syria live on Thursday

But the key difference between the misogyny in the Bible and that in the Koran is that no one in their right mind would interpret the former word for word.

Those who do — Christian fundamentalists — are rightly seen as bonkers by the rest of the Christian community, a remnant of a bygone age.

It took hundreds of years for feminists — male and female — to extricate society from the clutches of the medieval Church.

The efforts of the Suffragettes and the work of 20th-century feminism was the culmination of that lengthy process, bringing about a permanent change in cultural, legal and social attitudes, and a shift in the balance between the sexes from one based on the innate superiority of men to the present uneasy state of equality.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than it used to be.

The problem with certain Muslim communities is that they have not yet made that step.

In powerful countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Koran is not so much a manual on how to live a civilised and fulfilling life as a set of immutable instructions.

Women in those countries may still be under the thumb of their male oppressors, but we in Europe are not.

We cannot allow our liberal and tolerant instincts to obscure the fact that many Muslim men in our midst simply do not approve of our way of life.

That attitude, ultimately, is the origin of the attacks on women in Germany.

Because less enlightened Muslim men see only the meekest of females as worthy of respect, it follows that they find Western women — free and confident in their sexuality — deeply unnerving.

Challenge what those zealots consider to be their God-given supremacy and some of them respond in the way that men too often used to control women: through violent sexual assault.

What we have to understand is that if we continue to allow these attitudes to take hold, if young Muslim boys are taught this rhetoric in schools and at their mosques, our daughters in Britain may not enjoy the same freedoms as their mothers and grandmothers.

This is effectively what is already happening in Europe.

Young women who can no longer enjoy the same basic freedoms — a night out on the town without being attacked by mobs of men — as previous generations.

It is a backwards step for womankind, and we must not tolerate it.

These are hard and unpleasant things to write. I wish none of this were happening.

But if the behaviour in Cologne, Sweden and elsewhere is not enough evidence that Islam is a feminist issue, I don’t know what is.

How many more women and girls are going to suffer before we accept this fact?