Did feminism die at Cologne? This jaw-dropping display of willful blindness may (or at least should) mark the end of third-wave feminism as an ideology that’s taken seriously by anyone outside of a straitjacket. This article was co-written with Jamie Mason.

Let’s suspend the laws of humanism for a moment and imagine that there are people in the Islamic world who really do hate the West—not the way you hate your annoying neighbor, but with a historical, irrational, perhaps even a religious fervor. That perhaps there is a casus belli at large in the Muslim world, one that not only justifies but sanctifies the most vicious attacks on Western civilization.

I know that’s a conceptual stretch for good folks, believing as we do in the Moral Superiority of the Oppressed—but humor me.

Much like the Sun, this notion is simple; what’s tricky is to get people to stare directly at it for long enough to have a rational discussion. It’s more comforting to deflect the mind into Occam’s-Razorless conspiracies or politically correct apologetics, depending on your preferred flavor of ideological poison.

Which makes for fascinating debate, but it will neither reanimate any corpses nor change the fact that there are some people in the Islamic world intent on remaking the West in their image … or else.

And this New Year’s Eve, it should have become clear to everyone that part of “or else” is: “We will take your females.”

Cologne (and Stuttgart, and Hamburg …) should serve as the moment when anyone who’s still denying the rapecaust needs to stop being taken seriously — particularly feminists. Skyrocketing numbers of isolated assaults can be hand-waved away by questioning statistical methods, but you would have to have your head down past the sand into the aquifer not to catch the larger menace implied by a coordinated, multi-city attack involving thousands of men. You would have to be deaf, in fact, to the language and history of war itself. Because this is an act of war. And we’ve seen the like before.

You needn’t look back to Helen of Troy, the rape of the Sabine women, or even the Russian Revolution for a cautionary example. Just shift your gaze slightly east and a couple decades back.

Remember the Serbs? In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic first put forward the “contaminated bloodline” argument that would be used to justify the Serbians’ campaign against the Bosniaks and Croats, by alleging they were descended from the Turks (though DNA tests have shown the area to share a common gene pool). Similar to the softening-up of the Jews in 1930s Germany, the Bosniaks were prepped in part by restricting their freedom of movement: a static population is more easily targeted.

As is a frightened population. Now the women of Cologne have been scared and stripped of their freedom of movement, and consequently their freedom of access to society as a whole. Compare: in the early 1990s, Muslims in Eastern Bosnia were forced from positions of employment and eventually out of the job market entirely prior to the beginning of the conflict. German women, as products of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—accustomed to all the liberation and freedom of movement that entails—present a soft target for a similar campaign.

Accepting that a clash of civilizations is occurring on the streets of Europe is devilish hard; it’s as difficult, perhaps, as it was for the former Yugoslavia to acknowledge the existence of camps constructed by the Serbian army for the sole purpose of raping women. Some argue that there were rape camps in that conflict; some now wish to deny that Cologne happened. The extent of either epidemic can be finessed, and as with most conflicts, the roots of the war were hopelessly tangled. But reams of data and interviews at least strongly indicate that rape camps existed, and that tens of thousands of Bosnian women were humiliated within.

Not that the Croats and Muslims in the conflict were angels by any stretch of the imagination. As Human Rights Watch claimed in its 1995 Women’s Rights Project report:

Crimes have been committed by all sides, but the chief offenders have been Serbian military and paramilitary forces … Nevertheless, Bosnian Croat and Muslim forces are guilty of serious abuses of human rights and humanitarian law.

In other words, war is hell; the alleged war rapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina were only another move in the horrible chess game we’ve been playing for cultural dominance since before the Crusades. Maybe the West has largely forgotten those incidents, but the tactic is still on the table. If history has taught us anything about ethnic cleansing, it is that it’s viral: in Rwanda, for example, the project of extermination through rape began with a propaganda campaign targeting Tutsi women, who were portrayed as sexually loose. Sound familiar?

Sophie Kasiki, who says she stupidly left France to join ISIS—or rather, to become the property of ISIS—and wrote the memoir In the Night of Daesh after her improbable escape, describes the war rape experience more succinctly:

To begin with they made excuses, then came the threats. They said I was a woman alone with a child and I couldn’t go anywhere, and if I tried to leave I would be stoned or killed … in reality [we] Western women are just wombs to make babies for Daesh.

I’m not the first to note the bitter irony in the way the current wave of war rape in Western Europe is being aided and abetted by the deafening silence of Western feminists—although I did see it coming. It’s terrible to be right. Preeningly, unthinkingly immigrant-positive, third-wave feminists seem unable to grasp the shocking notion that their gallant allies in the fight to shame Western men into submission might want to harm them.

As Jessica Abrahams wrote in last Sunday’s Prospect Magazine:

Feminists are necessarily concerned with the protection of minorities and marginalised groups. If some of them are finding it difficult to speak up about the event because of concerns it might be used to encourage aggression against refugees, I can’t say I blame them. The fault lies not with the feminists but with those making them nervous to speak—the very same people, often, who are expressing outrage that they aren’t.

But how can you stand in solidarity with a marginalized group when they want to hang you for a witch? Unknotting Abrahams’ logical contortions confirms her message of rape apologetics: rape only counts when it’s White guys. This is for the greater good; lie back and think of Brussels.

Yet more proof of feminism’s moral and intellectual bankruptcy was handed to us this week when David Bowie succumbed to cancer. Within twelve hours of his death, the femisphere was eagerly calling him a rapist, a bullshit charge they were apparently too cowardly to come at him with when he was alive. Back in the 1970s he enjoyed an admittedly disgusting but apparently consensual liason with a 15-year-old Lori Maddox, who grew up to be a rock ‘n’ roll memoirist and groupie extraordinaire.

Maddox herself praises the experience, apparently without regrets, but this did not dissuade journalists like Jody Allard and Margaret Corvid from proclaiming in The Establishment: “There is no room for victimizers among our cultural icons.”

But apparently there’s plenty of room for victimizers on the welfare rolls. The mental disconnect implied by the femisphere’s preference for shrieking about groupie sex while ignoring massive street attacks is frightening. Would Allard and Corvid have enough sense to feel uneasy walking the streets of Cologne today? Or would they be too busy shouting “Look over there!”? The only notice feminism can spare for something as manly as war is blanket condemnation—so instead of facing up to the conflict as such, they paddle in verbal circles, recalculating the score of their Oppression Olympics.

In a weird way, you have to hand it to these ladies for not awarding themselves the oppression prize—but unwittingly, they’ve thus become the prize. And through the welfare state, they’re making the unprecedented wartime blunder of voluntarily, cheerfully, and possibly even retardedly feeding and sheltering the occupier. Necessary concern with the protection of the marginalized, indeed! This jaw-dropping display of willful blindness may (or at least should) mark the end of third-wave feminism as an ideology that’s taken seriously by anyone outside of a straitjacket.

And speaking of powerful women: as the media’s poorly-placed baffles fail ever more comically to distract the public from the rapecaust, Angela Merkel has finally admitted that she’s lost control of her country. Despite the disruption of PEGIDA’s anti-immigration protests by riot police and water cannons—which for some reason were not employed during the actual violence and continual detonation of fireworks on New Year’s Eve—the natives are getting restless.

Vigilante gangs are now attacking immigrants seemingly at will, as the cops have their hands full on all sides. By dismissing as fascist fanatics all the voices on the Right (and the Left, for that matter) that attempted to warn her against letting everyone and their goat into Germany, Merkel has let herself be backed into a corner whence escape might require her to get in bed with … fascist fanatics.

Who said irony was dead?