Europe has a big problem on its hands. On Sunday, Germany’s justice minister said a series of attacks across the country on New Year’s Eve appear to have been pre-planned. In downtown Cologne, about a thousand men of Arab and North African descent entered a square full of celebrators and proceeded to surround women, robbing and in many cases sexually assaulting them.

Police describe a horrifying scene of women running terrified and attackers aggressively pushing back police. So far, 170 women have come forward with complaints, three-fourths of which involve sexual assaults. Similar attacks from that night have been reported in Hamburg, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Düsseldorf.

It now appears that officials tried to cover up the attacks lest they stoke anti-immigrant sentiment. On Friday, Cologne’s police chief was fired because of his poor handling of the attacks in the first few days of the new year. Rather than face the reality that they have a problem with their Muslim population, city officials tried to sweep it under the rug.

Hiding Sexual Assault In the Name of Tolerance

How they thought they could conceal an attack of this scale and nature is difficult to say. Then again, they’re just following a rising European trend. Consider the Rotherham rape scandal last year in Britain, which revealed that police and social workers had for years been hiding what amounted to 1,400 gang rapes of young women and girls by men of Pakistani descent. Social workers and others claimed they were afraid to come forward for fear some would accuse them of racism and “Islamaphobia.”

Something similar is happening in Cologne. Mayor Henriette Reker was quick to come out and claim “there are no indications that this involved people who have sought shelter in Cologne as refugees.” On Friday, news broke that 18 of 31 identified suspects were confirmed asylum-seekers. German’s leaders rushed to insist this couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the recent migrant crisis, before knowing the facts.

This isn’t just a European habit. Recall the U.S. media’s initial knee-jerk denial of the motivations of the San Bernardino terrorists. But Europe is especially afraid to acknowledge it has a problem with its Muslim population, and its leaders are giving the impression they don’t take the problem seriously.

To prevent similar attacks during Carnival celebrations next month, Reker awkwardly proposed that city officials would work to explain Carnival to people from other cultures so they won’t be “confused” about “celebratory behavior in Cologne,” as if the New Year’s Eve attackers merely didn’t understand that sexual assault is an inappropriate way to “celebrate” and all that’s needed to uproot deeply held cultural norms is a little bit more information.

The Muslim World Has a Violence Against Women Problem

To date, only 18 of the approximately 1,000 attackers have been confirmed as asylum seekers. But what about the rest of them? They may have been second- or third-generation immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, which suggests these communities are not assimilating sufficiently into European society and are not adopting its most important cultural norms.

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