• As a response to a gang of a thousand migrant men sexually assaulting women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, the mayor suggested a “code of conduct” for German girls and women, as a measure to “prevent such things from ever happening again.”

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• The idea of a “code of conduct” for girls and women to accommodate male predators not only places the blame on the victim but is an inversion of responsibility unseen in Western jurisprudence. The politically correct urge to accommodate the culture of immigrants means that justice is no longer blind.
• Each asylum seeker, upon entering Europe, needs to be informed, in the clearest possible manner, that all women, even infidels, must be treated with respect.
• “I feel betrayed by Britain. I came here to get away from this and the situation is worse here than in the country I escaped from.” — A Muslim woman, quoted by Baroness Caroline Cox.

The cathedral opposite the main train station used to be the traditional gathering spot for New Year’s Eve revelers in the German city of Cologne.

This year, Germans who poured out from the train station to celebrate the New Year they were met by a crowd of some 1000 young men. The men, according to German police, seemed to be of Arab or North African origin. They had taken over the entire public square in front of the station, and divided themselves into smaller gangs to surround women who were passing by. They then sexually assaulted them, and stole their wallets, purses and phones.

Police have so far received over 100 criminal complaints; three-quarters of them for sexual assault, and one for rape.

According to the British Telegraph, “Women were robbed, groped, and had their underwear torn from their bodies, while couples had fireworks thrown at them.”

“Shortly after midnight, the first women came to us… Crying and in shock they described how they had been severely sexually harrassed. We went to look for women in the crowd. I picked one up from the ground. She was screaming and crying. Her underwear had been torn from her body,” an unnamed policeman said.

In Hamburg, according to the police, a series of similar incidents took place in the city’s Reeperbahn red-light district. Witnesses described groups of five to fifteen men of who “hunted” women in the streets.”

The Mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, suggested in response, a “code of conduct” for German girls and women, as a measure to “prevent such things from ever happening again.” Her proposed code of conduct entails staying at an arm’s length from strangers, remaining within one’s group, and asking bystanders to intervene or help as a witness.

The “code of conduct” Mayor Reker recommended sparked a storm of criticism against her. She later said that not only German women but visitors from “other cultures” should also be educated on acceptable conduct as well. “We need to prevent confusion about what constitutes happy behaviour and what is utterly separate from openness, especially in sexual behaviour,” she said.

So Cologne is facing mass sexual assaults, robbery and violence from what appear to be huge organized gangs of young migrant men, and the mayor is talking of teaching “happy behavior”?!

Yet, this is the approach that is often taken in other countries of Europe. As Andrew Higgins wrote in the New York Times last month, in Norway, Muslim immigrants are taught how to relate to women:

“Fearful of stigmatizing migrants as potential rapists and playing into the hands of anti-immigrant politicians, most European countries have avoided addressing the question of whether men arriving from more conservative societies might get the wrong idea once they move to places where it can seem as if anything goes. But, with more than a million asylum seekers arriving in Europe this year, an increasing number of politicians and also some migrant activists now favor offering coaching in European sexual norms and social codes.”

“The biggest danger for everyone is silence,” said a clinical psychologist in Norway, Per Isdal, who has been working with the immigrants. Many refugees come from cultures that are not gender equal and where women are the property of men. We have to help them adapt to their new culture,” Mr. Isdal said.

A course manual in Norway sets out a simple rule that all asylum seekers need to learn and follow: “To force someone into sex is not permitted in Norway, even when you are married to that person.”

Other than the “code of conduct” for German women to help keep criminal immigrant sexual predators away, Cologne’s Mayor Reker was most cautious in her statements. She avoided criticizing in any way Germany’s immigration policies, which led last year to one million migrants entering Germany. “It’s completely improper… to link a group that appeared to come from North Africa with the refugees,” said Reker.

But facts are facts. Of the more than one million migrants arriving in Germany in 2015, most were from Muslim countries, mainly from the Middle East or North Africa.

“We will not tolerate such cowardly and abhorrent attacks,” said German Justice Minister Heiko Maas. “This is apparently an entirely new dimension of organized crime.” All of those involved, Maas demanded, must be “identified and made accountable.”

That is not going to be easy, German officials made clear: “Footage from surveillance cameras mounted at the entrance to the Cologne station will certainly help, but the number of people on the square combined with darkness and the not entirely reliable memories of many of those partying at the site will make the process dramatically more difficult.”

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, despite the problems being caused by the wave of migrants, has refused to set a limit on how many migrants Germany should admit.

Despite German officialdom’s assurances that it will seek justice for the victims of the sexual assaults and violence on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Hamburg, Dusseldorf and elsewhere, Mayor Reker’s “code of conduct” for women and girls in the face of sexual assaults represents a new low in the way that Europe approaches crime — which is becoming increasingly rampant.

What will be next? Will there be further “codes of conduct” requesting girls and women only to walk outside accompanied by a male escort? As unimaginable as this sounds, that is the kind of measure the “code of conduct” will invite.

The flaw in the “code of conduct” is that it makes girls and women responsible for the criminal conduct of male predators.

What will be the defendant’s argument in a future case: “Well, your honor, she did not keep me at arm’s length, so of course I assumed she was game”?

The idea that there should be any “code of conduct” for girls and women to accommodate male predators not only places the blame on the victim; it is an inversion of responsibility. This has no precedence in the West, either in culture or in jurisprudence. Blaming female victims only emboldens male sexual predators.

The migrants know what laws are — there are plenty of them under Islamic sharia law. In the West, there is another type of law in their new host countries, which have welcomed them as guests. In the Middle East, “host countries” with “guests” is also a familiar concept. Virtually all the monarchies and emirates hold the view that the state is their “house” and newcomers their guests; so if a guest cannot behave the way the host expects, he is escorted out. No one would expect a host to put up with a guest who trashed his house.

In the same way, each asylum seeker, upon entering Europe, needs to be informed immediately, in the clearest possible manner, that all women, even infidels, must be treated with respect.

The politically correct urge to accommodate the culture of immigrants only means that justice is no longer blind. It means regressing to unequal justice before the law. It means that because of even a well-intentioned courtesy, half the citizens — women — remain mistreated, disregarded, and with scant, if any, rights.

Unacceptable behavior is not exclusive to Germany. It is a troubling trend that has spread in recent years over large parts of Britain and the European continent.

In March 2014, the British Law Society adopted controversial guidelines for solicitors on how to compile “Sharia compliant” wills. The guidelines allowed British solicitors to write Islamic wills that deny women an equal share of inheritances and exclude “unbelievers” altogether. Children born out of wedlock — and even those who had been adopted — could not be counted as legitimate heirs. The idea, apparently, was that these guidelines, favoring inequality, should be recognized by British courts. At the time, Nicholas Fluck, then president of the Law Society, said the guidance would promote “good practice” in applying Islamic principles in the British legal system.

Facing a barrage of protests, the Law Society, just eight months later, had to apologize and withdraw the controversial recommendations. Andrew Caplen, then the new president of the society, apologized and said that the criticism had been taken on board.

Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, who had campaigned for the guidelines to be withdrawn, said:

“This is an important reverse for what had seemed to be the relentless march of sharia to becoming de facto British law. Until now, politicians and the legal establishment either encouraged this process or spinelessly recoiled from acknowledging what was happening. I congratulate the Law Society for heeding the objections we and others made. This is particularly good news for women who fare so badly under sharia law, which is a non-democratically determined, non-human rights compliant and discriminatory code”.

Another example of accommodation in Britain came in December 2015. A two-year commission, the Commission on Religion and Belief in Public Life, chaired by former senior judge Baroness Butler-Sloss, concluded in its report ,”Living with Difference: community, diversity and the common good,” that Britain is no longer a Christian country, and should stop acting as if it were one. The Commission’s report stated that the decline of churchgoing and the rise of Islam and other faiths means that a “new settlement” is needed for religion in the UK.

Perhaps most controversially, the report called for a new approach to anti-terror policy (page 37):

“In universities two of the biggest problems put to us in our consultation were to do with a tendency to view issues of religion and belief through a lens of security and counter-terrorism… there is currently concern about the requirements of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 in relation to universities. ‘Enabling free debate within the law,’ wrote the Russell Group of universities, ‘is a key function which universities perform in our democratic society. Imposing restrictions on non-violent extremism or radical views would risk limiting freedom of speech on campus and may potentially drive those with radical views off campus and underground, where … [they] cannot be challenged in an open environment. Closing down challenge and debate could foster extremism and dissent … “

Simply put, the report advocates, in the name of free speech and “living with difference,” that students should be allowed to voice extremist and radical views on campus without fear of being reported to the security services.

The report was condemned by Cabinet ministers as “seriously misguided,” and the Church of England said it was “a waste.” Among those who fathered the report and provided input to it were the former and present Archbishops of Canterbury, Rowan Williams and Justin Welby; Home Secretary Theresa May, and senior executives at the BBC and Channel 4.

In the United Kingdom, Baroness Caroline Cox, a member of the House of Lords and a nurse by training, is attempting to reverse this trend. This October, she introduced a bill in the House of Lords to make it illegal for any arbitration tribunal to “do anything that constitutes discrimination, harassment or victimisation on grounds of sex.” She quoted one Muslim woman who had told her, “I feel betrayed by Britain. I came here to get away from this and the situation is worse here than in the country I escaped from.” When a colleague claimed the Bill was trying to “demonise Muslims,” another colleague, Lord Carlile, said it was really just trying to “demonise discrimination.”

Left: A scene from New Year’s Eve in front of Cologne’s central railway station. Right: Britain’s Baroness Caroline Cox, who is leading a fight to protect women’s rights from the encroachment of Islamic Sharia law on the British legal system.

Europe seems to have learned nothing from the past decades. Its problems with immigrant Muslim populations continue to deteriorate. Accommodation has not solved these problems; more accommodation will undoubtedly not solve them either. More accommodation will make them, if anything, worse.

Judith Bergman is a writer, columnist, lawyer and political analyst.

• Europe has voluntarily begun the process of giving up its liberal and hard-fought-for freedoms. Free speech no longer exists, only — straight out of totalitarian ideologies — “responsible” free speech: “free” only if it does not “offend” anyone.
• The desire of many Europeans and other self-declared devotees of “human rights” to cover up, downplay or explain away what is happening in Europe, in fact represents the opposite of respect for others and equality before the law.
• Absolving such criminal behavior is not only the very opposite of justice, it is also a kind of “inverted racism” — against its own native Europeans.
• In 2014 and 2015 Jews in Europe were murdered, raped, beaten and stalked — just for being Jewish. Signs in the street read, “Sale Juif” (“dirty Jew”), “Death to the Jews,” and “Jews to the gas.” None of these side effects of Muslim immigration seems to concern the liberals, the media, or the purported defenders of human rights — who so loudly claim to be against “racism.” Or, once again in Europe, does “racism” not include Jews?

• A sterile Europe apparently thought that civil liberties could be bargained away in exchange for a temporary peace. Everything became negotiable.

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• As British author Douglas Murray has asked, why were workers not brought in from European countries suffering high unemployment, such as Portugal, Italy, Greece or Spain?
• A clear-eyed U.S. Congressman, Rep. Steve King, correctly said recently that, “You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies.” He instantly drew that white-hot fire reserved for people who tell truths that threaten treasured fantasies (think Giordano Bruno or Galileo).

• One statistic summarizes the situation: in Q3, there was $460.6 billion of net capital outflow. No economy can survive outflows of that size. The Chinese economy has never made sense, but confidence held it together. Now, the confidence is gone.

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• There are indications that China’s economic growth rate is, in reality, close to zero. Take the most reliable indicator of Chinese economic activity, the consumption of electricity.

• China’s Communist Party has been closing off the Chinese market to foreigners, recombining large state enterprises back into formal monopolies, increasing state ownership of enterprises, and shoveling more state subsidies to favored market participants.

• Just about everyone correctly agrees that a new round of structural economic reform could restart growth.

“On conservative growth projections, China’s economy could well be bigger than the sum of all the G7 economies in real terms within the next decade,” writes Peter Drysdale, the editor of the popular East Asia Forum website.

Not everyone is as optimistic as Drysdale, but the general view is that China will work through a transitory period and enter a new phase of growth powered by consumer spending.

Are China’s economic problems merely temporary — a year or two at most — as the majority view suggests?

Perhaps, but there are also reasons to believe the country will have to endure prolonged hardship, either two or so decades of recession and stagnation or, more probably, a sharp 1930s-style crash followed by years of deep contraction.

Today, the Chinese economy is in far worse shape than most economists and other analysts think. China’s economy could not have been growing at the 6.9% pace reported by Beijing’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) for the third calendar quarter of this year or at the 7.0% rate claimed for each of the first two quarters.

It is more likely to have been the 4% that Willem Buiter, Citigroup’s chief economist, recently suggested, and perhaps the 2.2% that people in Beijing were privately talking about a few months ago. And maybe it is even less than that.

There are, after all, indications that China’s economic growth is, in reality, close to zero. Take the most reliable indicator of Chinese economic activity, the consumption of electricity. For the first nine months of the year, electricity consumption increased by only 0.8% according to China’s National Energy Administration.

Defenders of NBS’s gross domestic product (GDP) numbers argue the economy has shifted from energy-intensive manufacturing to services, so electricity is no longer indicative of economic trends. That, however, sounds like an excuse.

In any event, previous criticisms of the electricity numbers have been exaggerated, and Premier Li Keqiang, now China’s economic czar, said in 2007 that official economic growth statistics were “man-made” — unreliable — and that he looked to electricity figures when he wanted to know what was really going on.

Yet even if electricity is no longer as indicative as it once was, there are other statistics confirming the sharp deterioration of the economy. For instance, imports — a sign of both manufacturing and consumption trends — fell 15.7% in the first ten months of this year in dollar terms. October, when they dropped a worse-than-expected 18.8%, was the 12^th-straight month imports have fallen, and that equals the record from 2009.

Another disturbing sign is found in price data. In Q3, nominal GDP growth of 6.2% was less than the officially reported real growth of 6.9%, indicating deflation.

Deflation is never a good sign, and China looks as if it is now caught in the trap of falling prices. That means a 1930-style adjustment — a crash, in common parlance — is increasingly possible. And maybe even likely.

The problem for China’s leaders is that nothing they have been doing in the past year to stimulate growth has been working. Six reductions in benchmark interest rates since last November and five reductions of the bank reserve-requirement ratio since February, for instance, have had no noticeable effect.

This monetary stimulus is unproductive because there is a lack of demand for money. Banks do not want to lend, and potential borrowers do not want to borrow. Central government technocrats can create money as if there is no tomorrow — M2, the broad gauge of money supply, was up 13.5% in October — but few see a need to invest available cash. So creating money this year has not resulted in growth.

At the same time, two other government tactics have come a cropper. First, the reckless promotion of stock price rises, beginning during the fall of last year, was intended to create a wealth effect. The campaign, however, led to the dramatic collapse in equity prices in June. Beijing, incredibly, had not learned its lesson, and in recent months engaged in another round of government cheerleading. Chinese officials, however, should realize that a rise in prices without an improvement in fundamentals can only lead to another horrible bust.

Second, the still-inexplicable devaluation of the renminbi beginning August 11 has not helped either. The move caused a global run on the currency, and Beijing still has not changed sentiment even if it has, through extraordinary means, temporarily stabilized the situation.

Just about everyone correctly agrees that a new round of structural economic reform could restart growth, but such change has become exceedingly unlikely because:

• powerful vested interests are blocking it;
• there is now a perception in Beijing that reform will reduce growth at first and China cannot afford any dip;
• President Xi Jinping’s idea of change is regressive.

Since coming to power as China’s leader, Xi has been reversing Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “reform and opening up.” He has, for instance, been closing off the Chinese market to foreigners, recombining already large state enterprises back into formal monopolies, increasing state ownership of enterprises, and shoveling more state subsidies to favored market participants.

Xi has also strangled his country’s financial markets in order to keep share prices high and currency values elevated. For example, this summer his government restricted stock-index futures because it considered these derivatives a source of downward pressure on stock prices, but the restrictions killed activity. China’s stock-index futures market, the world’s largest in mid-June when the slide began, was devastated, with transactions down 99% by September.

Even when Beijing has summoned the gumption to announce reforms, there has been more show than substance. For instance, late last month the People’s Bank of China, the central bank, announced it was eliminating the caps on deposit rates, but officials are now informally dictating to commercial banks the deposit rates they may offer.

Let us not be surprised by the end of liberalization in China. Xi Jinping’s signature initiative, encapsulated by the phrase “Chinese dream,” contemplates a strong state, and a strong state does not sit easy with the notion of market-oriented reform. Unfortunately for Xi, also the Communist Party’s general secretary, there are no solutions that are possible within the political framework he will not change.

Therefore, Xi’s government has fallen back on fiscal stimulus to create growth. Fiscal spending was up 36.1% in October, according to the Finance Ministry. This follows increases of 26.9% in September and 25.9% in August. In the first ten months of this year, fiscal spending was up 18.1% while revenue rose only 7.7%.

No analyst is cheering the new spendathon. Just about everyone knows China does not need another “ghost city.” And everyone is concerned about the debt that has been created to fuel growth. McKinsey Global Institute puts the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio at a worrisome 282% at the end of June 2014, but the number is surely higher than that now, perhaps in the vicinity of 350% once all hidden obligations are counted and GDP is accurately assessed.

And even with this extraordinary spending, growth has been anemic — if there has been any growth at all. Beijing’s problem at the moment is that there is deep pessimism about the prospects for the economy. One statistic summarizes the situation: in Q3, there was $460.6 billion of net capital outflow, as documented by Bloomberg. No economy — not even one the size of China’s — can survive outflows of that size.

The Chinese economy has never made sense, but confidence held it together. Now, the confidence is gone, and Beijing does not know how to get it back. Therefore, money is gushing out of the country.

“Deep winter will continue,” said Liu Dongliang, a China Merchants Bank economist, to Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. Chinese leaders, not willing to open up their political system so they can reform the economy, should expect the weather to remain cold a very long time.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China, a contributor to Forbes.com, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

• Iran’s entire power structure and most of its civil society is centralized under the personal control of the Supreme Leader. In this way, Iran’s dictatorship is every bit as entrenched as North Korea’s, making the idea of traditional regime change a pipe dream.

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• The mullahs created a regime — an entrenched revolution — specifically designed to resist change or reform, adopting a unique theocratic structure that uses both Islamic ideology and brutal force to maintain absolute power.
• There is but one regime, and it has no interest in “reform.”
• The membership of every single one of the many official-sounding bureaucratic organs is personally approved by the Supreme Leader. Indeed, any individual, or coalition of individuals who might serve as a check on his absolute power is, in fact, completely beholden to Khamenei’s whims, making him the most complete and powerful dictator on the planet.
• Elections in this regime are not indicative of any form of “democracy”. Instead, they are merely a process of choosing among individuals vetted by the Supreme Leader. There are no factions based upon ideological differences, there is mere jockeying for position and the personal favor of the Supreme Leader.
• Western governments’ policy of providing concessions to the Iranian regime in order to empower “reformist” factions is based on a fantasy — a fantasy which the Iranian regime deliberately encourages in order to fool naïve foreign leaders into easing sanctions and turning a blind eye to the nuclear program. In reality, Western concessions are strengthening Khamenei — further reducing the possibility of change, and increasing the likelihood of outright war.