At the dawn of the New Year the European migrant crisis suddenly turned darker and nastier, challenging settled liberal assumptions and threatening to destabilise political establishments across Europe. Large, dangerous and unruly mobs of young men, said to be of mainly North African and Arab appearance, began to attack and assault groups of German women who had turned out to celebrate the New Year in Cologne and other German cities. The full horror of the incidents emerged only slowly, which suggests that neither media nor police wished to believe what the evidence was telling them. Many of the assaults were of a sexual nature and gave rise to a number of allegations of rape. It became clear that the assailants were overwhelmingly young Muslim migrants, including refugees – the ver