By Anne Perkins From The Guardian UK

With migrants being blamed for attacks on women in Germany on New Year’s Eve, the US presidents message of moderation in his State of the Union address could not have been more timely

President Obama, greyer and jowlier but still sounding a little like the earnest community activist of a decade ago, has delivered his last State of the Union address.

His unflappable moderation always seems astonishing, in a man who has been dogged by the ravings of conspiracy theorists spreading pernicious untruths alleging that the first black president is in fact a secret Muslim, an impostor and not even a US citizen. When Obama speaks of the dangers of division, he knows what he’s talking about.

But never has his message about the politics of race and creed been more important. “When politicians insult Muslims” he said, “when a mosque is vandalised or a kid bullied, that doesn’t make us safer. That’s not telling it like it is. It’s just wrong. It diminishes us in the eyes of the world.”

He was addressing a domestic audience, partly for party political purposes. But in the fetid atmosphere of a Europe struggling to work out how to respond to the angry claims that police have been covering up assaults on young women by bands of young men – refugees, apparently from Muslim countries – never has his calm authority been more badly needed globally.

The New Year’s Eve events in Cologne and some other German cities – and, it now emerges (just as support for the far-right Sweden Democrats is taking off, curiously), at a youth festival in Sweden the summer before last – are terrible for the women concerned. But they could also be disastrous for social cohesion as the layers of cultural significance are gleefully unpacked in the binary world of Twitter trolls.

This is a minefield for the rest of us who still inhabit the complex world of greys. The only easy bit is the beginning: there is never an excuse for a sexual assault. But there are – pause – often explanations.

These cases involved gangs of young men. Youth, maleness and crowds all in the one place are identifiers of trouble, wherever you are in the world. Add in a shared foreignness, late nights and the atmosphere of licence that tends to accompany New Year’s Eve, and maybe the biggest surprise is that the German police appeared so unprepared.

But the fact that these attacks happened looks more like a vehicle for another agenda altogether. The terrifying experience of the women has not much occupied people since news of the attacks first broke; the mileage is in the time it took for the truth to come out.

The assumption is that it was covered up in a liberal conspiracy to disguise the social harm that Germany’s open-hearted approach to refugees is provoking. That is reasonable, if you think that some refugees have behaved criminally– but there are many, many more who haven’t. And when there are already serious issues of social cohesion, many sensible people would think it sensible to avoid a naming-and-shaming exercise.

But there are other explanations. For example, rather than this being a liberal conspiracy, might it have been the more basic human emotion when faced with a total misjudgment: denial?

Without exonerating the perpetrators, it does seem possible that events were aggravated by a failure of policing; that possibly the mindset of the authorities in Cologne, where the police chief resigned because he had initially reported a quiet night and the mayor suggested that it was the victims’ faults for being there, was a contributory factor?

And possibly, there is another bunch of assumptions at work, based on the perception of Islam as a misogynistic faith that encourages young Muslim men (in a group etc) to assume that if they see a young woman on her own, and not covered up, that she is theirs for the taking. (Let’s not draw comparisons with the “she was asking for it” line of defence, which even now is the staple of the rape defendant in many a European court.)

I happen to agree that Islam often appears misogynistic. I hate wearing a headscarf in a strict Muslim country. But I don’t think this behaviour was a matter of faith: it is ordinary, nasty criminal behaviour. Bring the perpetrators to court. And then consider the circumstances in which the crime occurred.

There is an important obligation on those of us who pride ourselves on occupying the moral high ground. It is this: if we want to protect all those fleeing persecution, we must recognise that it will not be cost free. And unless we do address the costs – social and financial – we will play right into the hands of the people President Obama was pointing at last night: the people who believe that slamming the brakes on change is somehow the way to restore past glories.

IMAGE: Barack Obama
Barack Obama’s State of the Union: ‘When politicians insult Muslims … that doesn’t make us safer.’ Photograph: Xinhua / Barcroft Media

For more on this story go to: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/13/obama-hope-hate-state-union-migrants