A Polish magazine has published a highly inflammatory front cover showing a white woman being assaulted by three pairs of dark-skinned male hands under the headline “The Islamic rape of Europe”.
The cover of this week’s edition of wSieci (the Network), a mass-market politically conservative magazine, triggered outraged responses on social media. Some Twitter users compared the image to Nazi propaganda.
Appalling front cover by @Tygodnik_Sieci. Inflammatory and very offensive as though 'Muslims' cannot be trusted https://t.co/dygcbJWksc
— TellMAMAUK (@TellMamaUK) February 17, 2016
"Islamic Rape of Europe"—Polish magazine #wSieci
— Annia Ciezadlo (@annia) February 17, 2016
Just change "Islamic" to "Jewish" and it's Poland in the late 1930s pic.twitter.com/J2ua2TVHg9
The magazine cover depicts a blonde woman draped in a European Union flag. Male hands are grabbing at her hair and arms and apparently about to tear off the flag. The magazine blurb promises “a report about what the media and Brussels elite are hiding from the citizens of the European Union”.
Inside, the article refers to the rape and sexual assault of hundreds of women in the German city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve. Most of those arrested in connection with the attacks were recent migrants from north Africa.
“The people of old Europe after the events of New Year’s Eve in Cologne painfully realised the problems arising from the massive influx of immigrants,” wrote the report’s author, Aleksandra Rybińska.
“The first signs that things were going wrong, however, were there a lot earlier. They were still ignored or were minimised in significance in the name of tolerance and political correctness.”
This week’s edition of the magazine also carries articles headlined “Does Europe Want to Commit Suicide?” and “The Hell of Europe”.
More than 1,000 complaints were filed in Cologne, almost half of which were of a sexual nature, in the aftermath of New Year’s Eve. The attacks were a key factor in an anti-migrant backlash in Germany, which has accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees in recent months.
Accounts of the Cologne attacks encouraged women in other European cities to come forward with similar accounts of sexual attacks.
The Polish government has resisted EU efforts to persuade it to increase the number of migrants it is prepared to accept. In November, the prime minister, Beata Szydło, rejected an EU quota of 4,500 refugees, citing last year’s terrorist attacks in Paris, carried out by Islamic extremists. “After Paris, the situation has changed,” she said.