Cologne sex attacks: women made to "run gauntlet"

Sat Jan 9 04:30:01 CST 2016

Hello Robert,

it was tried to hide the facts, and there are still many things we do 
not know. On New Year's Eve the Cologne police said at their official 
press conference that it had been a "largely peaceful party." When the 
dimension of the whole thing started to become visible through the 
social media, the Cologne police president Albers said, that was on 
Tuesday, that "one does not know who the perpetrators were." That was a 
lie, very probably caused by political pressure from above. Since 
Thursday, internal police reports and anonymous statements by cops who 
were involved give quite a different picture.

http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article150735341/Die-meisten-waren-frisch-eingereiste-Asylbewerber.html

At least 80 or 100 persons were controlled, some arrested for a time, 
and it turned out that lots of them were asylum seekers who had entered 
the country just recently, among them many Syrians. According to the 
leaked police report, one guy said when a cop wanted to arrest him: "You 
cannot do me any harm: Mother Merkel invited me to this country!" 
Yesterday the Cologne police president Albers got removed into early 
retirement. So there were not only the usual folks from Morocco, Tunisia 
and Algeria who commit their petty crimes day in day out at Cologne's 
central railway station. There were also freshly arrived people out of 
these countries from where, since November, most asylum seekers who 
officially enter Germany (still thousands every day) do come from. And 
there were Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis. Some of these people are not 
Muslims, right, but most of them are. The practice of sexually harassing 
single women by a whole group of men is if not characteristic then at 
least not untypical for the culture of these countries coined by Islam. 
And this is what connects Sweden to the events in Cologne and other 
German cities.

When I said that my patience with Islam has come to an end, I 
additionally had the following issues in mind: a) Terrorism; b) Sharia 
law, which works so wonderfully in all European countries with Muslim 
populations: Now and then a girl gets killed through 'honor murder' by 
her father, brother or cousin, just because she liked short skirts or 
met a guy from a different religion; c) Censorship and militant 
intolerance: This is - literally (Charlie Hebdo) - killing free speech! 
(To keep this balanced: Free speech is also threatened by digital 
surveillance and by identity politics respectively political correctness).

Already in September the sociologist Armin Nassehi predicted a 
"masculinization of public space" for Germany in the following of the 
massive migration. While they show on TV mostly women, children and old 
people, more than 70% of the folks arriving are young men. And young 
men, that's a crime-anthropological fact due to testosterone and other 
male hardware stuff, commit by far most violence related crimes.  But 
cultures deal with that in different ways, and they develop an order of 
the sexes to prevent sexual and other violence. My impression is that 
Islam is not very good at this. And I think that this also has to do 
with the personality of its founder and its religious source texts. What 
does "masculinization of public space" mean when the men we're talking 
about are mostly Muslims? I'll tell you what it means: It means that the 
public space becomes significantly less safe for certain social groups: 
Women, homosexuals, Jews. The incidents of New Years Eve were just the 
beginning. And this calls for a political and societal answer. Too long 
we were sleeping, and now we have to wake up! In my case - I spoke in 
favor of massive migration for decades and voted, alas, six times at 
federal elections for the Greens - this implies the recognition that 
I've been an useful idiot promoting a process that perhaps will dissolve 
Europe and Germany in the near future. And if Jews would start to leave 
Germany again, like they are already leaving Sweden and France for quite 
some time now, what would this mean for the political culture of this 
country? Would it be an acceptable price to pay in order to become world 
champion in 'Refugees welcome!'-shouting? I don't think so.

The question what exactly changes when one has lost patience with Islam 
is indeed an interesting one. In every day life probably not much: I 
won't stop behaving politely towards Muslim women with headscarf in the 
subway, and I will still eat my favorite falafel at the Arab's shop. But 
I lost all sympathy for Islam as a religion and culture. Sufis are 
great, true, but they don't change the overall picture. I will not spend 
reading time anymore to understand Islam better. I'm against it. Of 
course every single individual I meet is, first of all, an individual 
human being to me. This is still valid, also in relation to Muslims, and 
it won't change. But when it comes to the Muslim background of people, I 
now consider it to be more like a handicap or trauma. I cannot pay 
respect to it as a legitimate cultural form anymore.

On 08.01.2016 20:28, Robert Mahnke wrote:
> Hi Kai, I have been trying to pay attention to this story, partly 
> because I change trains in Koln now and then and so it's easier for me 
> to imagine the scene.
>
> I wonder why you say your patience with Islam has come to an end, for 
> a few reasons.  One is that the English-language coverage I've seen 
> has had only scanty information about who the perpetrators might have 
> been.  Are they not relating facts that have been reported in 
> German-language media?  But even where English-language sources have 
> interviewed witnesses/victims, I haven't seen much to suggest that the 
> perpetrators were from any particular ethnic group or religion.  I've 
> seen suggestions that there were people present of Arab or North 
> African appearance, but that's been true of that area when I've passed 
> through.  And I don't get tie you see with Islam.  Am pretty sure 
> Islam frowns on what happened as much as Christianity or Judaism would.
>
> So, curious about what I'm missing.
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 1:25 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen 
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
>
>     http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/cologne-sex-attacks-women-made-to-run-gauntlet/news-story/c8a374824b163738853eb98daba9d2e6
>
>     Similar things happened that night in Hamburg, Stuttgart,
>     Bielefeld and other cities.
>
>     My patience with Islam has come to an end.
>
>
>     -
>     Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>

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