Cologne sex attacks: women made to "run gauntlet"

Sat Jan 9 10:33:04 CST 2016

I would have thought that discovering a handicap or trauma in another
person would suggest that one ought to be more, rather than less, patient
with them, and that one ought to consider learning about the handicap or
trauma so as to avoid further handicapping or traumatizing the person in
question. After all, handicaps and traumas are the sorts of things that
ought to engender sympathy, right? If those are not the appropriate
responses to handicaps and traumas, what would you say are better responses?

Danny

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 2:30 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de
> wrote:

>
> 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>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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