I keep forgetting that Poland is a country that actually exists.

Indeed. The so-called Polish question. You must be older than you let on... ;)

Well, I'm a random knowledge expert, and I happen to know that their country slogan at one time used to be "We're Still Here" and that the anthem is "Poland is Not Yet Lost", so that probably says loads more about the place than I could ever figure out through experience.

Well... (link for German speaking folks only)
http://www.der-postillon.com/2011/09/nerviger-trend-jetzt-hat-auch-munchen.html
:)

Not quite what I meant, so, good that you're bringing this up. Pegida are not "Christians" so much as their criticism is coming from a perceived culture seeped in Christianity. What we call the christlich-abendländische Tradition ("christian occidental tradition"). That's their talking point, and it doesn't really matter whether they add the christian part because the occidental part is practically synonymous in that respect. The hostility against the muslim religion is sourced from the christian tradition.

Just to clarify: I'm not opposed to religion, neither Christian nor Muslim, nor the churches.
I'm opposed to fundamentalist readings of religious texts, the influence of religion on the government (which at the time, in Germany, is practically limited to Christian influence), and cultural as well as real wars among religious strains of thought.

With a very high probability, it is. Layout and golden arches position fits. :p

However, this is the opposite side of the train station, ca. 130 meters from the outside point you've seen in the videos.

I'm not implying that, oh god no. The term organized crime is the one you find sprinkled all over my posts. This is outrageous, very scary, and the police will have to find a way to deal with this situation. At the time, they have nothing besides a mayor more concerned with carnival than the matter at hand.

Police is looking for certain people of African and Arabic descent. Now, the African religious spectrum is rather multifaceted and the Arabic a good deal more diverse than you'd think.

What they're (hopefully!) not looking for is "Muslim people".

A bearded drunkard O.O

From what I understand, it's like Huffington Post but on the conservative end of spectrum.

First is : "Germans on the hunt for mass assaulters in Köln"
Second is : "Köln during the new year eve: those are the facts"

I apologize if this will be a bit rough. As you know I don't particularly like you. You are at your rational tolerant best (not being ironic here) in this thread though, so I think you deserve a proper reply.

First, please don't be disingenuous. The ethnicity of the perpetrators has been likely determined based on skin color and other such racial traits shared by Arabs and North Africans and described by the victims. Disclaimer: I know there is such a word as ?phenotypes? for the manifestation of genetic properties, but I'm only mentioning that that is what I mean because you sometimes get or act triggered by some language, and despite my thinking that saying racial traits is quite neutral, who knows if you will accuse me of racism based on that alone.

Anyway, all this to say, that if they were looking for sub-Saharan Africans it would be known and I recall reading distinctly about North Africans, which maybe you can even confirm? And being so educated on geography and biology and religion, you should know the religious make up of North Africa and the Middle East is rather quite homogenous, rather than the opposite. Certainly if I consider all branches of Christianity together (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, etc...) I can do the same for other meta-religions or whatever you want to call them.

So the only reason the authorities will not look for muslims directly, is because by looking for the racial traits they have to go on, they will anyway find muslims with overwhelming likelihood. And you know it. At least nominal muslims, not that they are devout muslims likely... but that's another story. And yet another story is that by the time we actually get to that point, this will all have been significantly buried (carnival will be over for one) so that for example the names and mug shots of the suspects will not be broadly published, etc... would not want to inflame public opinion unduly right?


To your first and more valid point. The conflict you see over what I am saying you are implying is perceived only. The implication I'm pinning on you is somewhat more subtle. Because organized crime is nothing special unfortunately. So my outrage at your trying to paint this appalling example of communal sexual assault - to use less loaded language than gang rape, although that seems to have been the case here... Anyway my outrage comes not from thinking organized crime is not scary, because it is, but from thinking the unusual here is not the organized crime but what kind of crime and the degree of empowerment of the perpetrators that is implied by the known details. The special kind of crime here, and what you and others seem to be downplaying somewhat, points quite clearly to the unfortunately factual misogyny that correlates heavily with specific ethnicities that share a certain religion.

And contrary to what immi was implying, it's not like I am looking at this in isolation. Roterham, Tahrir square, the statistics that became public in Sweden... The context here matters.

Pointing at Oktoberfest, which is in itself an example of a particular subculture that does have severe problematic aspects, does nothing to prove or disprove the thesis that you are so earnestly trying to avoid. That being that islamophobia is to some extend justified. That is unfortunate, it's something we should try to change, gently and proactively if possible. (I say this despite believing you think I'm lying...). Put another way, both are true. Alcohol + Religion. One does not exclude the other.

Unless we acknowledge the problematic elements, we will always be blaming the victim. You seem to be viscerally against blaming the victim when looked at from the rapist / raped dichotomy. Maybe you should try to avoid blaming the victim in the host community / immigrant community dichotomy. Which goes both ways because you might notice I have never denied there are integration difficulties victimizing the second. I just happen to think the kind of multicultural fetishism that was unfortunately rampant, has done nothing but aggravate both sides of that victimization coin. It empowered and enabled the worst elements of both sides of this divide, and censored and silenced the rest.


Or put another way, so that even you will get the message. This is the place to talk about misogyny, much as you might not like it. Compared to this, *****gate is nothing. I admit I might be uncharitable to you here. I'm still being much more charitable than I've seen you be towards others though.

So again to clarify. If you actually have evidence that this kind of group sexual assault, does happen in Koln every single new year's eve, or carnival, then please do show it. Otherwise I'm going to believe there is something special about the specifics of the organized crime here, otherwise the freaking authorities, that would normally be super interested in being hush hush to not damage their anticipated revenue streams from tourism based commerce, would not have jumped on this the way they have, which to some extend seems to be a bit of an overreaction.

I guess you can't really blame them. They are also victims. I guess tourism in Rotterham or Malmo is quite dead. And you know... European economy crisis... they need revenue to be able to continue to provide community services and welfare benefits of many kinds.

Can you say perverse incentives? Because that's the thing that saddens me most in your reply. "the police will have to find a way to deal with this situation" No they won't. They should though. And I have no doubt the best of them will try. But in a few months, you will likely be defending the policies that prevent any effective proactive action addressed at the actual risk communities. Because it's islamophobia if you do, and islamophobia if you don't - and eventually you won't be able to hide, that it's not that much of a phobia at all, just an ugly truth of a religion that we should be trying to help instead of hide and enable.

Reconstruction of the proceedings in German media:
http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/koeln-was-in-der-silvesternacht-am-bahnhof-geschah-a-1070625.html

Brasas, give me the TL;DR version of your post please. Not for the first time, you're using far too many words to say very little.

Best start by deleting any and all presuppositions about my words' meaning as well as any anticipatory remarks about my reaction to your words.

For those who wants their dose of infos (in English), I updated the OP with a long article of the DailyMail which summarizes most of the reactions/aftermaths and testimonies after the story erupted (don't pay attention to the clickbait title, the text is more interesting than that):

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3386673/Women-Cologne-lockdown-council-admits-no-longer-safe-wake-African-Arab-mob-s-rapes-declares-upcoming-carnival-no-area-females.html

you might wanna get a cup of coffe ready to go along the reading.....

I think the most pithy TL:DR is something like:

Oh yes you are implying "nothing special". You are implying this organized crime is nothing special within organized crime, as if the sexual nature of the assault did not make it special all by itself. You are also implying this happens in all drunken revelries, eliding that in such cases there is no organized crime nuance to the sexual assaults.

In other words. You are downplaying the relevance of the perpetrator's culture to what happened. And your other point muddying the waters on the meaning of "africans" and on the correlation between certain ethnicities and certain religions is further evidence this is likely your intent.

A few more links to articles from "Telepolis" about this topic:

Der Tahrir-Platz von Köln

Kölner Polizei: "Wir haben bisher noch keinen Tatverdächtigen"

Köln: Polizei tappt im Dunkeln

Ist der Sexist immer der Moslem?

Edit:
Silvester-Übergriffe in Köln: Wir sind schockiert! Aber worüber eigentlich?

To my point about likelihood that "usual suspects" will ensure the police cannot do anything about this. Notice this box headline from your link already.

MUSLIM LEADERS CALL FOR RESIGNATIONS OVER POLICE 'FAILURES'

As I said. It's damned if you do, and damned if you don't.


This whole topic is fucking depressing. On one hand I do agree with Vaina and some others posting that there is an overreaction to the specific facts and incident at hand. On the other hand I find it distressing that the broader context that I keep pointing at is constantly ignored, dismissed, downplayed. It's taboo plain and simple.

All right, I can work with that and will ignore the pithy parts.

First of all, you don't understand Cologne culture. I never mentioned "Oktoberfest", because that's a totally different tradition in a fairly different part of Germany. I said Cologne Carnival, coming up at the beginning of February.

For those who have witnessed what's happening then – I have, several dozens of times, though in another carnival stronghold and Cologne is usually worse – imagine that on the first of the six day festivities, you already find crawling and vomiting 15 year olds on populated streets (Mind you, we're talking about "just" a few dozen cities in the area mostly South to Southwest of Germany).

The proceedings at the central station on New Year's Eve, in my personal informed opinion, mirror those expected during Cologne Carnival, then perpetrated by Germans and 'properly integrated' migrants (mostly Turkish). That is the reason why police reported "largely peaceful celebrations" on January 1st: They didn't see anything particularly new that night. It wasn't until they received dozens of complaints until they thought, oh well, there could have been something criminal going on as well?

They were used to this. This is what "celebrating" means to them.

The sexual assault and the violent attacks, in the opinion of the police, were the cover up for theft and robbery. I say, that cover up, allegedly executed by men of Arab and African heritage, was an exaggerated display of Cologne carnival culture.

The police has been aware of African 'con artist' gangs in Cologne for a very long time. I can not give you accurate percentages here, but I will assume that not disproportionally many of those are Muslim, and few are practising their religion in some form. So, yes, judging from my experience with sexual assault in prime 'party time' in Cologne, the ties to unhinged Christian men may be just as strong as to Muslim and especially atheist people.

The sexual assault was the undeniably absolutely worst thing that happened that night, and still it was incidental to what was actually happening, i.e. organised crime.

To sum up: Yes, there's definitely a problem with misogyny! Though definitely not misogyny learnt through religious doctrine, and in this particular case, probably not even through the individual everyday culture of certain, more accidentally Muslim, sub-groups living in Cologne.

I know, and the police knows, that in the search for Cologne offenders, "muslim" is not a sensible systemic criterium to confirm suspicions.

Take this quote from catpower's last link [Umlaut added, couldn't bear that]. If that's true (and it could well be), the whole supposed/systemic connection to Islam is gone.

This is just not the verbal battle ground you make it out to be. It really is quite another, a no less depressing one.

Public outcry violently demands that police do something against it.

Meanwhile, police is searching for men who committed various crimes on a badly lit plaza at midnight.

The police can in fact not solve this case, the police labor union thinks that a grand total of ZERO suspects will be arrested, but pro Islam voices have nothing to do with this very sad fact.

The only fitting place I found was Other and then Feedback. So I filled in that form. At least you got something. :)