The 2015 New Years Eve Attacks in #Cologne (#Köln)
|
Time
Text
If you look at the official website for the city of Cologne, they will, on their front page, tell you how wonderful New Year in Cologne is.
Apparently, it's really something to write home about.
Each year, hundreds of thousands of locals and visitors from all across the planet enjoy the midnight fireworks against the magical backdrop of Cologne's cityscape.
So, you can imagine the surprise of people who were at the New Year's Eve 2015 celebrations that the media didn't seem to want to cover the events that happened there.
The initial reports I saw were from the BBC, and frankly, they have actually been the best ones regarding this.
Between 80 and 100 women reported being sexually assaulted, with one reported being raped on New Year's Eve.
These attacks were carried out by approximately a thousand drunk and aggressive young men of North African and Middle Eastern descent.
According to the first article that I read, what's particularly disturbing is that the attacks appear to have been organized.
Around a thousand young men arrived in large groups, seemingly with the specific intention of carrying out attacks on women.
These young men would let off fireworks at ground level to cause confusion, and then roving gangs of them would surround and molest women.
As you can see from this footage, this was right outside the cathedral, and in spite of a significant police presence.
Needless to say, there's loads of footage of these events, and there is even eyewitness testimony from a chap who was a bouncer on the night, who I think is also some sort of famous international karate or kickboxing champion.
I made a deal with the Zogängern Silvester here in Köln.
I worked on the 31.12.2015 in a 5-Sterne-Hotel, right over the Dom.
When I started working there, I thought that I had a nice day with very good people.
The cards cost about 300€.
It was all about 40 years.
Suddenly, at 21 or 22.00pm, also, when the hotel was on the surface, the hotel was nothing to do with it, there was a mess-and-stecherei where there was someone who was injured, a hospital, a police, and then it was escalated.
The whole thing was happening.
The whole thing was happening.
The mention of the Telebeer and whatnot in the Dominican people, the right politicians, with Hellman, of the Doom, and these potentials.
The police said to me that they have never experienced it.
It was a war of war.
No one had talked about it.
At the end of the evening came women to me, who asked me if they could stand up, so that I was concerned about it.
They were followed by those and those people.
They wanted to go on.
Then I said to them, I was going to say, because I've never experienced it.
I thought it was a real propaganda.
but as I said, the Tuttle Board of Coppers, the Lawrence Fusskaus, is English, and the people of Transport, but all the people and the people in the authorities from Polish.
But the politicians, the latter, for the author of the police and the police.
The politicians have been able to do a lot of people In Köln, that is theorist expedient.
And I hope... you know I am not a traitor or anything like that, I always thought about these videos etc.
That's all some junk publications from Pegida groups and blah blah blah...
That was really... I was thinking of them.
They have been looking for them.
They are following us all the time.
They have Gäste bugged, They have shot Polis.
They have seen people lying on the table with their feet in their inshaustion.
The police didn't do anything.
After that particularly sobering account, there have been other people who have come forward, such as this woman who described how one of these attackers put a firecracker in her hood that has left her with scars.
Angela Merkel expressed her disgust at the New Year Gang assaults, saying that everything must be done to find the perpetrators as quickly and comprehensively as possible and punish them, regardless of their origin or background.
After the attacks, up to 300 women demonstrated against the violence near the scene of the attacks on Tuesday evening, outside of Cologne Cathedral, I presume, with one placard reading, Mrs. Merkel, where are you?
What do you say?
This alarms us.
And I know I've already said that the BBC's coverage of this has been the best and most objective so far, but there is still plenty of attempt by the BBC to minimalize what has gone on and conflate it with other issues.
For example, they will often use the word groped instead of molested, or they'll prime the article by saying how the Christmas market and medieval setting may look idyllic, but at Christmas and New Year, the area around Cologne Cathedral is a notorious danger zone when it comes to pickpockets and theft.
As if these crimes have anything to do with the organized sexual assaults committed by men of North African and Middle Eastern heritage.
Men who came not only in organized groups but with a plan to do what they did.
There are also reports of a similar situation happening in Hamburg, but I'm just going to focus on the Cologne attacks for this video.
So after Merkel expressed her shock and disgust, she's also on record saying that we must accept that migrants are more criminal.
Now, I can't seem to find the context for this eight-second clip.
So while she has clearly said this, I don't know why.
Again, I don't know what the wider context of that clip is, but I think that she is being accurate when she says this.
I think that they are more prone to commit crimes because I do think that the laws in Western European countries are more stringent, especially when it comes to situations like rape.
This is something I've covered in other videos that I will link to in the description.
So the quest was on to find out exactly why this happened.
What had gone wrong?
Why wasn't this prevented?
And I suppose most importantly, who had done this?
Well, the BBC began their analysis by saying that the area is notorious for crime, as they've already said in previous articles, with the area around Cologne Cathedral being a well-known danger zone when it comes to pickpockets and theft, with two crimes which are incidentally not comparable to a conspiracy to surround, abuse, and potentially rape hundreds of women.
Apparently many of the perpetrators on Thursday night reportedly used a well-known tactic to distract their victims by trying to dance with them.
Although this is the only report of that that I've actually seen.
The police were present but failed to stop these attacks.
Witnesses said that officers in Cologne appeared to be surprised and overwhelmed by the attacks, and the head of the German police union said that there were simply not enough officers deployed on the night.
However, the Cologne police chief has insisted that they were actually well prepared, with 70 federal officers in the station and about 140 officers around the cathedral area and city centre.
I would be inclined to speak well of the police in this case if it weren't for a few details, because they weren't prepared for a thousand people to turn up with the specific intention of molesting and raping women.
I don't see why they should have prepared for this kind of eventuality.
And given the large numbers of people present, I'm sure it was very difficult to identify individuals who had actually done something before they melted back into the crowd, which was undoubtedly part of the strategy.
But the thing is, the Cologne chief of police said that the initial police assessment describing a relaxed atmosphere in the city on New Year's Eve was wrong.
Which is, I mean, how would you come to that conclusion when you have a thousand men causing trouble and 80 to 100 women claiming they've been sexually assaulted and a rape?
And almost a week after the incident, no arrests are thought to have been made despite reports of hundreds of men being involved.
So is there a taboo about the perpetrators?
Well, kind of.
The thing is, this has been taboo for quite some time, and it's now reaching the point where it simply can't be glossed over.
But given the initial police reports that everything was fine, and the fact that Germany's media seems to have been very hesitant to report on these attacks, apparently for fear of stirring far-right sentiment, and the fact that these stories didn't emerge till almost a week after the events, it would kind of seem that there is.
I'm sure like with Rotherham, there are a lot of people who are afraid of being called racists.
Cologne has a female mayor, and she said that people from other cultures needed to be given a better explanation about appropriate behaviour during street celebrations.
It's almost like she's in willful denial about what has happened here.
These men knew what they were doing was wrong.
They absolutely knew.
They didn't care.
Because, like the eyewitness said, they were just saying, fuck the police.
The police just simply weren't prepared to deal with them.
and they knew it.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that these men need to be taught not to rape, But the thing is, this doesn't stem from the fact that they don't know that rape is wrong.
It's that they do not care that it's wrong.
They have no respect for German women.
Henriette then went on to reach Swedish levels of denial and self-flagellation when she went on stress that women need a code of conduct to prevent future assaults.
This advice included maintaining an arm's length distance from strangers and stick within your own group.
I assume that the rest of the advice was wear a burqa, make sure you're escorted by a male relative and keep a Quran on you at all times.
Seriously, her advice was fucking ridiculous.
These women were doing nothing wrong.
They were just wandering around enjoying the festivities and gangs of men were assaulting them.
No code of conduct would have prevented this.
All of the women involved were trying to maintain an arm's length from these men.
So understandably, German women are furious.
They're apparently angry, scared, and getting tired of excuses.
And I don't blame them.
With plans to publish online guidelines that young women can read through to prepare themselves for sexual assault by immigrant Muslim men, understandably these comments have been condemned and met with accusations of victim blaming by women's rights campaigners.
There's a very important distinction that they've made there.
They didn't say feminists, and I'll show you why.
According to feminist organization Women Against Violence Against Women, rape culture is a term that was coined by feminists in the United States in the 1970s.
It was designed to show the ways in which society blamed victims of sexual assault and normalized male sexual violence.
The Geek Feminism Wiki has a nice article on rape culture with a list of bullet points to help you identify the aspects of rape culture when you see it.
We've just covered victim blaming, and trivializing sexual assault is something that almost every media outlet has done here in their attempts to minimalize what has happened and the language used to describe it.
Angela Merkel seems to be displaying a distinct tolerance of sexual harassment as we just have to accept that the migrants are going to commit more crimes.
The mayor of Cologne has already tried to teach women to avoid getting raped, and the migrants definitely fit the description of Schrödinger's rapist.
So you would think that these categorizations would be enough for feminists to leap into action.
There is clearly a real rape culture forming in Germany at the moment.
Famous feminists like Laurie Penny, of course, did not give a shit.
They just were not interested in talking about women's rights when they were actually being violated because of racists wanting to bash Muslims.
But really what we should do is actually thank Laurie Penny for making statements like this.
The people who think you can be racist to a religion are busy extracting themselves from the conversation through their own virtue signalling.
They don't want to be perceived as racists, therefore there can be no criticism of Islam or Muslims.
As Laurie Penny clearly hasn't figured out yet, calling people racists is not going to stop this conversation.
When even The Guardian characterizes this as a series of coordinated sex attacks by Arab and North African men, there is simply no way of trying to avoid the issue.
Unless of course you are a writer for The New Statesman, the paper where Laurie Penny herself is an editor.
You may find yourself so confused that you simply say, let's just keep sticking up for women.
We daren't criticise the men doing the actual assaults, but we're definitely within our safe space if we just keep sticking up for women.
Despite the fact that you know that there are a thousand attackers and that their efforts were coordinated, you know their efforts to molest women were coordinated.
You may find yourself writing irrelevant apologia, such as, the volume of sexual violence against women worldwide is extraordinary.
It is horrifying, heartbreaking, and finally it's enraging.
Whether women are in public or in the supposed safety of their own homes, the offences committed against them are off the scale.
Yes, and it was even worse at Cologne on New Year's Eve.
Why are you talking about women worldwide when we have a very specific subject to discuss right here?
To quote the United Nations, it's estimated that 35% of women worldwide have experienced either physical and or sexual intimate partner violence or sexual violence by a non-partner at some point in their lives.
However, some national studies show that up to 70% of women have experienced physical and or sexual violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime.
So fucking what?
This could not be less relevant to what happened in Cologne.
Our author reiterates the facts and says scores of women were set upon by up to a thousand men in a public place.
Yes, they were.
Our author then goes on to say that, at the risk of sounding uncharitable, I don't think that as many people as I would like are concerned with the socio-economic nuances of why black men are so poor.
Because for some reason he thinks that Middle Eastern and North African men include black men.
They actually don't.
I haven't seen a single report or video or anything like that that suggests one of these attackers was black.
But even if it was all black men who were ridiculously poor and struggling to get by, how does that justify a thousand of them getting together to molest women?
This is a perfect example of how the progressive mind works.
Instead of directly addressing the thousand or so individuals who took part in these assaults, what they've done is decided to sanitize it, externalize and collectivize it, so our author can finally write this paragraph.
Here's what I propose we do.
Why don't we just start with the premise that it is a woman's fundamental right, wherever she is in the world, to walk the streets and not be groped?
Why don't we see this as a perfect moment for men, regardless of our ethnic backgrounds, to get genuinely angry about the treatment of women in public spaces?
To reject with fury the suggestion that we are somehow conditioned by society forever to treat women as objects, condemned by our uncontrollable sexual desires to lunge at them as they walk past.
What fucking relevance does this have to Cologne?
This is nonsense!
The New Statesman is a joke, apparently.
This is nothing to do with men.
This is everything to do with North African and Middle Eastern men.
Muslim men who have been taught that Western women are easy, they're sluts, they are all sorts of terrible, terrible things, and it's okay to do this.
We don't need to talk about the rest of the world, the whole world.
We're talking about one specific incident in Germany, a place where it's not acceptable to grope women on the street, which is why this is such a fucking big deal.
But for some reason, you seem pathologically obsessed with obfuscating this situation.
It's not racist to say that Muslim men who have bad, regressive, retrograde attitudes towards women are more likely to commit sexual violence against women.
It's a fucking fact, you moron!
I am not going to be lumped into any category with these men where I have to share any kind of guilt for what has happened.
I am not only not part of the group that did it, I am diametrically opposed to it.
I am currently railing against it right now, and you are trying to prevent people from addressing the issue because of your fucking obsession with race.
It's no wonder that people think that there is a cover-up going on.
As the extent of the crimes emerged on Monday, the story became the central theme of Twitter with Coln and Alf Schrei outcry both ranking in the top five hashtags.
Many people accused the national media of engaging in a cover-up due to the ethnic background of the criminals, with many pointing to the fact that it took days before the details of the story reached national attention.
And, as we covered earlier, the police initially filed their report saying everything was fine.
It was a relaxed, enjoyable, happy atmosphere or whatever.
The Huffington Post Deutschland accused the police of covering up details about suspected criminals in order to protect public order.
Questioning why no details were given on the appearance of the suspects when the police called for witnesses, despite plentiful CCTV footage, Schunk suggested that police chose to leave important details out so that the public would not make a connection between crime and refugees.
In its details, the case is reminiscent of the mass sexual assaults which took place in North Africa during the huge Arab Spring protests of 2011 to 2013.
Schunk points out that, writing of her concern, that so many people are moved into Germany from patriarchal Muslim societies, which is a perfectly legitimate point of concern.
We know what cultural attitudes towards women are in these countries.
We know that they are bad ideas.
It isn't to do with their race.
It is to do with what they think.
What they think is backwards and needs to change.
So finally, and I'm sorry that it took so long to get to this point, but there was so much to cover, finally, we get to the question.
Were these attackers migrants?
And I mean specifically part of the migration into Europe through 2015 that was repeatedly lied about by Merkel's government.
Now, I want to stress that the reason I've left this to the end is so we can examine everything that came before and be as well informed as possible when we come to this question, because I don't want to inflame any kind of hatred for people fleeing persecution and war.
I'd like to thank the German listener who sent me this document.
It was very, very useful.
I really appreciate it.
These are the preliminary asylum statistics from Austria.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find the German ones.
But I imagine these are largely representative of the migrants as a whole.
The largest individual group of migrants who have arrived in Austria have been Syrian war refugees.
However, that's less than a third of the total number of migrants received by Austria.
That means that most of these migrants are not Syrian war refugees, who, as I said, I am sure are in desperate and legitimate need of help.
However, people from Algeria, Morocco, Iran, Pakistan, they are not fleeing from ISIS.
At most, it's just the Syrian and Iraq refugees that are, and they make up less than half of the migrants.
So were these people who committed the attack in Cologne Syrian refugees?
Well, I don't think they were.
As far as I can tell, 70% of the entire migrant group has been male.
And I can only imagine, because I simply can't find the statistics on it, because probably they're not being kept, that most of the Syrians include women and children.
Whereas most of the North African and surrounding Middle Eastern countries probably contain the majority of the men.
These are the economic migrants.
Again, I want to be very clear, and I think it is an important distinction to make.
So, were the economic migrants specifically responsible for this attack?
The first thing you'll hear is the police claim no.
Many of the men had been known to them for some time and they were not a group of newly arrived refugees.
And this was parroted by Cologne News website, I'm not even going to try and pronounce it, which said also that the suspects were already known to police because of frequent pickpocketing in and around Cologne Central Station.
And so we have our first claim that the police know who at least many of the attackers are, and apparently they know that they are not recent migrants.
However, this is directly contradicted by Cologne's chief of police, who, despite saying it's absolutely inadmissible to speculate that the perpetrators were refugees, he said that they don't currently have any suspects.
So we don't know who the perpetrators were.
All we know is that the police at the scene perceived that it was mostly young men 18 to 35 from the Arab or North African region.
So we know that this claim cannot be true.
And I am more than willing to trust the chief of Cologne's police department over a local newspaper.
The BBC reported that a policeman who was outside Cologne Station during the New Year's Eve trouble, so someone on the ground, told the city's Express News website that he had personally detained eight suspects.
They were all asylum seekers carrying copies of their residence certificates.
However, there was no official confirmation that asylum seekers had been involved in the violence.
Commentators in Germany were quick to urge people not to jump to conclusions.
We don't need to jump to a conclusion.
At least eight of them have been asylum seekers.
Unless of course this policeman is lying, but why would he need to?
Why would he need to?
Everything fits the profile of this.
Nothing about this is incongruous.
The thing that doesn't make sense is the Cologne officials warning against linking suspects to refugees by saying things like, it would be inadmissible, it would be improper to do this.
Not that it would be wrong, not that it would be factually inaccurate, because they can't say that.
But what they are trying to do is control and mitigate the results of importing a foreign rape culture.
And like our kickboxing champ eyewitness said at the beginning, he thought that all of this was right-wing propaganda.
But that's the problem, it's not.
It's actually, this is genuinely happening.
And denial of it, minimalization of it, is pushing people to the far right, because they are the only people who are being honest about reality.
I do have to stress that that was until recently anyway.
I think probably because of the consequence of this, that there are in fact people even within Merkel's own party who are expressly speaking out against Europe taking in so many foreign migrants, especially ones who aren't fleeing from war zones.
So I'm very, very pleased to hear that things are probably changing for the better.
I imagine it's quite early days yet, but it's nice to see the public dialogue getting past accusations of racism.
It's nice to see the people still going racist, racist, racist, are becoming less and less relevant by the day.
It's just a shame so many women had to be assaulted and feminists be so silent on the issue.