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Jan. 20, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
42:51
Aftermath of the #Cologne New Years Eve Attacks
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So this video will be part one of probably two or three parts covering the aftermath of the Cologne attacks at New Year's Eve.
I've spent about two weeks collecting these sources and I'd just like to thank everyone, especially my German listeners, who have sent me German language sources that I can use.
Without your help, this wouldn't have been possible.
So honestly, thank you so much.
There's so much that the Western media outside of Germany is not reporting.
And as usual, in the comments, Please don't say anything ridiculous.
I will have to ban you from my channel.
I don't want to, but this is a sensitive subject, and I have to be careful.
And I do want to remain fair and objective.
I don't hate Muslims.
I don't hate migrants.
I'm happy to accept that a large portion of this problem is due to Western interference with Muslim countries, and I don't want to close the borders to prevent Muslims from ever coming to our countries again.
However, I'm sure you're all aware that the mainstream media reporting on this has been abominable, and I really do think that someone has to do the due diligence to actually lay out these facts.
Now, I'm not a journalist, and I don't have an army of lawyers behind me, which is why I have to insist that you retain your calm and act rationally and do not post anything excessively inflammatory in the comments, because again, like I said, I'd have to moderate you.
I don't want to, but the situation is out of my hands.
So I think it's become obvious that the issues are very definitely cultural ones.
I don't think there's anyone who would even venture to deny that.
And so I think it'd be well worth looking at this article first.
It's called, Would He Disapprove of My Single Heathen Lifestyle?
Me and My Syrian Refugee Lodger.
So I started with this article because I want to show everyone what your average Syrian migrant is like.
Now, it's important to remember that the average Syrian migrant hasn't committed any crimes.
They haven't actually, you know, raped anyone, robbed anyone, anything like that.
And so it'd be interesting to take a look at his cultural norms from the perspective of a Western woman.
And I've also chosen this article for another reason.
To explore her cultural background.
Because her cultural background is probably not the same as, say, my cultural background, despite the fact that we're both English.
This is her reason for taking in a Syrian refugee.
I thought having Yasser to stay would be some kind of atonement for mistakes I have made in my life.
But his presence has made me feel guilty.
Guilty for what I have, for the easy life I lead, for complaining about trivial things.
One day I got in a tiz about how to fit a new curtain rail in my bay window.
In my country, people worry about whether a barrel bomb will hit the house.
In England, you are worried about your curtains.
Yasa said, laughing at his own joke.
We all have our problems.
From the word go, I have a real issue with what she said here, and she probably thinks she's being a really good person.
The reason she's taken Yasser in is for herself.
It's not for Yasser.
It's not because he is alone in a foreign land with nowhere to live.
It's because she needs to feel good about something, because, as she says, she wants to atone for mistakes that she has made in her life.
I don't think that she can do that by taking in Yasser unless the mistakes were against Yasser himself.
If she genuinely wanted to atone for mistakes that she had made, she would go to the people whom she had made mistakes against, and she would talk to them and apologize.
She wouldn't just take in a random person and assume that in some sort of cosmic, karmic way, that that would even the balance.
I think this part gives us a good indication of the author's cultural background.
She says, Yassa usually only eats halal meat, which posed a problem when Christmas came around, and he joined me at my parents' place near Morecombe in Lancashire.
The Muslim population here is close to zero, and my mother was struggling to source a halal turkey.
I explained this to Yasser.
He thought about it and said that, because my parents are Christians and Christmas is a Christian holiday, their turkey will be holy.
Halal basically means holy so he could have it, but he drew the line at Pigs and Blankets.
Mum did him a Linda McCartney sausage.
Now, I don't mean to be too presumptuous, but it's quite obvious that this person does not come from a working class background.
Inviting waifs and strays to join you for Christmas dinner isn't something you do when you're short on money.
I'm not saying this in any way to denigrate the author or her family.
I think that what she's done is very noble, and I think what her family does is very noble.
I'm pointing this out because I think it's obvious that she doesn't have a lot of experience with Muslim communities.
Clearly, her parents don't either.
The author of that piece goes on to speak very highly of Yasa.
very, very complimentary.
And it was in The Guardian, so I wouldn't really expect anything different.
But I do think that there is a remarkable cultural divide between the West and the Arabic world.
And I think that it's something that, well, it's funny how nobody from the Arabic world has mentioned something called Taha Rush.
Taharush is an Arabic gang rape phenomenon, which sees women surrounded by groups of men in crowds and sexually assaulted, and police say that attacks in Cologne marked Europe's first instance of Taharush, not to mention the very similar attacks that occurred in other places across Europe.
So police fear that the gang rape phenomenon known as Taharush Gamir in the Arab world and seen in attacks on women across German cities at the new year has now spread to Europe.
The name of the practice translates to collective harassment and is carried out by large groups of men who sexually assault lone women, either by groping or in some instances raping them.
The men first surround their victim in circles, then some sexually assault her, while others not directly involved watch or divert outsiders' attention to what is occurring.
This happened in 2011 during the Arab Spring in Egypt, when CBS reporter Lara Logan was subjected to such an attack, or game.
So the practice is only carried out in public, and almost always at demonstrations or large public gatherings where attackers find safety in numbers and disorder.
Lara Logan described the terrifying details of the 40 minute long February attack in Cairo's Tahir Square, including how she became separated from members of her crew after someone in the frenzied 200 strong crowd shouted, let's take her pants off.
She said, suddenly before I even know what's happening, I feel hands grabbing my breasts, grabbing my crotch, grabbing me from behind.
I mean, it's not just one person that it stops, it's like one person and another person and another person.
And I know Ray is right there, and he's grabbing me and screaming, Lara, hold on to me, hold on to me.
I'm sure I don't have to point out how self-evidently immoral this is.
Honestly, I'm really having a hard time keeping my call watching this footage.
It's the height of barbarity.
These men are savages, and any culture that permits this should not be tolerated.
And as I said, the German police believe that it was Taharush that was committed in Cologne and other cities in the New Year by Arab and North African men that led to the hundreds of police complaints and sexual assaults and rapes in the following weeks.
And so I really just want to revisit the mayor of Cologne's statement that it's completely improper to link a group that appeared to come from North Africa with the refugees.
From the Cologne Mayor.
It's improper.
It's not wrong.
And I can show you why it's not wrong.
Because it turns out they were Syrian refugees.
The suspects themselves claim to be Syrian refugees.
The police have identified dozens of these men by name.
And there were, of course, asylum seekers amongst the suspects.
But sexual offences were not previously associated with the asylum seekers.
So this is new.
And investigators could locate some of the stolen Niyaziv phones, and in some cases, the trail led directly to refugee homes or their immediate environment.
And the thing is, this police report was leaked.
It wasn't even an official release.
wasn't something that they wanted the public to know about and I really do think that the mayor of Cologne statement that it would be improper to link them together is I think I really think that's important because like we know we know there were Syrian refugees involved We know that there were asylum seekers from all across the sort of Arab world and Muslim world.
And it's so bizarre that they would say, well, actually, it's improper to link them together.
No, it's fucking factual to link them together.
It's not improper.
It's how things actually happened.
But there appears to be some sort of deep-seated ideological impetus within the, I guess, German, but probably Europe-wide political class that for some reason wants to bury this information.
So the report states that the officers were hindered from pushing their way through to people calling for help by tight clusters of men.
One man is quoted as saying, I'm a Syrian, you have to treat me kindly.
Mrs. Merkel invited me.
Witnesses were threatened when they provided the names of the perpetrators.
People reportedly demonstratively tore up the residence permits in front of the police, grinned and said, you can't touch me.
I'll just go back tomorrow and get a new one.
The report did not, however, confirm the authenticity of these documents.
Orders for people to leave the premises were ignored.
Taking repeat offenders into custody was not possible due to lack of resources.
One officer told German newspaper Build that he hadn't seen anything like it in almost 30 years on the force.
The very high number of migrants was striking.
The forces met with a level of disrespect I have not seen in 29 years of service.
Yet the president of Cologne Police Force Wolfgang Albers and Cologne Mayor Henriette Reiker have said that there is no reason to believe that those behind the Niyaziv sex attacks were refugees.
There is a bizarre desire to apologize for the people committing the crimes, to desperately disassociate them from the refugees, whereas we know that many of them were refugees.
One officer told Cologne's Express newspaper, we arrested 15 people.
These people had been in Germany for only a few days or weeks.
Of these 15 people, 14 are from Syria and one is from Afghanistan.
This is the truth, even if it hurts.
He added, I had young women standing next to me crying because they no longer had any underwear after the mob had spat them out.
Police even found a list of German to Arabic translations on at least one of the suspects, with German phrases and terms like busty and I want to kiss you, I will kill you and I want to fuck, to the writers listed the Arabic meaning.
Now, I thought things looked premeditated when it was discovered that these men were using fireworks to throw into the crowd and cause confusion.
But you could always say, well, you know, maybe they weren't throwing to cause confusion.
Maybe they were just exuberant and reckless with fireworks.
They had fireworks New Year, you know, blah, blah, blah.
But I really don't see how you could say that it's not premeditated when they're found with a list of translations that are literally threatening women to have sex with them or else they would kill them.
170 mostly female victims had filed lawsuits, with reported 120 of them also being for sexual assault.
Unfortunately for them, according to at least one legal expert, the New Year's perpetrators will probably never be convicted.
Reinhard Merkel, professor of criminal law and philosophy of law at the University of Hamburg, told the newspaper he meant that virtually none of the perpetrators would be condemned.
The prerequisite for this would be a clear identification of the attackers by the victims.
The success of this compelling evidence, however, is in doubt.
And I'm not surprised.
It was chaotic, dark, there was very little CCTV footage, and the top brass amongst the authorities seem intent on, frankly, covering this up.
So is it any wonder that a professor of law is predicting that there will be no convictions for these attacks?
I really do think it's important to note, and be very clear on this, there was very definitely a cover-up on this issue by the authorities.
What we've witnessed in addition to the cover-up is known as a conspiracy of silence, which is an expression that describes the behaviour of a group of people of some size, as large as an entire national group or profession, or as small as a group of colleagues, that by unspoken consensus does not mention, discuss, or acknowledge a given subject.
The practice may be motivated by positive interest in group solidarity, or by such negative impulses as fear of political repercussion or social ostracism.
I mean, maybe that's actually giving the German authorities too much credit.
We know that they targeted hate speech after New Year's Eve.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter are working with German authorities to control speech as angry citizens react to the chaos caused by the refugees.
The deal with social media giants comes as Germans fume over 100 sexual assaults and robberies perpetrated by migrants last Friday in Cologne.
And this isn't something new.
Germany's enforcement blitz on speech laws in recent months includes a police raid on a 26-year-old man from Berlin who said he celebrated when refugees drowned on the way to Europe.
Another man named Weissmar was given five months probation, a $325 fine by a judge for making similar comments the post reported.
It certainly appears that the German authorities are attempting to censor discussion of these events or at least contain them within a very narrow and acceptable range.
Personally, I think that the German government shouldn't be allowed to do this.
I think that German citizens should be protesting that in itself.
But it gets worse, frankly.
It gets a lot worse.
Is there a cartel of silence at the police station, as one policeman reports that there have been strict instructions not to report offences of refugees?
The Cologne police are accused of having concealed the origin of alleged accomplices from the New Year's Eve attacks from supposedly political correctness.
Well, I mean, if the Rotherham case is anything to go by, that is something that can and will happen.
A spokesman for the Hessian Ministry of the Interior denied that there was any kind of order to withhold information from the press, but it was noted that they should be sensitive to the issue of the refugees.
The officer said that there were strict instructions from the board of directors not to report offences committed by refugees.
Only direct requests from media representatives to such acts should be answered.
So if this allegation is true, and you know what, I actually could believe that it is, the officer was being ordered to lie by omission by not volunteering pertinent information about what had occurred.
The policeman also said that, as many papers suggested, the perpetrators had gone there primarily in the night to steal from passers-by.
The sexual harassment was only incidental to what had happened, but in reality, it was exactly the opposite.
Primarily, it was the mostly Arab perpetrators to sex offences, or to put it from their point of view, to their sexual amusement.
And he then goes on to describe how this is a well-known phenomenon in the Arab world, Tahrarush, where a group of men circle a female victim.
The thing is, internal communication from the police from the days immediately following the attack was published by newspaper Welt am Sontag, and it reveals that the police had identified 71 of the thousand attackers by the 2nd of January, most of whom were recently arrived refugees.
Acting on this information, the police had made 11 arrests, but Chief Wolfgang Albers allegedly covered it all up because it was politically awkward.
Honestly, this sounds so similar to Rotherham, with authorities betraying the victims in order to protect the perpetrators.
It's just because of political correctness.
It's absolute madness.
It's insane that they would do this.
I guess I should really be thankful that there are still some German politicians who are not only brave enough, but capable of speaking out against the spiral of silence that appears to have gripped the German political institutions during this time.
But of course there is one group of human rights activists who you would think would be up in arms about this.
You would think they would be marching through the streets, demanding that the police and politicians stop covering up the events of Cologne and New Year's Eve so that the men who actually sexually assaulted hundreds of women could be brought to justice.
You would think that a certain human rights group would actually be leaping into action.
This would be their time to make a difference for the actual victims of these events.
Thank you.
But no.
Instead of condemning these assaults, instead of condemning the culture that tolerates a rape game like Taharush, feminists didn't do that.
They instead decided that what they would do is defend the migrants.
Like this German feminist who thinks that the racist hysteria after the attacks in various German cities hurts the victims.
This is not an unusual perspective from feminists on the issue of the Cologne New Year's Eve attacks.
In fact, they seem to be deliberately allowing other people's reactions to inhibit their own activism to help the victim.
In fact, feminists appear to be looking at this from their intersectional Marxist perspective that, in fact, German women are less oppressed than Muslim men and therefore they have to advocate for the Muslim men.
Even after they have raped German women.
I mean look at the way that feminists approach this issue with such kid gloves.
From The Guardian, let's not shy away from asking the hard questions about the cologne attacks.
Yeah, that sounds great.
Just because xenophobes are fanning the flames doesn't mean we should censor the discussion about the assaults in German cities on New Year's Eve.
Totally agree.
On New Year's Eve, something happened that I really don't want to talk about.
Why?
Why don't you want to talk about rape culture?
You are normally, normally we can't stop you from talking about it.
It's weird that now as soon as it's done by men of colour, you don't want to talk about this.
Why would you want to talk about this?
Many Germans asking why politicians, police and broadcasters seem so reluctant to discuss what happened, under cover of the crowds, and whether it's because the attackers are widely described as looking Arab or North African.
Which is why, of course, liberals like me are reluctant to talk about it.
Look, I don't think there's anything about being a liberal that means you don't have to talk about reality.
I think it's everything to do with you being a fucking progressive that means you don't want to talk about reality because now you're going to have to accept that maybe Marxist principles of oppression being applied intersectionally to situations like this are in fact not liberal at all.
There is absolutely nothing about this case that should stop an actual liberal from discussing it.
I mean, apparently, loads of feminists are speaking up, but you have to listen.
No, no, that's not on them, it's on you.
We've taken to the streets in our millions to protest sexual violence.
What more do you want?
Well, I mean condemnation of the Muslim men who committed these attacks on New Year's Eve would be a good start.
I mean just if you're curious.
Look at this.
The cologne attacks have unsurprisingly been set upon enthusiastically by those who wish to turn emotions against the new arrivals and have portrayed the incident as the result of an influx of immigrants who engage in crime and have little respect for women.
Which is actually what has happened.
So her complaint is that the attacks have been enthusiastically set upon by those who wish to accurately represent reality to the rest of the world.
Feminists are necessarily concerned with the protection of minorities and marginalized groups.
But apparently not German women, who now are not either a minority or marginalized enough for feminists to care about them over the people doing the raping and sexual assaults.
Some of them are finding it difficult to speak up about the event because of concerns it might be used to encourage aggression against refugees.
So other people's opinions and actions are enough to silence intersectional feminists.
Women are actually being assaulted and raped, and intersectional feminists, they don't care because the people doing the raping and assaulting are too brown.
And therefore, they can't talk about it.
And of course the real victims here are the feminists.
Because the fault lies not with the feminists, but with those making them nervous to speak.
The very same people often who are expressing outrage that they aren't.
Really?
Are you actually going to say it's everyone else's fault but yours that you don't have the balls to speak up in defense of victims who were assaulted by gangs participating in a rape culture?
So these were the least stupid of feminist reactions.
There were of course feminists who absolutely shat the bed and had no idea what they were fucking talking about.
You had feminists denouncing German-born men after these sex attacks.
I hate to break it to you, but German-born men also harass and rape.
Okay, that's great, but were they harassing and raping in the gangs on New Year's Eve at Cologne?
Rape culture in Germany is not an imported phenomenon.
Okay, well, how many of these rape gangs in Cologne were made up of German men?
The answer, of course, was zero.
Just let's just disregard nationality and culture altogether.
We should look to the gender of the Cologne attackers, not their race.
Well, I mean, I don't think anyone was actually talking about race.
But how exactly is that any better?
I mean, we weren't blaming all Arabs based on the fact that they are Arabs, but now you want to blame all men based on the fact that they are men.
Do you not see that it is the same bigotry dressed up in different clothing?
Apparently, the German Green Party decided to come out and say that all men are potential rapists, which is baffling why either of them would be smiling.
Love, you're about to get potentially raped.
And of course, that means that feminists think that it's time to consider a curfew for men.
Now, this is obviously the most ridiculous apex of feminist nonsense regarding these attacks, but this is where the feminist mind ends up.
It's the logical conclusion of collectivizing individual actions.
If a group of foreign-born men decide that they're going to form rape gangs, then, well, you don't want to talk about the fact they're foreign, so just talk about the fact that they're men, and what do we do then?
Well, all men are potential rapists.
Well, this therefore logically concludes with us simply criminalizing men.
Because a handful of Middle Eastern migrants come from a rape culture where it's acceptable to play these sort of games with women.
But like I said, these were fringe feminist groups, and I don't think they actually represent the majority.
I think that mainstream feminists like Laurie Penny represent the majority.
So I think it's worth taking a close look at her article, After Cologne, We Can't Let the Bigots Steal Feminism.
Why can't we always take sexual assault as seriously as we do when migrants and Muslims are involved as perpetrators?
It's weird, Laurie, that you don't seem to want to talk about those women who have been sexually assaulted.
You just don't...
You seem to want to talk about other things, like our reaction to Muslims who sexually assault.
That's what you want to talk about here.
You want to talk about the state of feminism.
You don't want to talk about these poor victims, do you?
In a perverse sort of way, it's progress.
After months of dog whistle xenophobia, European authorities have finally started to treat migrants as they would treat any other citizen.
They have achieved this by choosing to not make a fuss when migrants are accused of raping and assaulting women.
That is how Laurie Penny describes a police cover-up of the events.
She's not angry that these events have been covered up.
She thinks that this is normal.
She gives quite an accurate report into what happened.
On New Year's Eve in Cologne, Germany, hundreds of men, almost all reportedly Arabic and North African appearance, and including many asylum seekers, viciously attacked women who were celebrating in the Central Plaza, robbing and groping and tearing off clothes.
At least one rape complaint has been filed.
The police and the press were initially slow to react, and the Mayor of Cologne reacted to the eventual protests by suggesting that women should adopt a code of conduct in public and keep an arm's length distance between themselves and strange men.
Now, Laurie Penny, as a feminist, I would have expected to go fucking apeshit at the Mayor of Cologne, at the police, at the men who were doing the raping.
But no, she doesn't.
In fact, she doesn't really mind any of that.
This is what Laurie Penny's annoyed about.
It'd be great if we could take rape, sexual assault, and structural misogyny as seriously every day as we do when migrants and Muslims are involved as perpetrators.
What kind of stupid sentence is that, Laurie?
Structural misogyny!
It's something that these perpetrators were involved in, is it?
You think that these Taharush rape games are structural misogyny in Germany?
What about some more apologetics, Laurie?
The sensible thing to do in response to the cologne attacks would be to call, as many German feminists are doing, for far more rigorous attitudes to rape and sexual assault across Europe.
Oh, that makes sense.
Instead, the solution on the table seems to be clamped down on migration.
That fits in with the shibboleth that only savage foreign men and hardened criminals rape and abuse women, despite the fact that most rapes in Germany and elsewhere are committed by people known to the victim, and migrants have not been shown to be any more or less sexually aggressive than any other group.
Have they not?
I think that's only a matter of time, to be honest, Laurie, given that they actually seem to be perpetuating a rape culture.
But I like this.
The sensible thing to do in the cologne attacks would be to call for a far more rigorous attitude to rape and sexual assault across Europe.
I know why Laurie is taking this position.
She thinks that individual instances of sexual assault and rape in Europe are exactly as bad as an organized rape gang taking part in Taharush.
She's insane.
But the thing is, her response is what I really am enjoying, because it's so deliciously hypocritical.
Laurie's response and the response of many feminists on this issue along these lines, which has been the majority in my experience, is very reminiscent of a reverse of hashtags Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter.
One of the main complaints from Black Lives Matter activists against the hashtag All Lives Matter is that we are currently talking about Black Lives.
It doesn't mean that all lives don't matter.
And you may well have seen this charming little cartoon doing the rounds.
Well, I think that all lives matter.
We should care exactly equally at all times about everything.
All houses matter, and that's why we're not going to pour water on the house that's on fire.
Well, hell, I kind of think that this might be analogous to the feminist response to the cologne attacks in New Year's Eve.
Let me see if I can help out feminists who don't probably don't understand why this is analogous.
I'll tell you, I'll modify the cartoon just slightly so they can see why people are so angry at feminists.
So now it would read, well, I think that all rapes matter, says Laurie Penny.
We should care exactly equally at all times about everything.
All rapes matter.
This is why people are so angry about feminists so thoroughly dropping the ball over the cologne rapes and sexual assaults on New Year's Eve.
You should be on this.
Don't try and say, well, it's this bad everywhere.
It's not this bad everywhere.
This was a concerted, organized effort, literally in advance, to go and molest women.
This is not people who happen to know they're rapist.
One-off incidents between people who know each other.
Individual occurrences.
This was an organized rape culture.
And more than that, it was covered up by the fucking authorities.
Come on, you don't care about the victims, you fucking liars.
Look at how these people are being treated.
Migrant rape fears spread across Europe.
Women are told not to go out at night alone after assaults carried out in Sweden, Finland, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland amid warnings that the gangs are coordinating attacks.
Where the fuck are you?
Why are you...
Oh, but don't blame the migrants.
Don't blame the migrants.
Well, I'm sorry.
There do seem to be a remarkable number of migrants committing these attacks.
It's not all the migrants, and I agree that the migrants who aren't doing anything shouldn't be blamed.
But you guys sticking your heads in the sand and saying, well, it's nothing to do with them.
Don't be racist, is ridiculous.
We're not talking about race.
I mean, look at this.
Cologne sexual assault victim called a racist and harassed after simply identifying her attackers.
Where are the feminists?
Where are you?
Why aren't you objecting to this?
Why instead of feminists criticizing papers for having racist covers when portraying the events of the cologne fucking attacks?
We have an example here of a Syrian refugee who allowed smugglers to rape his wife as payment for trafficking them into Europe.
Where is the objection?
Where is the fucking objection?
Why don't you care about his wife?
Why don't you care about this woman who has been raped as payment to get to Europe?
Thing is, I think I can tell you why.
I think I can tell you why.
And I think that it's honestly one of the most despicable things about feminism.
I know I've been talking about feminism for quite a while now, but I covered all of the important stuff, I think, earlier on in the video.
Cologne attacks.
Our response must be against sexual violence and not race, says feminists.
Okay, that's great.
Let's talk about the individual occurrences of sexual violence.
We had 71 of them arrested.
We have a guy here, one individual.
It's not about his race.
It's about the fact that he allowed a terrible thing to happen to his wife.
Where is your objection?
But look at this, right?
It's harmful for all of us if feminism is exploited by extremists to incite against certain ethnicities, as is being currently done in the discussions surrounding the incidents in Cologne.
You are trying to protect feminism as an ideology.
You're not a women's rights activist.
You're not trying to protect the rights of women.
Because if you were, you would be angry at the same things that the people you hate are angry at.
Instead, you're annoyed that now your own standards are being used against you and you are failing them horribly and you're faming them because you're afraid of looking like racists.
It doesn't matter that there are women getting assaulted.
It doesn't matter there are victims going without aid or care or comfort.
It doesn't matter.
There are victims actually being insulted and harassed over social media because they are victims.
It doesn't matter.
There's a fucking rape culture.
None of this fucking matters.
So you goddamn hypocrites.
You're like, well, don't drag feminism into this.
No, fuck you.
Fuck you.
This is something you have to deal with.
You've been sat there preaching about this for so goddamn long.
No, it's not just going to go away.
Oh, but one in three women over the age of 15 has experienced physical or sexual assault.
Oh yeah, I forgot.
All rapes matter.
All rapes matter all the time.
I forgot.
I'm so fucking sorry.
How dare anyone want to talk about a specific set of occurrences at a specific time, a specific place done by a specific group of fucking people?
How dare they?
We should be talking about all fucking rapes mattering all the time, you fucking hypocrites.
And all this talk of, oh, we don't want to inflame the right wing.
We don't want to encourage bigots or give them ammunition.
You are so fucking stupid as not to see that your refusal to accept and acknowledge and deal with the actual problem that everyone, millions of people are concerned about, is driving them straight into the hands of the bigoted extremist right-wing neo-Nazi fascists that you claim to hate so much.
I guess it must be something to do with you guys being fucking Marxists as to why you hate these people so much because I personally don't give a shit about them.
I really don't.
They are, or they were, a tiny fringe minority that nobody else cared about.
But you guys decided to criminalize talking about the facts.
You decided to make it impossible to have a measured, reasonable discussion and debate about something that actually needs talking about.
And so now, I mean, look at this.
German interior minister, right-wing chat rooms are at least as awful as the Cologne sex attacks.
Listen, as someone coming from the left, I'm trying to tell you something you need to understand.
You, by completely controlling and tyrannically demanding the dialogue be as you say it is, are encouraging the growth of these political movements.
You are driving people there because they have no moderate, centrist, left-leaning place to discuss the actual facts of the issue because you shut it down by screaming, racist, every fucking time.
And now you have actual racist groups that are on the rise.
They're gaining prominence because the things that they are saying, that it's gangs of Muslim men who are raping native European women, are true.
What happened when a bunch of right-wing demonstrators understandably demonstrated outside of Cologne's Cathedral about these attacks?
They got fucking water cannoned.
So what happens when you have thousands of right-wing extremists who have this great depth of feeling they actually have a legitimate complaint and the public discourse is shutting them down?
They're being oppressed by their own fucking government.
They're not allowed to express themselves.
They can't deal with this issue.
What do they do?
They start forming vigilante gangs.
That's what they do.
Because you have excluded them from the public dialogue.
They start forming vigilante gangs and their numbers are fucking growing, you dumbasses.
I am absolutely sure that the average Finnish person wants soldiers of Odin, anti-migrant extremist groups, patrolling the streets as much as they want groups of rapey migrants running around molesting their women.
Because this shit is really getting out of control.
It's really getting out of control.
And I think the stifling of the public dialogue has been one of the major factors.
I mean, look at that.
There has been a significant amount of political fallout, right?
The police chief in Cologne has been fired.
Sorry, sent him to early retirement because of his part in the cover-up of this information.
He's not going to be punished for the cover-up.
He's not nothing like that.
He's just gone into early retirement.
Even such a pro-refugee ideologue as Merkel has said, look, the crisis is now out of control.
She has actually been forced to change her position on the refugee issue, and Germany is now turning away migrants.
There is even talk of deportions, which I would never have predicted before the events of Cologne and New Year's Eve.
Never have thought.
What's really interesting about this is that it could be that Merkel's laissez-faire refugee welcome policy may well have been unconstitutional, according to a judge.
Not being any kind of authority on German constitutional law, I really can't comment, but this is just what I've found.
And it may well be that there are lawsuits filed against Merkel for her actions during this crisis.
I'm sure it will come as a surprise to precisely nobody that support for refugees in Germany is falling.
When asked whether Germany had too many refugees, 62% of Germans polled said that there are too many refugees in Germany.
Again, who can blame them?
Interestingly, German women are now more likely than men to oppose the current levels of migration, which had previously not been the case.
So after all of this, I really do think it's important to really actually take a look at the migrants themselves, because yes, it was a small number of migrants out of the total that was committing these crimes, and these individuals should indeed be punished.
Of course.
There's no doubt about it.
They shouldn't be given any leniency or anything like that.
But I do think that we should remember not to abandon our principles and not simply presume the guilt of the other migrants by association.
As I've said before, I strongly feel that any economic migrants should simply be sent back to where they've come from, and any war refugees from Syria should be taken in and treated as if they are war refugees.
And I do think it's important to recognise that not all of these refugees are the total fucking savages who would take part in Faharamush.
In fact, it is the overwhelming minority of them that do.
And there have actually been demonstrations by Syrian refugees in condemnation of the mass assaults by migrants, which really I think is about the best that anyone could actually expect of them.
So apparently refugee and Syrian Germans have posted pictures of themselves holding up signs with the message, Syrians Against Sexism, on Facebook.
More than a thousand refugees are expected to attend an anti-sexism protest outside of Cologne Cathedral, the site of the attacks.
And local media has reported that a group of male refugees from Syria was handing out leaflets on the streets of Cologne to decry the attacks on New Year's Eve.
A translation of the letter is as follows.
We men from Syria condemn in the strongest possible terms abuse against women and the attack and robberies on New Year's Eve.
We regret that women were injured physically and in their honour.
We hope that they will recover well and soon from these attacks.
We hope that the perpetrators of these criminal acts will be found and punished.
Our cultural values were trampled by these crimes.
Those values include respect for women and men, respect for bodily integrity and respect for personal property.
We Syrians have come to Germany as refugees because we want to live freely in this democratic society.
We want to shape, to speak, and to live democracy.
We regret that the acts on New Year's Eve have brought our group, a group of Syrians, a group of refugees and of other Arab or North African people, and our culture into disrepute.
We have fled an inhuman war in order to save our lives and our ability to remain human.
We want peace and security and the opportunity to provide for our families through work.
We thank all of the people in Germany, both women and men, for all of the help they have so far offered us.
We want to show ourselves worthy of your help.
We remain united.
Your values are our values.
Germany has done more for us than any other European or Arab country.
I really think it's important to bear in mind that the Syrian refugees aren't a group.
You know, they didn't sign up together.
There's no governing body who determines who becomes a Syrian refugee.
And so, if bad elements decide to come with a group of refugees who are legitimately fleeing a war, what can you do?
You know, and if you're a Syrian refugee, what can you do other than hand out letters saying, look, I'm so sorry, you know, and these poor guys are these poor guys are apologizing for things that they didn't do.
They're apologising for things other people do.
And I can't stand that.
I can't stand that they are going to be held accountable.
And yet they kind of are.
I do think it's important to remember that we in the West believe in the presumption of innocence.
We don't go on witch hunts.
And we don't blame people for things they didn't do.
And I do think that there is a probably minority of people in the Arab world who don't agree with the retrograde ideas that Islam holds about women.
These attacks were condemned by people from the Arab world on social media.
So the hashtags Germany and Cologne were used more than 17,000 and 2,500 times each.
And so, I mean, it does seem that there are people who are politically aware and concerned about these issues in the Arab world.
So I don't want to just, I don't want to just lump them all into the same category.
I don't want to condemn them all with the same broad stroke of a brush.
You know, it's unfair.
It's not right to do so.
And by the same token, I'm sure that these people would probably willingly tell you that Islam contains a lot of bad ideas about women.
And Arab Middle Eastern culture has a lot of very, very bad cultural practices when it comes to women.
And I think that really we should be trying to change that.
I really think so.
I'm not content to just say, well, that's the way they are in their culture.
well, then the way they are is wrong and it needs to change.
It's not, I don't think it's acceptable.
I really don't.
And, I mean, I'm not normally a fan of this sort of thing, but you've got, like, Norway and Belgium have decided to launch respect for women classes for refugees and migrants.
It is basically the same as feminists saying, well, teach men not to rape.
But, I mean, at least in this case, there is a genuine cultural difference.
And it does genuinely seem to be a case where education on the subject is actually needed.
So, whereas normally I would be very much against this sort of patronizing technique in principle, it really does seem that there is just a cluster of bad ideas that need to be, if not discarded entirely, at least reformed for the modern era.
Because, you know, it's 2016.
Finally, I commissioned a piece of artwork that you can find in the description, and I hope you enjoy.
It's by a wonderful chap called Brent Cherry, who I've left a link to his Twitter as well, who you should also follow.
He's a very nice guy, very creative, and he does some fantastic infographics that really are well worth a share.
But anyway, this is what a feminist sounds like when they stitch their mouths shut with intersectionalism.
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