Hundreds of women assaulted in German NYE celebrations

[ViolentPanda]

what has this to do with cologne?

The attackers were wearing aftershave?

 

[Celyn]

I was only there on a sort of schools group visit. Main memory of Cologne is that a boy managed to explode a bottle of Sekt or similar in his face, therefore a need to go to hospital, which is probably when our supposed group leaders might have eventually realised that it would have been a good idea if even one of them spoke any German.

 

[Celyn]

The attackers were wearing aftershave?

using Brut force?

 

[Pickman's model]

I was only there on a sort of schools group visit. Main memory of Cologne is that a boy managed to explode a bottle of Sekt or similar in his face, therefore a need to go to hospital, which is probably when our supposed group leaders might have eventually realised that it would have been a good idea if even one of them spoke any German.

the one phrase you need, ime, is 'sprechen sie englisch bitte'

 

[treelover]

Pubs and clubs in German town of Freiburg forbid refugees | News | DW.COM | 23.01.2016


In Frieiburg, a self proclaimed liberal city, University Town, a number of clubs and bars are banning all refugees, I wonder where all this is going to lead?

 

[Pickman's model]

Pubs and clubs in German town of Freiburg forbid refugees | News | DW.COM | 23.01.2016


Frieiburg, a self proclaimed liberal city is banning all refugees from its pubs and clubs, I wonder where all this is going to lead.

now, perhaps you could enlighten us about the relevance of rt in calais to nye in cologne.

 

[Pickman's model]

Pubs and clubs in German town of Freiburg forbid refugees | News | DW.COM | 23.01.2016


Frieiburg, a self proclaimed liberal city is banning all refugees from a number of its pubs and clubs, I wonder where all this is going to lead?

your comprehension skills leave much to be desired if you read

Freiburg, Germany prides itself on being the country's "Green City," a friendly, open place where a family of four is more likely to own a tandem bike than a station wagon.

as

freiburg is a self-proclaimed liberal city

in addition to which it isn't the city doing the banning but a group of bars and clubs.

for you remedial reading beckons, treelover.

 

[treelover]

I changed it, and RE Calais, its about the proportion of dangerous people who seem to be moving in along with the refugees, ok public school pedant.

 

[treelover]

Stretched to the Limit: Has the German State Lost Control? - SPIEGEL ONLINE

"Easy" is the German abbreviation for Primary Distribution of Asylum-Seekers and it was designed exclusively to help spread the refugees out among the 16 federal states according to quotas set by the German government. New arrivals don't even have to provide a name under the system. They only have to state their country of origin and their familial connection to other refugees.

Many new arrivals are simply waved into Germany by border officials without even taking any personal data. It often takes days after they enter into the country before they first come into contact with "Easy," often in a refugee camp. In some cases, asylum-seekers are given temporary ID cards for the camps that include the name they provided. In others, they are just given colored wristbands that give them access to food and services.

In many places, refugees simply disappear soon after arrival, without anyone knowing where they've gone. The operators of some asylum-seeker camps, like one in the state of Hesse outside of Frankfurt, report a disappearance rate among refugees as high as 50 percent within the first two days after arrival.

Very worrying

 

[Pickman's model]

RE Calais, its about the proportion of dangerous people who seem to be moving in along with the refugees

just to clarify: for you people who are dangerous are not refugees, but must be separated from the refugees.

 

[Pickman's model]

Stretched to the Limit: Has the German State Lost Control? - SPIEGEL ONLINE

what do you think?

 

[treelover]

Just do one will you, haven't you got another errant poster to stalk?

 

[Pickman's model]

Just do one will you, haven't you got another errant poster to stalk?

i am not stalking you. and you know i am not stalking you. your use of the term demeans the experiences of people who really are stalked in real life: and makes you look stupider than before, which is imo no mean feat.

now, do you think the german state has lost control?

 

[Anudder Oik]

i am not stalking you. and you know i am not stalking you. your use of the term demeans the experiences of people who really are stalked in real life: and makes you look stupider than before, which is imo no mean feat.

now, do you think the german state has lost control?

The article says directly that the state stands disgraced and trust is vanishing. The Independent today states that tensions are still rising over the NYE events. The state has lost control in that respect.

The Spiegel article also claims that currently, several thousand people from the Maghreb region are slated for deportation from Germany, but they haven't had to leave because the state, in many respects, has become powerless to act.

Powerless to act against criminals?

I know that in Spain, of the thousands of maghreb pickpockets, who fleeced barcelona for years on end, most of the time they got fines, veryt few were deported. Apparently the trick consists in always having a court case pending, that way they get to stay and carry on as usual. Same thing is happening now with the 300 eastern criminals who work the metro in BCN.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Powerless to act against capital at any event ...

 

[bimble]

A question that the left has failed utterly to answer is how we confront a new style of criminality. It is of no use saying "oh it's criminality and nothing to do with culture" because it is to do with culture - a criminal subculture. Taharrush gamea is not carried out by European criminals, it is carried out by criminals who have arrived from other parts of the world.

Agree completely with the thinking behind your post but.. What on earth use is the word 'criminal' here ? What does it help with?

 

[ItWillNeverWork]

Agree completely with the thinking behind your post but.. What on earth use is the word 'criminal' here ? What does it help with?

What word would you use?

 

[bimble]

What word would you use?

I'm suggesting that it's a total copout to just call them "criminal' as if that explains anything because the rules about what is criminal are constantly evolving and very place and time specific. I mean, to use 'criminal' as a byword for morally not ok is .. a bit dodgy to say the least and explains nothing about what happened to women on NYE far as I can see.

 

[ItWillNeverWork]

I'm suggesting that it's a total copout to just call them "criminal' as if that explains anything because the rules about what is criminal are constantly evolving and very place and time specific. I mean, to use 'criminal' as a byword for morally not ok is .. a bit dodgy to say the least and explains nothing about what happened to women on NYE far as I can see.

I still don't follow. What is not criminal about mass sexual assault?

 

[bimble]

It's totally criminal in Germany yes of course, and morally repugnant. I'm probably trying to peddle a degree of cultural relativism that people here don't really have a stomach for .

 

[Bernie Gunther]

The majority of victims were robbed and many sexually assaulted.

"Criminal" doesn't seem like an unreasonable word to use in that context.

What makes you want to avoid it and what alternative terms do you prefer that you think urbanites couldn't stomach?

 

[ItWillNeverWork]

It's totally criminal in Germany yes of course, and morally repugnant. I'm probably trying to peddle a degree of cultural relativism that people here don't really have a stomach for .

So basically you want to argue that these men did it because of Islam?

 

[bimble]

So basically you want to argue that these men did it because of Islam?

Please kindly read my earlier post in which I try to explain why specifically not that.

 

[ItWillNeverWork]

Please kindly read my earlier post in which I try to explain why specifically not that.

The thread has been moving pretty quickly and I haven't had time to keep up with it. Can you link to you post please?

 

[bimble]

The majority of victims were robbed and many sexually assaulted.

"Criminal" doesn't seem like an unreasonable word to use in that context.

What makes you want to avoid it and what alternative terms do you prefer that you think urbanites couldn't stomach?

Ok. Never mind. It was just an outburst of criminality. I don't want this to come out wrong but sometimes on this thread I've wondered whether it makes a difference that so few of you are women who have experience of being elsewhere apart from here in cosy liberal modern western cities or whatever.

 

[ItWillNeverWork]

Ok. Never mind. It was just an outburst of criminality. I don't want this to come out wrong but sometimes on this thread I've wondered whether it makes a difference that so few of you are women who have experience of being elsewhere apart from here in cosy liberal modern western cities or whatever.

No. It's coordinated criminality of a particular sort, imported from a particular region of the world. N.African and Middle Eastern criminals will have ways of operating that are qualitatively different to German criminals. That was the whole point of my initial post when I spoke about criminal subcultures differing from place to place.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Ok. Never mind. It was just an outburst of criminality. I don't want this to come out wrong but sometimes on this thread I've wondered whether it makes a difference that so few of you are women who have experience of being elsewhere apart from here in cosy liberal modern western cities or whatever.

Who said it was "just an outburst of criminality"?

 

[coley]

It's totally criminal in Germany yes of course, and morally repugnant.

I'm probably trying to peddle a degree of cultural relativism that people here don't really have a stomach for .

Or understand, I certainly don't? they were/are criminals, no better or worse than a bunch of football hooligans,

 

[planetgeli]

A question that the left has failed utterly to answer is how we confront a new style of criminality. It is of no use saying "oh it's criminality and nothing to do with culture" because it is to do with culture - a criminal subculture. Taharrush gamea is not carried out by European criminals, it is carried out by criminals who have arrived from other parts of the world. If you wan't to tackle it and defeat it, that fact has to be acknowledged. If we don't, the narrative will (and I fear already has been) lost to the far-right.

Since when was sexual harassment new?

In recent days, a new term has suddenly appeared in the media to describe a supposedly Arab cultural practice: "taharrush gamea." The term, which is misspelled (the second word should read gama'ei), just means "group harassment" in Arabic, but right-wing commentators are trying their hardest to convince you that it actually means "sexual assault by a bunch of Arab men" or "gang-rape game" and that it's a normal thing in the Arab World.

They're wrong, of course, on all fronts. But the invention of the term and the sudden currency it has gained in the mainstream Western media tells a darker tale of how xenophobic right-wing groups in Europe have cynically used reports of sexual violence against women to further a deeply racist, anti-refugee agenda....

...within days a new phrase emerged: "taharrush gamea." In their report on the violence, Cologne police took an Arabic phrase that translates directly to "group harassment," garbled its pronunciation, and then described it as a "modus operandi" in the Arab world...

...
Unsurprisingly, the use of an Arabic phrase to describe what was now being thought of as a supposedly Arabic cultural phenomenon spurred commentators across the political spectrum to begin speculating how Arabs had brought it there.

To those who have followed the issue of sexual harassment in the Arab world, the sudden appearance of "taharrush gamea" in German or English is bizarre. As I mentioned above, the term has perfectly suitable equivalents in other languages, to describe an issue that unfortunately occurs all over the world: sexual harassment. Germans have only to look at Oktoberfest (where the sexual violence is so bad they've had to set up "sanctuaries" for women) or other mass drunken gatherings to remember that, unfortunately, misogynistic men from many different cultural backgrounds engage in sexual harassment.

In Egypt, where the phenomenon supposedly originates, mass sexual harassment is just as shocking to average people as it is anywhere else...

...
That is not to say that sexual harassment or sexism in general are not major problems in Egypt or in other parts of the Arab World. They definitely are, and feminist groups there have for years been confronting the troubling violence women face in many aspects of their lives.

But "taharrush gamea" is by no means a common practice in Egypt nor anywhere else in the Arab World. It is not surprising that right-wing commentators in the West quickly adopted the explanation that mass sexual harassment was part of Arabic culture;...

...Of course (our) culture has a word for "taharrush gamea": the word is "group harassment. But rendering the term in Arabic makes it scarier and more exotic, suggesting it is part of a timeless, unchanging Arab culture. And by ascribing the phenomenon to that culture, the author is implying that white men don't sexually harass women in groups or engage in gang-rape - a conclusion which is patently untrue.

Sexism is not an imported product. Until 1997, under German law men could legally rape their wives, and even today less than 10% of rape trials end in convictions. Sexual assault statistics themselves are notoriously unreliable, as the vast majority of victims do not report their attackers. But a 2013 global survey estimated that one in three women around the world will face sexual violence in their lives. For the "Eastern Mediterranean," that figure was just above 36%, while for "high-income countries" like Germany it was nearly 33%.

In the United States, for comparison, government surveys report around 50% of women have suffered some form of sexual victimization and around 20% have experienced rape. One-fifth of women who attend college report being sexually assaulted during those four years of their lives alone.

The fact that so many commentators are focusing on a supposedly cultural dimension to the Cologne violence highlights the growing fear that the moral outrage is guided more by racism against refugees than concern for women...

...We should definitely be concerned about women's safety, there is no question about it. We must demand that German police deal with individuals accused of sexual assault - all of them, of whatever background - in a way that prioritizes women's voices and right to the public sphere.

But it's possible to demand women's safety and not get sucked into racist explanations that blame "Arab culture" instead of asking larger questions about why men feel entitled to women's bodies in public and why the police failed to take seriously women's concerns that night...

...It's about the way society treats sexual violence, and when it decides to care. We need to discuss the roots of sexual violence and the reasons men feel that they have control over women's bodies, and address the structures of patriarchy and rape culture that have made sexual harassment on the streets, at school, at the office, and at home so common for so many millions of women. This mean interrogating both what attitudes in the families of asylum-seekers make violence against women acceptable as well as what attitudes in the families of white Germans make violence against women acceptable...

...We need to take sexual violence of all forms seriously, and not just when the attackers are of foreign background. Adopting foreign terms like "taharrush gamea" won't erase the reality of how endemic sexual violence is to our own culture as well.

Neither Taharrush Gamea Nor Sexism Are Arab 'Cultural Practices'

 

[Pickman's model]

Since when was sexual harassment new?



Neither Taharrush Gamea Nor Sexism Are Arab 'Cultural Practices'

just as everything in your quote already said on the thread. and by posters themselves.