I’ve been reading on Reddit the situation of the attacks on women in Cologne and now it appears to have been organised in part by the very Asylum seekers that Germany took on, not only that, but it’s rumoured that the authorities tried to downplay the situation due to the sensitive nature of them being asylum seekers and refugees from Syria.
I really don’t understand how someone has the mindset of coming to Germany, of who have the good graces to let them stay there, support them, and then think it’s alright to go around with a few others and organise attacks on women.
They’re pretty much handed the gauntlet to PEDIGA and the likes who warned of such things happening if the EU allowed millions of refugees to settle here.
How do you destroy a mindset ingrained in a culture that has determined that if a woman dresses a certain way, that she is ‘Fair game?’
This shit, happening in multiple countries, is definitely going to strengthen the anti-refugee crowd. To be fair, the ones initially mentioned in the independent article who were arrested are long time residents but it seems like it goes way beyond those 3.
What would make you believe that just because they came to Germany they’d suddenly magically become other people? Would you become another person with an entirely different set of values, if you moved to Germany?
What happened was that as per the Cologne (why can’t you say Køln like everybody else?!) major, girls should learn to keep an arm’s length distance to men and only move in groups. Also: properly conservative dressed, demure with downcast eyes, and down leave home unless accompanied by a male relative.
The biggest problem with Muslim immigrants isn’t that they’re uneducated, or unproductive, or that terrorists may hide within their ranks. It is that by and large, even fairly liberal Muslims do not want to genuinely socially integrate into the existing populations, and especially when it comes to social norms and behaviors. This isn’t unique to Muslims, of course–this is true to some extent for any immigrants from a significantly different culture–but it seems to be particularly ingrained in Muslims, and in particular, the view of the role of women as subservient and/or needing to be protected to an extreme. Andrea Merkel seems to get bashed every time she says this from both sides on the immigration issue, but the lack of assimilation makes it both difficult for Muslims to find housing and work, and ferments social unrest.
Lest we be too proud of our own enlightenment, we should recognize the way that Islamic cultures treat women today is little different than the developed world treated all women sixty or seventy years ago, and much of that behavior was justified on cultural and religious grounds as well (and still is in some places). We’re expecting immigrants to make that leap of decades instantly, and in their lack of doing so regard their behavior as atavistic. What is needed is a culture shift which still allows Muslims to be respected in their faith but to moderate their social views on the role of women and in other areas, such as the regard of “apostates”, and recognize that “The Prophet’s commandments” about such reflect the mores and conditions of a very different time.
Modern day Germany, of course, is the same ground where Catholics and various Protestants took turns killing the ever-loving shit out of everybody in sight all in the name of their respective religious and social beliefs, so we can hold out some hope that the Muslim populations of Europe, exposed to modern ideas of liberty, freedom, and egalitarianism may come to the same position, but recall that it took the Christians about three centuries to get to a comfortable stalemate to the point that no one was really calling for anyone else’s head.
That’s true, but 60-70 years is still a fairly long time. Besides, the gap is growing all the time. If Islamic cultures were on the cusp of a sexual revolution that’d be one thing, but it seems like a lot of them have a huge amount of ground to cover before they get to where we were decades ago.
Also, as an aside, the silence from prominent rape-culture obsessed feminist writers on this scandal has been positively deafening, particularly since we know from past experience that if this was a plot on Game of Thrones they’d be going apeshit.
With all due respect Stranger, bringing up that we were just as bad 100-200 years ago is of little comfort or value. And we can most assuredly expect them to obey our laws the instant they cross the border. Of course, hard to enforce if we 100’s of thousands at a time.
Yeah, Western women in the 1940s and before were downtrodden little things, fearful of offending men and hidden away indoors.
Actually rape was a death offence from ancient Rome to Mediaeval times: swinging them stopped in English law in the 1840s, but it was replaced with imprisonment for life. Which wasn’t a picnic in 19th century prisons.
It wasn’t the same in Eastern countries so much. Depended whom you raped probably.
Which is not to say that muslims don’t have useful insights on gender relations that we can adopt. I have recently been enthused with the muslim Shia invention of Mut’ah, Fixed-Term Marriages, legal with the Twelvers ( the major Shia ). Instead of people being forced to stay in a loveless, boring marriage, it can instead be fixed in advance to 3 days, 3 months, or 3 years., after which both parties can go their own way in friendship and amity. The only caveat being the woman has to refrain from sex for a while after.
I’m not trying to excuse the attitude; merely to show where it comes from and why it will be difficult to change. For Christianity, it took several hundred years and five generations-long war to keep get two factions of a common religious tradition to stop reflexively killing one another, and another three centuries before women were more or less treated as equals even in developed industrial countries. I personally find the attitudes repugnant, particularly the self-proclaimed “moderate” Muslims who attempt to justify the more subtle repression in couched terms of “protecting women” and “cultural sensitivity”, because they are perpetuating a mentality that we’ve long recognized to be detrimental to society at large. The majority of the Muslim-dominated world (the Middle East and much of Saharan Africa) is in a cultural state that is essentially equivalent to pre-Enlightenmen Europe, and that isn’t going to change quickly, nor do the majority of immigrants from those societies seem interested in assimilating into Western culture. But to be fair, we’ve had to abandon much of the precepts of fundamentalist Christianity to get to the same point, and the repression of women was never as firmly entrenched into Christianity as it is in Islam. I don’t think there are any simple solutions, and this is going to be a problem for any nation which accepts asylum-seekers as many European nations are already well-aware. It’s unfortunate, because the Muslim world was once a beacon of scholarship during repressive times in Europe, and still produces a wealth of educated and talented people today.
Whose math? I would dispute that 70 years ago women in the West were treated pretty much the way women are treated in the Islamic [Greater] MENA* today. If anyone would like back up that assertion, I’d be interested in hearing the argument.
*I use that territory since that is where the refugees are coming from. No need to bring Indonesia into this (whether it would help or hurt the argument I don’t know) since Indonesian refugees aren’t streaming into Europe.
It sounds like this is more about recent immigrants thinking that German Girls are Easy, rather then these guys trying to put non-Muslim Germans women into burqas.
What is the ratio of men:women coming in? It it’s high, then it should be no surprise that bringing in a bunch of unattached men is going to raise sexual tensions in areas where lots of these unattached men reside.
??? a night of groping because they think the women are easy?
this was at a rail station next to a cathedral. It’s the equivalent of going to Iran and assaulting women in front of a Mosque.
They didn’t randomly find themselves at that location. They were shooting fireworks into the crowd and were in sufficient numbers to overwhelm the police.
I’m sorry but what you wrote here would be appropriate if this story was about a couple of refugees robbing a store. We’re talking about mob sex assaults in multiple cities on the same night. "A few bad apples " ain’t gonna cut it.
Germany has taken in about 800,000 refugees in 2015.
If a mere 1% of them are “bad apples” that’s 8000 criminals. More than sufficient numbers to account for the miscreants on NYE, which likely numbered in the 100’s at most.
You’re not taking into account the sheer number of people that flowed into Germany in one year.