The recent sexual assault in Cologne of women on New Year’s Eve has shocked the nation. As many as 1000 men, allegedly set upon women and made them run a gauntlet as they were grabbed, their clothes ripped, and their bodies groped. Police sources and witnesses have said that many were refugees — triggering renewed objections over a spate of rapes and assaults of women in the country attributed to recent immigrants. To make matters worse for the government, newspapers are reporting that one man told police “I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly. Mrs Merkel invited me.” The result has been a rising tide of criticism of Merkel for her open-door policy. Yet, that criticism may now be muted by a move by the government to crackdown on anti-immigration comments as a form of “hate speech.” As we discussed today with the effort to ban Donald Trump, free speech is being rolled back in Europe under hate crime and anti-discrimination laws as an alarming rate. It is particularly worrisome when the government is under attack on an issue like immigration and responds by prosecuting people for such criticism. News reports indicate that 18 of the 31 known suspects from Cologne were asylum seekers, including “nine Algerians, eight Moroccans, five Iranians, four Syrians, an Iraqi, a Serbian, an American and two German nationals.
We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in France (here and here and here and here and here and here) and England ( here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). Much of this trend is tied to the expansion of hate speech and non-discrimination laws. We have seen comedians targeted with such court orders under this expanding and worrisome trend. (here and here).
Prosecutors are charging people who are “inciting hatred” in Germany by speaking out against immigrants and their impact on German society. Prosecutors and judges are determining what criticism will be allowed and what will be treated as criminal. In the meantime, the government has reached a deal with Facebook, Google and Twitter to crackdown on Internet speech. It is an effort to create the artificial appearance of agreement and tolerance by denying free speech to critics.
While it is still not clear how many of the Cologne attackers were immigrants (as many as 22 have been identified as refugees), the incident has been a flashpoint as numerous stories of women and girls being harassed about their clothing or assaulted by immigrants. For example, a 26-year-old Berlin man’s home was raided by police, who confiscated his computer and phones after he had posted the image of a dead 3-year-old Syrian boy on a Turkish beach and wrote “We are not mourning, we are celebrating!” A disgusting comment and one that is worthy public condemnation. However, it is also an act of free speech.
Nevertheless, many citizens are celebrating the denial of their own free speech rights. So long as they disagree with the speakers, there appears little concern over the rising tide of censorship and criminalization of speech. People are now unsure what they can say about immigration, which is precisely the chilling effect that governments seek in such measure. The result is a forced silence . . . which is golden for governments like Merkel’s that do not like what they are hearing.
Dieter, Don’t you love having someone living in the US lecturing you on Germany. You have the patience of Job, good woman. I would have told the sanctimonious Education Industry bureaucrat to go defecate in his beret.
Fascinating thread. It appears a few have terminal BDS. Hopefully, w/ that disabling mental condition, they aren’t able to purchase firearms.
Spoken like a woman, DBQ 🙂
A man would choose a central mass shot over a groin shot….
po….your lack reading comprehension is showing again..
Read my comment again———>A central body mass shot is much more effective and less likely to miss.
DBQ, get off your outrage and reread me…comprehension issue, eh?
Any man would choose being shot in the chest than in the groin…. so am telling you that the best thing you can do as a woman, and the worse thing for the man, is to shoot him in the groin.
Take my advice or leave it, your choice!
If the people aren’t allowed to speak, how will the “representative” government know what to do?
How can any people enjoy freedom if people aren’t required to live with the results of freedom?
Oh, I get it. Dictatorial global communism got rid of representative republicanism a long time ago.
Who the hell does Merkel think she is? Can voters outvote their constitution or vote to violate innate and accepted, natural rights like freedom of thought, speech, press, assembly, religion, etc.
Angela Merkel reminds me of the tyrant and despot, Crazy Abe Lincoln, who illegally and unconstitutionally ignored legal secession and suspended Habeas Corpus among all the other illegal and unconstitutional acts he committed during his “Reign of Terror.” How about those wild and crazy folks who have availed themselves of their innate, God-given right to secede in Catalonia, Scotland, West Virginia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and the entire, late USSR? I wonder if Merkel has associated the dictator, Lincoln, with the psychotic husband who beats the hell out of his wife in order to force her to say in his marriage and in his house? Take it easy, Abe!
Seems like the people breaking the rules are supposed to be defined as traitors committing treason.
And the punishment for treason in Britain, until the 18th century, was Drawing and Quartering.
How apropos.
Those pesky French folks rolled out the guillotines and had a bloody-good party, now didn’t they?
“As for your It is the brand name of the most virulent disease currently ravaging Europe and beyond., thank you for finally coming out of the closet and revealing yourself in all your bigoted glory 🙂 Finally!”
Your welcome Po. If you consider naming a threat bigoted then so be it. You have been very vocal in identifying what you consider a threat and I have not been so ignorant as to claim it’s because you are a bigot. I spent most of my Navy career in a Cold War against communism. Does that make me a bigot against Russians or any nation that posed a threat to our national security? Should a woman that is being assaulted by a man avoid “identifying” her assailant because it’s not politically correct?
EVERYTHING on this planet is identified as something and in your world, extremism conducted by a culture self-identified as being motivated by Islam shall not be named. Your defense of this religion has clouded your judgment. I have a Palestinian-born American friend who has no problem identifying these extremists for what they are. He is a Muslim and when I have explained how you are defending these people his response is that “she is what’s wrong with our faith.”
I don’t need your benefit of the doubt; never have and never will. You see I have never tried to cover for ANY group violating the natural rights of others, but you knee-jerk to some moral equivalency argument when it comes to atrocities perpetrated by self-identified Islamic Extremists.
Nicely done!
I don’t know, Olly, naming a religion of 2 billion people a virulent disease sounds very bigoted to me! Unless it is just ignorant? I get confused considering how both are so prevalent here. Unlike you however, I have yet to call Christianity a virulent disease, that would be pretty idiotic of me.
Nor have I made the many to bear the burden of the few, that would be equally idiotic. The threat I have identified is the white male militia with Christian right leanings… and that was before the Malheur take over… and that includes most of the 353 mass shootings that took place this year alone.
Unless white male militia of christian right wing leanings defines Christianity?
You tell me!
To try to frame this debate in terms of what to call whom is pretty intellectually dishonest, and you well know it. You throw words whose meaning you seem not to know…still cannot answer what is/who is a muslim? Is Muslim an ethnicity? A religion? A culture?
You obviously do not know…nor do your friends know…and yet the word keeps being thrown about freely!
We could refer to Syrians…to Afghans…to Libyans…but no, you opted for Muslims, why?
You opted for 1000 instead of 15, 45,100, why?
You called a whole faith virulent disease…why?
You demanded to know my view on Israel’s right to exist, Why?
And I when I asked you to clarify your question, you accused me of antisemitism, why?
As far as defending a religion, what are you defending, Judaism? What are bambam and kfc defending, Buddhism?
…””extremism as being motivated by Islam…””, is Islam a culture now? Are you saying that groping and raping is a religiously crime?
I wished I was there to hear your take on me to your Palestinian friend…I have the nagging suspicion I would not have recognized the argument you assigned to me.
Matters little, as far as I know, I am still one of the few here who has condemned without any reserve any act of violence, especially religious violence against civilian, especially women and children. My knee-jerk reaction has been very consistent, and it goes along the wisdom of Christ :”Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?””
In light of the rank islamophobia that permeates this site, to accuse me of sensitivity is pretty ridiculous…then again…
Ken, I have to run, and can’t read through the full quote yet, but thought I’d put this up as preliminary reply.
My quote above…
1- All economists of note acknowledge that Obama did as best a job as anyone could have stopping the recession from getting worse. I happen to think that we were better off letting it collapse then rebuilding anew…but in terms of what the standards are, he did a great job.
2- Individually (blowing up people across the globe), he is worse than Bush, but in terms of preventing another 9/11 under his watch, why can’t you give him credit?
3- If he went along with the cries for war from the republicans, guess where we would be?
Fighting wars in North Korea, Iran and Syria.
4- I don’t recall any previous president who faced such open and blatant coalition against him, one eager to crash the country for the sake of scoring political points.
establishes a standard based on not what I feel, morally, subjectively, but what we use to determine the effectiveness of a president.
I have also pointed out that in terms of blowing up people around the globe, Obama is surely worse than Bush. I have mentioned on another thread that Obama got the benefit of the doubt from liberals but had Romney won, we would be in the streets by now.
And, I did not vote for him the second time based almost solely on his escalation of murder inc.
But, yeah, only through HIm could things have gotten as bad as they did.
In regards to comparing him to Bush, he has managed to keep us out of another full blown occupation like Iraq and nation building, like Iraq. For the sake of this exact debate with Olly, it is worth some credit…a lil’bit.
@po
1, January 8, 2016 at 12:38 pm
“Olly, no matter how bad Obama is, and believe me, he is no choir boy, it is hard to beat Bush on both fronts, foreign affairs and economy. It would be fair to acknowledge that in light of what he has inherited, and history will certainly show it, Obama is clearly one of our greatest presidents…and this from someone who did not vote for him the second time.”
As you’re concerned with comparing Bush and Obama at Bush’s expense, po, let’s take a look at some major components of their respective foreign and domestic policy records, which I suggest will clearly demonstrate that Obama is even worse than Bush. Because of the importance of this issue, I want to quote at length a fairly comprehensive article on the subject, which could have been aptly entitled, “Obama is George W. Bush on Steroids”:
“Drone Wars and State Secrecy – How Barack Obama Became a Hardliner
“He was once a liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war. Now, according to revelations last week, the US president personally oversees a ‘kill list’ for drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan. Then there’s [sic] the CIA renditions, increased surveillance and a crackdown on whistleblowers. No wonder Washington insiders are likening him to ‘George W Bush on steroids.’
“The revelation that Barack Obama keeps a ‘kill list’ of people to be targeted by drones has led to criticism from former supporters.
“Amos Guiora knows all about the pitfalls of targeted assassinations, both in terms of legal process and the risk of killing the wrong people or causing civilian casualties. The University of Utah law professor spent many years in the Israel Defence Forces, including time as a legal adviser in the Gaza Strip where such killing strikes are common. He knows what it feels like when people weigh life-and-death decisions.
“Yet Guiora – no dove on such matters – confessed he was ‘deeply concerned’ about President Barack Obama’s own ‘kill list’ of terrorists and the way they are eliminated by missiles fired from robot drones around the world. He believes US policy has not tightly defined how people get on the list, leaving it open to legal and moral problems when the order to kill leaves Obama’s desk. ‘He is making a decision largely devoid of external review,’ Guiroa told the Observer, saying the US’s apparent methodology for deciding who is a terrorist is ‘loosey goosey.’
“Indeed, newspaper revelations last week about the ‘kill list’ showed the Obama administration defines a militant as any military-age male in the strike zone when its drone attacks. That has raised the hackles of many who saw Obama as somehow more sophisticated on terrorism issues than his predecessor, George W Bush. But Guiora does not view it that way. He sees Obama as the same as Bush, just much more enthusiastic when it comes to waging drone war. ‘If Bush did what Obama has been doing, then journalists would have been all over it,’ he said.
“But the ‘kill list’ and rapidly expanded drone programme are just two of many aspects of Obama’s national security policy that seem at odds with the expectations of many supporters in 2008. Having come to office on a powerful message of breaking with Bush, Obama has in fact built on his predecessor’s national security tactics.
“Obama has presided over a massive expansion of secret surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency. He has launched a ferocious and unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. He has made more government documents classified than any previous president. He has broken his promise to close down the controversial Guantánamo Bay prison and pressed on with prosecutions via secretive military tribunals, rather than civilian courts. He has preserved CIA renditions. He has tried to grab broad new powers on what defines a terrorist or a terrorist supporter and what can be done with them, often without recourse to legal process.
“The sheer scope and breadth of Obama’s national security policy has stunned even fervent Bush supporters and members of the Washington DC establishment. In last week’s New York Times article that detailed the ‘kill list’, Bush’s last CIA director, Michael Hayden, said Obama should open the process to more public scrutiny. ‘Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a [Department of Justice] safe,’ he told the newspaper.
“Even more pertinently, Aaron David Miller, a long-term Middle East policy adviser to both Republican and Democratic administrations, delivered a damning verdict in a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine. He wrote bluntly: ‘Barack Obama has become George W Bush on steroids.’
“Many disillusioned supporters would agree. Jesselyn Radack was a justice department ethics adviser under Bush who became a whistleblower over violations of the legal rights of ‘American Taliban’ John Walker Lindh. Now Radack works for the Government Accountability Project, defending fellow whistleblowers. She campaigned for Obama, donated money and voted for him. Now she has watched his administration – which promised transparency and whistleblower protection – crack down on national security whistleblowers.
“It has used the Espionage Act – an obscure first world war anti-spy law – six times. That is more such uses in three years than all previous presidents combined. Cases include John Kiriakou, a CIA agent who leaked details of waterboarding, and Thomas Drake, who revealed the inflated costs of an NSA data collection project that had been contracted out. ‘We did not see this coming. Obama has led the most brutal crackdown on whistleblowers ever,’ Radack said.
“Yet the development fits in with a growing level of secrecy in government under Obama. Last week a report by the Information Security Oversight Office revealed 2011 had seen US officials create more than 92m[illion] classified documents: the most ever and 16m[illion] more than the year before. Officials insist much of the growth is due to simple administrative procedure, but anti-secrecy activists are not convinced. Some estimates put the number of documents wrongly classified as secret at 90%.
” ‘We are seeing the reversal of the proper flow of information between the government and the governed. It is probably the fundamental civil liberties issue of our time, said Elizabeth Goitein, a national security expert at the Brennan Centre for Justice. ‘The national security establishment is getting bigger and bigger.’ (Emphasis added)
“One astonishing example of this lies high in the mountain deserts of Utah. This is the innocuously named Utah Data Centre being built for the NSA near a tiny town called Bluffdale. When completed next year, the heavily fortified $2bn building, which is self-sufficient with its own power plant, will be five times the size of the US Capitol in Washington DC. It will house gigantic servers that will store vast amounts of data from ordinary Americans that will be sifted and mined for intelligence clues. It will cover everything from phone calls to emails to credit card receipts.
“Yet the UDC is just the most obvious sign of how the operations and scope of the NSA has grown since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Under Bush, a key part was a secret ‘warrantless wiretapping’ programme that was scrapped when it was exposed. However, in 2008 Congress passed a bill that effectively allowed the programme to continue by simply legalising key components. Under Obama, that work has intensified and earlier this year a Senate intelligence committee extended the law until 2017, which would make it last until the end of any Obama second term.’
.
” ‘Obama did not reverse what Bush did, he went beyond it. Obama is just able to wrap it up in a better looking package. He is more liberal, more eloquent. He does not look like a cowboy,’ said James Bamford, journalist and author of numerous books about the NSA including 2008’s The Shadow Factory.
“That might explain the lack of media coverage of Obama’s planned changes to a military funding law called the National Defence Authorisation Act. A clause was added to the NDAA that had such a vague definition of support of terrorism that journalists and political activists went to court claiming it threatened them with indefinite detention for things like interviewing members of Hamas or WikiLeaks.
“Few expected the group to win, but when lawyers for Obama refused to definitively rebut their claims, a New York judge ruled in their favour. Yet, far from seeking to adjust the NDAA’s wording, the White House is now appealing against the decision.
“That hard line should perhaps surprise only the naive. ‘He’s expanded the secrecy regime in general,’ said Radack. Yet it is the drone programme and “kill list” that have emerged as most central to Obama’s hardline national security policy. In January 2009, when Obama came to power, the drone programme existed only for Pakistan and had seen 44 strikes in five years. With Obama in office it expanded to Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia with more than 250 strikes. Since April there have been 14 strikes in Yemen alone.
“Civilian casualties are common. Obama’s first strike in Yemen killed two families who were neighbours of the target. One in Pakistan missed and blew up a respected tribal leader and a peace delegation. He has deliberately killed American citizens, including the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in September last year, and accidentally killed others, such as Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdul-Rahman.
“The drone operation now operates out of two main bases in the US, dozens of smaller installations and at least six foreign countries. There are ‘terror Tuesday’ meetings to discuss targets which Obama’s campaign manager, David Axelrod, sometimes attends, lending credence to those who see naked political calculation involved.
“Yet for some, politics seems moot. Obama has shown himself to be a ruthless projector of national security powers at home and abroad, but the alternative in the coming election is Republican Mitt Romney.
” ‘Whoever gets elected, whether it’s Obama or Romney, they are going to continue this very dangerous path,’ said Radack. ‘It creates a constitutional crisis for our country. A crisis of who we are as Americans. You can’t be a free society when all this happens in secret.’ “ (My emphasis)
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/02/drone-wars-secrecy-barack-obama
@ po
2 glocks even!
Aimed low!
That is ridiculous. A central body mass shot is much more effective and less likely to miss.
Spoken like a woman, DBQ 🙂
A man would choose a central mass shot over a groin shot….
po – given the number of people who wear body armor, the groin shot or a head shot is the better option.
Agree with you, DBQ… 2 glocks even!
Aimed low!
I think the suggestion that the women of Cologne keep arms length from the rapists is an excellent one……as long as at the end of the women’s arms there is a loaded Glock 9mm.
“Still, I don’t recall him running around blaming Bush for anything, so there goes your argument.”
You don’t recall is not saying he hasn’t. Then why are you?
“Which brings me to the question, which I keep asking but get no answer for.
Who/what is a Muslim?”
It is the brand name of the most virulent disease currently ravaging Europe and beyond. There. Now, let’s assume our past foreign policy was equivalent to us being a smoker. Would you advise the patient to stop smoking and ignore the disease until they quit? Would you defend the disease as a punishment and again, ignore any treatment?
This seems to be a theme with you Po. You defend that which does not deserve defending. That does not bolster your argument.
Olly, come one… i don’recall you advocating gassing Mexicans, should I assume you have? My not recalling doesn’t mean you haven’t!
As for your It is the brand name of the most virulent disease currently ravaging Europe and beyond., thank you for finally coming out of the closet and revealing yourself in all your bigoted glory 🙂 Finally!
From thereon, that benefit of the doubt I used to give you? None left.
Natural rights, han?
Wondered why you kept insisting on the 1000 instead of the 15-45…or even the 100…for the higher the number, the better to make your point.
And you dare wonder why I defend the “”indefensible””? For there are those like you whose agenda requires painting the whole with the largest brush possible for the sins of the few.
Meanwhile, the US, a Christian nation, one woman/child sexually assaulted every 107 seconds! Is that defensible? Are we making it about Christians vs Muslims now?
Do you wanna go there?
So the Finns are obviously more intelligent than the Germans. Where did they deploy a “massive police presence?” Why, where the trouble makers were expected to be! Duh! And the Finns are more truthful than the Germans, calling a spake a spade……
Unprecedented sex harassment in Helsinki at New Year, Finnish police report
By Richard Orange, Malmo3:48PM GMT 08 Jan 2016
Asylum seekers who met in central Helsinki to celebrate New Years’s Eve “had similar plans” to commit sexual assault and other crimes as those who targeted women in the Germany city of Cologne, Finnish Police have reported.
Three Iraqi asylum seekers have been arrested for committing sexual assaults during the celebrations in the city’s Senate Square, where some 20,000 had gathered. Security personnel reported “widespread sexual harassment” during the celebrations, police added, with women complaining that asylum seekers had groped their breasts and kissed them without permission.
“This phenomenon is new in Finnish sexual crime history,” Ilkka Koskimaki, the deputy chief of police in Helsinki, told the Telegraph. ”We have never before had this kind of sexual harrassment happening at New Year’s Eve.” He said that the police had received tip-offs from staff at the asylum reception centres.
“Our information from these reception centres were that disturbances or other crimes would happen in the city centre. We were prepared for fights and sexual harrassment and thefts.”
He said that police had established a “very massive presence” to control the estimated 1,000 Iraqi asylum seekers who had gathered in the tunnels surrounding the central railway station by 11pm, many of whom appeared to be under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Mr Koskimaki said that sexual assults in parks and on the streets had been unknown in Finland before a record 32,000 asylum seekers arrived in 2015, making the 14 cases last year “big news in the city”.
“We had unfortunately some very brutal cases in autumn,” he said. “I don’t know so well other cultures, but I have recognised that the thinking of some of them is very different. Some of them maybe think that it is allowed to be aggressive and touch ladies on the street.”
On the bright side, given the way the German government is behaving, it shouldn’t be too long until there’s another Kristallnacht, this one with worthy recipients. The only question is who will be the new vom Rath.
Al Jazeera News:
“Interior Ministry spokesman Tobias Plate said the suspects were nine Algerians, eight Moroccans, five Iranians, four Syrians, two Germans and one person each from Iraq, Serbia and the United States.”
It’s looking more and more like the 1930s. Those that forget the past are DOOMED to repeat it. I will continue to pray nightly…… This world needs all the help it can get. Did anyone see “Childhood’s End”? Scarey and sad. I know it was fiction but still very, very sad. It haunted me.
CNN headlines:
18 Cologne attack suspects ID’d as asylum-seekers; police chief fired
Chris,
If your wife or daughter ran home terrified that she had been sexually assaulted by 1,000 men, would your first response be to question her numbers? If she claimed they all appeared to be Muslim, would you claim that could not be statistically accurate? If she said it was only one Muslim man would you dismiss it for ANY reason whatsoever?
Olly, she would not say that because there was not 1000 “Muslims”. Please let us drop that.
Which brings me to the question, which I keep asking but get no answer for.
Who/what is a Muslim?
As for Po,
Every President “inherits” the current state of affairs and is tasked to lead us to a better, future state. No leader that is worth a salt blames their failure to lead on the previous leader. Obama sold Hope and Change and he takes credit for successes and passes the buck on failures.That is not leadership that is failureship.
We know that, Olly!
All leaders blame their failures, at least to some extent, on their predecessors, that is what the state of the nation speech about, to state what one has accomplished in spite of what one founds… Still, I don’t recall him running around blaming Bush for anything, so there goes your argument.
The buzzword “failurship”” cannot hide the fact that:
1- All economists of note acknowledge that Obama did as best a job as anyone could have stopping the recession from getting worse. I happen to think that we were better off letting it collapse then rebuilding anew…but in terms of what the standards are, he did a great job.
2- Individually (blowing up people across the globe), he is worse than Bush, but in terms of preventing another 9/11 under his watch, why can’t you give him credit?
3- If he went along with the cries for war from the republicans, guess where we would be?
Fighting wars in North Korea, Iran and Syria.
4- I don’t recall any previous president who faced such open and blatant coalition against him, one eager to crash the country for the sake of scoring political points.
In light of all that…I still say he Bush is not qualified to hold his basketball 🙂
There are and have been many roads leading to fascism in Germany.
And each always requires men like Ralph, eager to call for, and support dividing people into groups of better and lesser.
So Chris, who describes himself as a German lawyer and “civil liberty activist” says, “The German system is based on the obligation for the state to defend the weak and to construct rules for defending the weak without the obligation for them to defend themselves.” Wow. So Germany believes it is more important to defend marauding bands of Muslim men who are attacking, robbing and sexually assaulting their wives and daughters than it is to defend their own women? It is the Muslim sex offenders, not the German women who need protection? I’m certainly glad I’m not a female in Germany, given that the German men are such cowards. And I would never allow my wife or daughters to visit your weak-kneed country. What a bunch of losers! And you Europeans wonder why Americans are not giving up their gun rights? Because if our politicians choose to flood our country with criminals, we are going to defend ourselves, and not become apologists for the criminals like you pathetic Germans. So there’s some free speech for you. Don’t like it? Too damned bad!