That look

hat tip Maggie's Farm

Do Germany's politicians understand the magnitude of what is happening there?

New Year's Eve in Germany

The staff of Der Spiegal in Germany report on the events in Cologne on New Year's Eve:

...On New Year's Eve in Cologne, it was -- according to numerous witness reports -- drunk young men from North Africa who formed gangs to go after defenseless individuals. They humiliated and robbed -- and they sexually assaulted women.

...Two months after the attacks in Paris, one can have one's doubts as to whether Cologne represents a "completely new dimension of violence," as has been repeated by both police officials and politicians. What is clear, however, is that the police were unprepared and that they failed. The officers on site were reduced by the circumstances they faced to playing a pitiable role.

...The stories of Lara, Jeanette and Paul, three university students from Bonn, paint a vivid picture of what so many women experienced on New Year's Eve. The trio had traveled to Cologne with two other female friends because the parties there are simply better than they are in Bonn. They arrived at the square in front of the train station just as the police were clearing it. They didn't know what was going on -- all they saw was police officers in helmets pushing people back. They continued on to the banks of the Rhine River, a vantage point from which they could view the fireworks, when Jeanette realized that her money, ID and entry ticket for that night's club had been stolen.

Just the Beginning

At midnight, they shared a bottle of cheap champagne out of plastic cups and then headed back to the central train station. In front of the stairs leading from the cathedral down to the train station, they had to squeeze past a large group of men. They locked hands, letting Jeanette take the lead because she knew judo. Paul tried to provide some cover for the girls. At one point, Lara cried out: "Someone just grabbed my crotch!" That was just the beginning.

Hands seemed to come from every direction to grab the women's bodies. They always went for between the legs. Paul's attempts to protect the women were futile. Providing cover for one left another to fend for herself. "It was one hand after another," Jeanette says. She was able to throw one attacker "really violently to the side" with a judo grip.

None of the three students can say for sure who attacked them. They are, however, all in agreement that all of the men surrounding them were speaking the same language, and that it sounded a lot like Arabic.

What Lara, Jeanette and Paul experienced in Cologne wasn't unique to that city. Police reports indicate that a large group of men also gathered along the famous street in Hamburg's St. Pauli district known as Grosse Freiheit, most of whom were probably of North African descent. These men committed a series of "property thefts with sexual components."

In Stuttgart, a 20-year-old Iraqi has been in custody since the morning of Jan. 1 for allegedly groping two women at the city's Schlossplatz square. Police in Frankfurt am Main have reported similar incidents.

Jeanette and Lara, the two students from Bonn, went to the police six days after New Year's to file complaints for sexual assault. "We want this to be documented," Lara says. It makes them furious to read in the newspaper that what happened in Cologne came from the pickpocket milieu. The way Lara sees it: "We were systematically sexually harassed."
...Cologne's central train station isn't far from the tower where the office of one of Germany's leading feminists, Alice Schwarzer, is located. It is from there that she broadcasts her commentaries on current events out into the world. When it comes to the sexual assaults on New Year's Eve in Cologne, Schwarzer speaks of "war" and "terror."

"Young men of Arab or North African descent are playing war in the middle of Cologne," she writes, describing a "gang-bang party and 1,000 men who were acting as if they were at Tahrir Square in Cairo, dreaming of being heroes like their brothers in the civil wars of North Africa and the Middle East." They are a product, Schwarzer says, of misplaced tolerance in this country.

Read more here.

Germany, where free speech is considered to be worse than sexual assault

Mark Steyn writes about the multiple sexual assaults committed by Middle East refugees across Europe on New Year's Eve, and the attempt by media and persons in power to equate the rapists with those who spoke up against the rapists:

So "the most savage" voices in society who need to be forced to "respect" others are not the thousands of men participating in a group sexual assault of female infidels, but the Tweeters and Facebookers who point out that these guys come from a very particular segment of the population. It's revealing that Anthony Faiola could even write that sentence and not be aware of its insulting absurdity. I have written for years about western feminists' acceptance of the "two-tier sisterhood" - one life for them, and another quite different one for women born into certain other, ah, cultural traditions. Given mass Muslim immigration, it was never likely that this division would be more than an interim phase, and, as German women are now learning, in the hierarchy of identity politics Islam trumps feminism.

This line from the Telegraph report is also striking:

It is not clear why the suspects were released but police officers have said they were overwhelmed on the night.

So the state lacks sufficient manpower to be able to detain those whom they arrest in the commission of a crime ...but they have sufficient manpower to be able to prosecute you for pointing that out.

...Oddly enough, there's nothing new about what Chancellor Merkel is doing. Germany was the intellectual and cultural colossus of the world in the 19th and early 20th century. Since then, not so much. Why would that be? Well, for all the tumultuous changes this last 90 years - from Weimar to Nazis to Commies to social democracy to demographic suicide - the German state in its various iterations has been no friend of free speech.



Anthony Faiola says the German government needs to do this because, what with the country's dark past, a sinister totalitarian streak is never far below the surface. But, when you import a million-man army into your country and then tell your citizens they can't discuss the subject, you're the totalitarian. The events of the last week make plain that the institutions of the German state are as corrupted by this century's official ideology (multiculturalism) as they were by last century's (you know what). The only reason we have even a glimpse of what really happened on New Year's Eve is because a multitude of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts revealed what the German police, political class and media would not. So now Angela Merkel has determined to bring them into line, too.

...So what can you say in a land where real crime isn't policed but thought-crime is? Let's leave the last word to one of those young men detained but then released on New Year's Eve:

One of those involved in attacks told officers: "I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly. Mrs Merkel invited me."

That guy understands his rare privilege in today's Germany: He can say whatever the hell he wants, and you can't say anything back.

Read more here.

Mdme Merkel does not look amused

h/t The Barrister

Germans take to the streets

Apparently not all Germans are as welcoming to Middle East migrants as is Angela Merkel. Here are some German men expressing themselves in Dresden: "Putin to Berlin, Merkel to Siberia."



h/t Chateau Heartiste