It looks as if Cologne’s police chief just got Bynged.
Cologne mayor Henriette Reker said police had failed to inform her fully about sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve, in a final blow that has pushed police chief Wolfgang Albers to be suspended. Media reports on Thursday and Friday “mean I have to conclude that the police has had a significantly different picture of the New Year’s Eve situation than the one supplied at my request by the police leadership,” Reker said in a statement. It was the last straw on a day that saw Albers suspended, as German media reported late on Friday afternoon. Reker said that the police had concealed “politically sensitive” information from her and from the public and that trust in the force had been “seriously shaken”. “I can’t accept that I, as mayor of this city, first got this information from today’s media, especially about the origins of the people involved who are under investigation,” she said.
But, assuming the allegation is true, what could possibly have led Albers to withhold “politically sensitive” information?
Well, to start with, Reker herself is well-known for her pro-immigration views (indeed she was the victim of an appalling stabbing by an anti-immigration extremist last year).
Back to The Local:
Albers had said on Tuesday that his men had few leads on the culprits behind the wave of crimes around the train station and cathedral. But it emerged on Thursday evening that police had checked identities and taken numerous perpetrators into custody on New Year’s Eve – with many of them having papers proving their status as refugees.
Again, what could possibly have led to such reticence?
Meanwhile the BBC reports:
The [German] federal police – responsible for the station itself but not the area nearby – released information on their investigation on Friday.
“Of the 31 suspects whose names are known, 18 have asylum seeker status,” federal interior ministry spokesman Tobias Plate told reporters.
The suspects include nine Algerians, eight Moroccans, four Syrians, five Iranians, two Germans and one each from Iraq, Serbia and the US, he said.
Here’s Maajid Nawaz, no man of the right, in the Daily Beast, discussing the reluctance of public broadcaster ZDF to cover the attacks:
It appears that, as the authorities and the media were choosing between stirring up racial tension and these women’s rights, we were faced with a conspiracy of silence.
Eventually, this was bound to happen. Recent mass migration patterns across Europe have meant that misogyny has finally come head to head with anti-racism, multiculturalism is facing off against feminism, and progressive values are wrestling with cultural tolerance.
Yes, it is racist to suspect that all brown men who look like me are rapists. It is bigoted to presume that all Muslim men who share my faith advocate religiously justified rape. It is xenophobic to assume that all male refugees are sexual predators awaiting their chance to rape. But let me be absolutely clear: What will feed this racism, bigotry, and xenophobia even more is deliberately failing to report the facts as they stand. Doing so only encourages the populist right’s rallying cry against “the establishment.”
…[It] is infuriating and totally counterproductive is to deny that a specifically cultural problem around immigration patterns and European sexual norms has been steadily rising across the continent. To pretend this is not the case only further stigmatizes us brown Muslim men. That the problem requires attention is clear.
While Nawaz takes care to cite police evidence that refugees are no more likely to commit sexual offenses than other sections of Germany’s population, he also notes that both German police unions and women’s rights group have accused the authorities of underplaying the incidence of rape at refugee shelters. And, quite correctly, he criticizes those in the West, including the mayor of Cologne, who have suggested that women should change their behavior, adding this:
The fetishization of the female body has not led to a decrease in cases of sexual violence in societies where women cover their entire bodies. If Taliban- and ISIS-held areas are anything to go by, violence against women only increases the more women are asked to conceal and segregate themselves. This would make sense, because accompanying such attitudes is the notion that women are sexual objects to be owned and controlled, and not human beings to be respected and loved. What is infuriating is that for centuries progressives have made these very arguments against white Christian fundamentalists in the West, yet—displaying an incredible cognitive dissonance—those progressives easily abandon that position when confronted with the problem in a minority community.
The case of Cologne tells us that we can no longer afford this Regressive-Left double standard. The only person to blame for rape is the rapist….
Nawaz also notes this:
With men accounting for about 70 percent of asylum seekers, some groups across Germany have demanded gender-segregated accommodation and safe zones for women.
This sexual imbalance is the subject of a piece in Politico by Valerie Hudson. Here’s an extract:
66.26 percent of adult migrants registered through Italy and Greece over the past year were male, according to the International Organization of Migration.
That imbalance might not sound radical, but it is, especially when you look more closely at who those males are. It’s true that many male migrants hope that, if granted asylum, they will be joined in Europe by their wives and children, who would help balance out national sex ratios. But importantly, more than 20 percent of migrants are minors below the age of 18, and the IOM estimates that more than half of those minors traveling to Europe are traveling as unaccompanied minors—90 percent of whom are males. This heavily male subset is all but guaranteed asylum because of their status as unaccompanied minors, but they get no special dispensation to bring spouses
…According to Swedish government statistics, as of the end of November, 71 percent of all applicants for asylum to Sweden in 2015 were male. More than 21 percent of all migrants to Sweden were classified as unaccompanied minors, representing more than half of all minor migrants to the country. For accompanied minors, the sex ratio was about 1.16 boys for every one girl. But for unaccompanied minors, the ratio was 11.3 boys for every one girl. In other words, the Swedish case confirms IOM’s statistic that more than 90 percent of unaccompanied minors are male. Indeed, on average, approximately 90 unaccompanied boys entered Sweden every single day in 2015, compared with eight unaccompanied girls.
… in the overwhelming majority of cases, terror attacks are carried out by unattached young adult men. Most of these men are unmarried, and virtually none have children. Indeed, the Islamic State reportedly discourages its male fighters from having children so that they are more willing to engage in suicide attacks, and widows of suicide bombers are quickly forced to remarry, while remaining on birth control.
But fear of terrorism might not be the only reason to be leery of highly abnormal sex ratios among the young adult population. As my co-author Andrea Den Boer and I argued in our book, societies with extremely skewed sex ratios are more unstable even without jihadi ideologues in their midst. Numerous empirical studies have shown that sex ratios correlate significantly with violence and property crime—the higher the sex ratio, the worse the crime rate. Our research also found a link between sex ratios and the emergence of both violent criminal gangs and anti-government movements. It makes sense: When young adult males fail to make the transition to starting a household—particularly those young males who are already at risk for sociopathic behavior due to marginalization, a common concern among immigrants—their grievances are aggravated.
Meanwhile, from Handelsblatt here’s another reminder that in Merkel’s Germany everything is under control.
German authorities are battling a massive backlog in processing refugees that streamed into Europe’s largest economy over the course of last year, the head of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees said Friday.More than 600,000 asylum applications from 2015 have not yet been processed, Frank-Jürgen Weise told politicians during a party convention of the conservative Bavarian CSU in Wildbad Kreuth, Bavaria.
What could possibly go wrong?