Pat Condell speaks his mind on Cologne and other mass incidents of Muslim men committing sex crimes,
That “99% of women in Egypt have been physically molested” stat is shocking enough that I went looking for evidence of it, and this was evidently Condell’s source. It says that 99% have been sexual harassed, but a mere “96.5 percent of the women who’d been harassed said they’d been physically assaulted.” So Condell’s stat is slightly off, but the percentage is still staggering, assuming the UN report is accurate…
Following up on yesterday’s report of up to 1000 Muslim men sexually assaulting women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, Cologne’s female mayor is taking action:
The Mayor of Cologne said today that women should adopt a “code of conduct” to prevent future assault at a crisis meeting following the sexual attack of women by 1000 men on New Year’s eve.
Mayor Henriette Reker attended an emergency meeting with Chief of Police Wolfgang Albers and Wolfgang Wurm to discuss how to deal with the attack, where dozens of women were repeatedly touched and groped, with one case of alleged rape in the center of town.
Snip.
The crisis management team said prevention measures should include a code of conduct for young women and girls, and Mayor Reker said the existing code of conduct will be updated online.
The suggested code of conduct includes maintaining an arm’s length distance from strangers, to stick within your own group, to ask bystanders for help or to intervene as a witness, or to inform the police if you are the victim of such an assault.
“Especially the area in and around the central station, the cathedral and the adjoining area towards the banks of the Rhine for tourists (and locals) is no longer considered even in normal times as safe. For months, there is in these areas numerous thefts, open drug dealing, robberies and harassment of all kinds… Dozens of women were sexually harassed in public and there was at least one rape.
“Neither the city nor the police are able to guarantee in the territory described the safety of tourists and locals. Especially for women it must be assumed that a high security risk is here in the evening and night hours. At New Year’s Eve there was a legal vacuum and a no-go area for women. With the climax of the Carnival season it is unfortunately expected to be a similar situation”.
And the “solution” to this problem? No-go areas and free western women self-imposing soft Sharia law on their own actions.
Remember how feminists were enraged by guidelines for women like “Don’t walk alone in bad parts of town late at night” or “don’t drunk from a punch bowl unless you know what’s in it” because they contributed to “rape culture”? Yet when it comes to the real rape culture that radical Islamists have carried with them to other countries, they remain silent, just as they remained silent on the Islamic pedophile rape gangs in Rotherham.
The reason is twofold, though both relate to leftwing political solidarity: Somehow Muslims have become the most sacred victims on the victimhood identity hierarchy, and leftwing political parties need Muslim votes.
They left has evidently decided that if reality doesn’t conform to their fantasies of peaceful, multicultural Muslim immigrants, then reality must be ignored, and anyone noticing this reality must be labeled a “racist” or “xenophobe”. If leftists continue to ignore reality, they are likely in for a rude awakening come election time…
At Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing for secretary of state, she promised she would take “extraordinary steps…to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
Later, more than two dozen companies and groups and one foreign government paid former President Bill Clinton a total of more than $8 million to give speeches around the time they also had matters before Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
Fifteen of them also donated a total of between $5 million and $15 million to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the family’s charity, according to foundation disclosures.
Six things a Washington Post reporter found out following Ted Cruz around. “The majority of the undecided voters I have spoken with have said they were very impressed after hearing Cruz speak. Many of them said they were undecided coming into a rally and supported him when it was over.”
“Unfortunately, 2016, the little of it that we have so far seen, is already beginning to look like another year of Grim Slide, of a world stumbling down a slippery slope to become less secure, less stable, and less free.”
Iran and Saudi Arabia have severed diplomatic relations over Saudi execution of a Shiite cleric, and Kuwait has recalled their ambassador from Tehran; don’t be surprised if the other Sunni nations follow suit. Good thing we have a Nobel Peace Prize winner in the White House…
Turkey’s Prime Minister: Hey, you know who was a model of effective leadership? Adolf Hitler.
It looks like Karachi, Basra, and Mogadishu all rolled into one. People sell drugs openly just next to the Gronland subway station.
It’s not Norway or Europe anymore, except when there is welfare money to be collected. The police have largely given up. Early in 2010 Aftenposten stated that there are sharia patrols in this area, and gay couples are assaulted and chased away.
Mass sexual assaults involving up to 1,000 Arab men on New Year’s Eve in Cologne.
Rahm Emanuel’s failure in Chicago is emblematic of the blue model failure in America’s cities. “The city’s bloated pension obligations have already forced Emanuel to make severe education cuts. It will continue to force cuts in city services in various cities, making it harder and harder for mayors to govern, and increasing the antagonism among various constituencies.”
Confessions of a social justice warrior white knight. “Their communities thrive on self loathing disguised as elitism…SJWs insist their goal is to make everyone equal, and for a long time I believed it, but their communities actually enforce factionalism and division.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
I hope everyone had a merrier Christmas than I did. (My father recently went on hospice care after a two year fight with cancer, so I was back home helping my mother care for him.) Here’s a LinkSwarm to start your week with.
What would Democrats do to defeat the Islamic State? Not a damn thing.
Iraqi government forces retake Ramadi, the Anbar province city the Islamic State took in May.
“Two weather occurrences – the Arctic Oscillation and El Niño – are combining to shake up temperatures from coast to coast in the U.S., bringing springlike conditions to the Northeast for much of this month and leaving parts of the West colder and wetter than usual.”
Adjusting for inflation, the gross domestic product of the 19 countries now sharing Europe’s common currency, the euro, was less in 2014 than it was in 2007. Widespread joblessness and diminishing opportunities confront an entire generation of young Europeans, especially in Spain, Italy, France and Greece. The economic malaise tinges everything: Young people resist marriage for lack of economic opportunity. Poorer European countries are experiencing brain drains as many of their best young professionals and college graduates move abroad. Numerous Greek doctors, for instance, now work in more prosperous Germany while Greece’s health system is in crisis.
Pennsylvania’s insane, disgraced Democratic Attorney General Kathleen Kane accused of suborning perjury.
Democrats in congress have proposed a sweeping gun control bill. Because that’s always such a big electoral winner. It just kills liberals that free citizens are allowed to remain armed…
What’s Obama’s strategy in Iraq and Syria? He doesn’t have one. “Without a clear overarching strategy to resolve the conflict.” Say what you want about Bush, he wanted to win in Iraq. Obama wants to do just enough to not get blamed for losing.
Speaking of Islamic refugees, shotguns (which don’t need a permit) are selling like hotcakes in Austria. Whatever could be the reason?
“The Democratic party is mainly a coalition of interest groups, and the current model of Democratic politics — poor and largely non-white people providing the muscle and rich white liberals calling the shots — is unsustainable…Democrats gleefully predict that demographic changes are going to give their party a permanent majority. The unspoken corollary to that is that white liberals think they’re going to remain in charge of it.”
It’s appropriate that Zeno (the paradox Zeno) was Greek, since Greece appears to have entered Zeno’s Endgame. The country edges ever closer to default, without actually defaulting. Or without the Greek government actually ceasing to spend radically more money than it takes in, because the ruling left-wing Syriza Party would rather destroy the Greek economy than give up their bloated welfare state. Their latest plan is to raid pension funds to keep that welfare state going just a little longer. “This is the last bit of cash that the Greek state has.” “Honey, let’s cash in our 401K so we can buy some heroin!”
Sorry if this sounds like every other update on the Greek debt crisis over the last six years. It’s a vitally important story, which is why I keep covering it, but it’s also the story of a host of people making the same stupid, easily avoidable mistake again and again rather than making the hard choices necessary to deal with the problem.
A few other links of interest on the Greek debt endgame:
So Greece went hat-in-hand to the IMF: Can we put off making some debt repayments? IMF: (Laughs) Oh wait, you’re serious! Let me laugh harder!
Looks like Greece’s creditors have finally reached the depression phase of the Kubler Ross grief cycle. “Greece’s international creditors signaled they are losing hope that Athens will do what is needed to unlock bailout funds before it runs out of money.” Do tell.
A timeline of Greece’s bills coming due. “Debt interest payments are piling up. It has to pay off an €80m interest bill to the European Central Bank (ECB) on 20 April and €200m to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on 1 May. But the one that is stirring jitters around Europe is a €760m (£550m; $810m) interest payment to the IMF that is due on 12 May.”
Once upon a time, American anti-antisemitism was seen as a bastion of the poorly-educated nativist right. (This was never entirely true, as quotas limiting Jewish admissions were imposed at many Ivy league universities in the 1920s, and Father Coughlin, perhaps the most prominent American anti-Semite of the 20th century, founded the National Union for Social Justice.) But William F. Buckley was fairly diligent in excluding anti-Semites from the modern conservative movement, a vigilance that continued well into the 1990s, as Joseph Sobran and Patrick Buchanan (cast out for tiptoeing up to the line) can attest.
Conversely, antisemitism has been rising on the left, both here and in Europe, as John-Paul Pagano details:
Israel’s stunning victory against combined Arab armies in 1967 set in motion streams of hostility—some anti-Israel, some “anti-Zionist,” some anti-Jewish—which would pool, roil, and gather strength until the turn of the millennium, when the Second Intifada unleashed them in a cataract of anti-Semitism. Two groups were swept along most forcefully by the current: Arabs and Muslims; and Left-wing radicals, who took their cues on Israel and Zionism from Moscow, where “anti-Zionism” assumed a central place in the Soviet anti-colonial catechism.
That’s the first strand. Pagano then offers a section on the rise in the unassimilated Muslim immigrant population in Europe, and the increasingly open antisemitism and attacks against Jews by those populations over the last decade. Then he gets to the meat of his argument:
I think there are three main drivers guiding progressives like [Freddie deBoer] who have similar responses to the very real injuries suffered by Jews who are targeted, excluded, abused, and sometimes murdered for reasons that are clearly the result of hatred: an excess of rationalism, the way anti-Semitism short-circuits the “privilege” analysis of racism, and a prioritization of some victims of racism over others.
But it’s the “privilege” theory so beloved of Social Justice Warriors that really ties it all together:
Paul Berman made the point in Terror and Liberalism—a book the mere mention of which sends deBoer types running for the bathroom—that we in the West are inheritors of Enlightenment rationalism, and as such we find it difficult to understand and constructively respond to irrational political movements. In this respect “we are all Noam Chomsky,” Berman wrote in reference to the man who has done the most to advance this reductive Weltanschauung. In politics Chomsky proposed two warring innate ideas—an instinct for greed (embodied by the corporatized West) and an instinct for freedom (embodied by those opposing the West)—and honed this analysis by applying it to the abattoir in Cambodia during the 1970s. There have been few enormities that more clearly exhibit irrationalism than the Khmer Rouge auto-genocide; but in Chomsky’s hyper-rationalist view, no such movement of self-cannibalizing lunacy could exist (at least not among victims of American imperialism). So, he wrote that there was no genocide to speak of in Cambodia, and if there was violence, it was because greedy U.S. war-making had driven the Cambodians to it.
So too with some interpretations of crises relating to radical Islam and the Middle East. Irrationalism is the wrong explanation, because it simply can’t be right; or if violence and hatred do exist, they assume the discrete and contingent form of being a rational (i.e., predictable and understandable) response by the victims of the United States and Israel. For deBoer and the segment of the Left he represents, anti-Semitism is not a coherent and meaningful force among Muslims—that is to say, a movement; or if it is, it is not a self-sustaining irrational movement, one founded on conspiracist racism against Jews and drunk on salvationist violence. Rather it is tightly correlated to the wrongdoing of Americans and Jews themselves, and thus acute in onset and understandable.
Hyper-rationalism pairs well with the dogmatic underdog-ism of the Left, which assumes that weakness is a source or at least a marker of virtue. Yet just as the poverty of Chomsky’s political analysis became clear after the United States withdrew from Indochina, the silliness and toxicity of New Left ideas about race have become plainer as Jim Crow recedes.
Perhaps the worst of these is the formula that racism equals prejudice plus power. People of color can’t be racist, according to this definition, because they are structurally disempowered by our racist-capitalist “system.” Whites are racist, wittingly or not, because they are existentially driven to oppress non-whites in order to preserve their “privilege.” Analyses of “structural racism” and “privilege” assert a kind of Wizard of Oz sociology that exhibits some elements of conspiracy theory—false consciousness, social determinism, and peoples of good and evil locked in Manichean struggle.
In the mental shorthand of many, Muslims are people of color and Jews are white. That demarcation has fateful consequences. We in the West have a horrendous history of racism; in the United States the oppression of African Americans for hundreds of years is an enduring betrayal of liberal values. Responses throughout the educated West to the Arab-Israeli conflict have been warped by fear that Zionism is a form of racism—as the Soviet architects of that libel surely intended. We are prone to seeing Israeli violence as illegitimate per se, and to regarding violence, hatred, and illiberalism among Arabs and Muslims as a rational—predictable and understandable—response to Western and Israeli imperialism. We miss the part that is a will to power, aspirational imperialism in its own right.
The “prejudice plus power” idea erases real anti-Semitism—a construct with its own history of horrific effects, which is often lumped in with racism, but is actually something else. To borrow from comedy parlance, most racism “punches down”—an incumbent group constructs and subordinates an underclass. The stereotypes that make up such racism diminish their victims. For example blacks, to the white racist, are inferior, criminal, stupid, lazy, and lusty. Anti-Semitism is often the opposite, envisioning the Jew as a preternatural creature—as evil, brilliant, controlling, connected, rich, and powerful beyond measure. Anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory. As such, Anti-Semitism often “punches up.”
When deBoer implies that anti-Semitism is not increasing in Europe and that the real problem is Islamophobia, he ties all of these threads together. Muslims, people of color, can’t be racist, at least not in any coherent and self-sustaining way; they are an oppressed people reacting to the depredations of Jews and other whites. Irrationalist movements that are powered by Jew-hatred don’t exist anymore; that sort of thing was the preserve of white people 70 years ago. Anti-Semitism today is embraced most frequently and fervently by people of color—but to note that is “the basic logic of bigotry,” blaming the victim while aggrandizing the powerful. As Chomsky put it himself, “Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It’s raised, but it’s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98 percent control.”
Most people on the Left today prioritize the well-being of Arabs and Muslims over Jews.
It appears we may finally be reaching the endgame of the endgame on Greece.
Greece is suffering a bank run and owes just over $2 billion in debt payments due Friday, but shows no signs of having the money or meeting the Troika’s conditions for obtaining more. Quite the opposite. Greece’s left-wing Syriza government is increasingly acting like an erratic heroin addict refusing to check into rehab and howling through the streets at night in search of an angry fix, heedless that there’s an arrest warrant out in his name.
“The International Monetary Fund, one of Greece’s main three creditors, was reported to have called Greece ‘the most unhelpful client’ the Fund has dealt with in their 70-year history.”
“During the teleconference, the Greek representative said his government wasn’t prepared to talk about the country’s finances with technical experts and instead wanted European Union leaders to discuss the issue at a summit in Brussels, one of the European officials said.”
I’m sure telling your bank that you’re “not prepared to discuss my finances” when asking for your fifth bridge loan would go over really well.
Also this: “There was a general feeling that the Greek side is completely out of touch with reality.”
You think? How about the fact that Greek parliament just passed a raft of anti-austerity spending measure, which is rather like a man with stage 4 lung cancer lighting up a couple of stogies in route to the operating room.
And the one person whose opinion matters the most? “German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday that Greece has no choice but to carry out economic reforms if it wants to receive more financial aid, dashing any hopes Athens might have had for a softening in Berlin’s stance.”
Carrying out real reforms (like stop spending more money than the government takes in) is what Greece in general, and Syriza in specific, has steadfastly refused to do. And the reason they refused is that the European cradle-to-grave welfare state has become more sacred to voters than the capitalist economics and fiscal discipline necessary to support it.
This is not a recipe for happiness.
There’s a chance that all of this is posturing on both sides, and that a kabuki compromise involving small reforms in exchange for still more loan extensions may yet kick the can a few more feet down the road. But there is every sign that EU institutions have finally tired of Greece’s show, and are willing to see the final curtain drop. And the Greeks are about to learn that the vengeance of the gods of the copybook headings cannot be delayed indefinitely…
I was going to put this long Atlantic piece on whether Jews should leave Europe or not into the Friday LinkSwarm, but I think it deserves it’s own post.
A few excerpts:
France’s 475,000 Jews represent less than 1 percent of the country’s population. Yet last year, according to the French Interior Ministry, 51 percent of all racist attacks targeted Jews. The statistics in other countries, including Great Britain, are similarly dismal. In 2014, Jews in Europe were murdered, raped, beaten, stalked, chased, harassed, spat on, and insulted for being Jewish. Sale Juif—“dirty Jew”—rang in the streets, as did “Death to the Jews,” and “Jews to the gas.”
In Greece, a recent survey found that 69 percent of adults hold anti-Semitic views, and the fascists of the country’s Golden Dawn party are open in their Jew-hatred.
Yes, I think we all remember the perfidy when Jews marched on Athens and held guns to the heads of elected officials until they agreed to take loans from Germany.
Anne Frank has become an obsession of modern anti-Semites. Her story—universally known, and deeply affecting—is a threat to the mission of the Holocaust-denial movement, and her youth and innocence challenge those who argue that Jews are innately perfidious. In Rome last summer, the slogan “Anne Frank is a liar” was spray-painted on walls in the former Jewish ghetto.
Read the whole thing.
Between this and that long Grahame Wood piece on the Islamic state, it appears as though readers of the Atlantic are finally being brought up to a level of awareness of the rise of Islamic radicalism that readers of The Weekly Standard achieved some 15 years ago. Progress.