“Lets dare to say (how bad) things really are!”
The furore about those sexual assaults says more about ‘our’ culture than ‘theirs’.
In the fallout from the New Year’s Eve crime spree in Cologne, when numerous women were allegedly robbed and molested by men recently arrived from Syria and other Arab countries, most of the political focus and media fury have been aimed at ‘their culture’. At the problem of Muslim men’s allegedly ingrained disrespect for women. At the fundamental conflict between their Koran-derived way of thinking and Europe’s women-friendly, gay-friendly, largely liberal outlook. As one observer put it, Cologne shows that the culture of these men is simply ‘not compatible with European norms’.
All this handwringing over ‘their culture’ is strange. Not because we shouldn’t criticise other cultures — I’m all in favour of that — or because we shouldn’t chastise and punish the men accused of committing crimes in Cologne. No, it’s weird because what the Cologne fallout most graphically exposes is the rot and disarray and dishonesty of our culture. Of 21st-century Europe. Of nations, like Germany, which claim to be liberal and enlightened but which in fact now exist under a creed of sheepish, silencing multiculturalism which puts more store by lies that might help to pacify mass society than by truths that might open up real and, yes, difficult debate.
The Cologne controversy shines a harsh light on the corrosion of the Enlightenment values Europe claims to hold to, on the decay of freedom and openness at the very heart of Europe; and we’re obsessing over the cultural habits of gangs of Arab blokes?
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There were two alarming things about what happened in Cologne. The first was the attacks themselves, which, going by the women’s accounts, were awful. The second was the way the authorities, like rulers in some fictional dystopia, sought to cover up the nature of the attacks lest the revelations rattle the populace and provoke inter-communal tension. The police chief of Cologne consciously hid info about the backgrounds of the attackers. He told the media it was hard to know who carried out the assaults, a claim later contradicted by officers who were on the ground on the night in question, who say ‘the majority’ of those arrested had asylum-seeker IDs.
Like something out of Orwell, the police chief preferred to promote a lie of omission than allow the truth of the situation to start a discussion about Germany’s recent intake of immigrants from Syria and elsewhere. He appears to have tailored the facts, rewritten reality, in the name of keeping in check the passions of what he seems to view as the swirling German populace, better kept passive with untruths than made rowdy with uncomfortable facts.
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Continue reading After Cologne’s al Taharrush
A teenager allegedly assaulted numerous women in the water at Surfers Paradise on Tuesday. Photo: Glenn Hunt
