Ten Years On, German Elite Still Plays Down 2015 Cologne New Year’s Eve Migrant Sex Attacks.
Getty ImagesOver 1,000 women were sexually assaulted and raped across Germany’s major cities exactly ten years ago today, in an enormous and apparently coordinated act of violence by recently arrived migrant men, the nature and causes of which are still the subject of attempted obfuscation to this day.
The attacks — which were initially unreported in the German national media — were first brought to global attention by Breitbart News and saw women in practically every major German city set upon by gangs of migrant males. There were over 1,300 people targeted in the city of Cologne alone, primarily women. Of them, 600 women were sexually assaulted and 28 raped, while still more were beaten and robbed.
One 18-year-old woman was reported to have had an abortion after falling pregnant from being raped alongside another woman on the floor in the square between the Cologne Cathedral and the city’s central railway station.
Nationwide, over 1,200 women are reported to have been sexually assaulted in just one night. Although there were said to have been over a thousand perpetrators, the vast majority were never traced, and a decade later, just 39 convictions have been secured. Only two of those were for sexual assault, it is reported.
The Cologne police command centre rejected the support of reserve officers held nearby and dismissed them home on the evening of the attacks, even as their own officers struggled to contain the chaos on the Cathedral square. The following morning, the force published a cheerful press release stating the night had passed off “peacefully” and without incident.
Broadcaster WDR notes then-Federal Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière acknowledged the attacks were “a turning point in the debate about refugees in Germany” and changed the course of German political history, setting migrant-critical party the AfD up for greater successes and ushering support for stricter migration policies in the years that followed. Evidently the narrative created on that night ten years ago remains difficult for left-wing pro-migration politics and activists, and attempts to revise history continue.
As reported by German broadsheet Die Welt, Hamburg-based police researcher Rafael Behr, a former professor of police science at the Hamburg Police Academy, used the anniversary to put forward his particular theories. The paper states he told WDR5 radio that the perpetrators having Arab or North African origins is not from a criminological point of view, “a criminogenic factor”.
Behr rejected the German police shorthand for “North African Repeat Offender”, ‘NAFRI’, as unhelpful and said instead the Cologne attacks should be seen in the light of “masculinity as the motive and not nationality”. The paper quoted him as saying that the migrants had “endured existential fears” and were then transferred to a society “where they are not allowed to do anything, not even have the prospect of being allowed to stay here.”
On New Year’s Eve, then, “something was being compensated for that night” and this “was released explosively”.
This sudden rush of thousands of sex assaults and rapes taking place simultaneously across Germany was essentially spontaneous, he said he believed, and was not actually “strategically” planned, as has been widely reported.
Local Cologne newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger reports the 10th anniversary of the sex assaults was being memorialised on Wednesday night by a vigil in the same square by the Women’s Heroines group, which accuses police of being overwhelmed and that the importance of the attacks have been downplayed.
The Heroines group said in a statement of their motivation:
The consequences of failed migration and integration policies have long disproportionately burdened women: with acts of violence in public spaces, parallel societies that isolate themselves through clothing and behaviour, sprawling concentrations of young men, and an openly displayed rejection of central values of the free democratic order and thus of the hard-won women’s rights in Europe.
The Cologne New Year’s Eve attacks ten years ago were a warning sign of this trend at the expense of women and girls. And the far too late reaction of the city and authorities at the time was a worst-practice example of failed analysis… the acts were not accidental and cannot be explained by alcohol, trauma, or “cultural misunderstandings”… here is a clear motive: contempt for Western civilization. Europeans are seen as weak, their legal system as exploitable, their women as legitimate prey.
The group made 11 demands of the government, including that the government should recognise it has a constitutional duty to protect the life and liberty of women and girls and that this “takes absolute precedence over all considerations related to migration, integration, residency, and perpetrators”.
Violent and sex criminal migrants should have their citizenship stripped and be deported, they said, and big-money NGOs that ” downplay, excuse, or cover up violence” should be defunded.
Failure to deliver means the rule of law loses its legitimacy, they warned.
According to a report from the Italian newspaper Il Giornale, the prosecutor’s office in Milan suspects that the alleged sexual assaults were a manifestation of the “Islamic ritual” known as taharrush gamea, or the “collective sexual harassment in crowds”. The paper said the attacks generally target “insolent women, guilty of showing up in public”.
… The first widely documented ‘taharrush gamea’ incident occurred in Egypt in 2005 when the government allegedly hired gangs of men to assault female protesters and journalists sexually. Amnesty International reported in 2015 that since 2012, “mob sexual assaults, including rape, have become a regular feature of protests in the vicinity of Tahrir Square in Cairo.”
The practice has since spread into Europe, most notably in the 2016 New Year’s Eve Cologne attacks brought to international attention by Breitbart London… Gang sex attacks have also occurred in Italy, including in Milan on New Year’s Eve 2022 in the very same Piazza del Duomo when nine young women fell victim to similar sexual assaults, leading prosecutors to believe that the recent attacks may have been a copy cat of the incidents two years prior.The practice has since spead into Europe, most notably in the 2016 New Year’s Eve Cologne attacks brought to international attention by Breitbart London… Gang sex attacks have also occurred in Italy, including in Milan on New Year’s Eve 2022 in the very same Piazza del Duomo when nine young women fell victim to similar sexual assaults, leading prosecutors to believe that the recent attacks may have been a copy cat of the incidents two years prior.