Sex Attacks in Cologne and other European Cities Part VIII

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THE PETITION _ Please sign and share
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Let the debate continue.....

Labour have been silent or embarrassingly ill informed
yes I'm incredible disappointed in them.

unlucky I am actually shocked by the level of my acceptance... I am shocked at myself.

Perhaps we were all smarter a hundred years ago. Here’s something from a recent letters page of a newspaper about forcing traditions onto each other so it is in the public domain.

“The Commander-in-Chief in India, General Sir Charles Napier, was approached by Hindu priests protesting at the British ban on the custom of suttee, the requirement for widows to burn themselves on their husband’s funeral pyres.

“Napier replied: You say suttee is your custom. Where I come from it is the custom that should a man burn a woman alive, we take that man and hang him. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You may erect a funeral pyre over there and I will have my men erect a gallows over here and we will each follow our separate customs.”

Brilliant, no toadying.

Labour hasn't been silent. The media minister blogged, she is undergoing chemotherapy at present. Jess made some relevant feminist points. The Birmingham comment was bizarre and her decent points were lost.

Kate Green is getting involved in a webchat too.

The only positive that we can take from Jess Phillips stupid comments is that it keeps it in the media loop. My worry is that this becomes an old story and leaves the public focus . If we want more to sign the petition the story must live on

The Guardian is a disgrace, 100!

They have grudgingly gone up from 40 to 60 sexual assaults then. What a joke their fact checking is.

They are so at it.

It is a disgrace and the people that only read the Guardian???

Vertigo sorry yes there was a really interesting response from Thangam Debbonaire. Labour.

Maybe someone should write to the dear old Graun, and point out the dazzling inaccuracy in their report.

I've just seen on BBC site Jess Phillips talking on QTime last night. She strikes me as a lightweight and, as you have said, she is diminishing Cologne attacks by comparing them to what occurs in Birmingham. She is another one who cannot bring herself to talk about the kernel of the issue.

Article about jess Philips on Independent news site. Feel free to add a comment.

Also, as I suggested on an earlier thread, we should try and get into the QT to persist with this issue. Locations and dates on BBC site.

Oh good, because, to my astonishment, the Graun wasn't accepting comments.

Perhaps they thought they might get hassled. Like you do on Broad Street.

Speaking of the Guardian, despite their heavy handed censorship of all things Cologne related I have noticed that they are not so hot on all types of 'hate'.

An article was published yesterday re Adolf Eichmann's last letter pleading for mercy. In the comments there are quite a few anti-Semitic holocaust denying comments which have been allowed to stand despite comments around them being deleted. Often the usernames suggest posters who might seem likely to be Muslim.

Good ol' Graun eh? Stamping out hatred and intolerance everywhere except when it's the hatred and intolerance they approve of.

LumelaMme thanks for the Guardian link I see Jess Phillips says 'lots of stuff going on'. She reminds the ex Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during Bush era 2001 to 2006 on the looting of Iraq. When asked at the time why U.S. troops did not actively seek to stop the lawlessness, Rumsfeld replied,
"Stuff happens…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld

I've just sent an email to the Guardian reader's editor at [email protected] pointing out that the figures they give in the Jess Phillips article are long out of date and directing them to this article for figures from the German police.

How to make a complaint about Guardian or Observer content

Accuracy is top of the list of issues covered by their Editorial Code.

"The Guardian’s policy is to correct substantial errors as soon as possible. Corrections appear on the relevant web page and/or in the newspaper and significant corrections are collated in our corrections and clarifications column."

So we wait to see whether they correct or consider my complaint "trivial, hypothetical or otherwise vexatious or insignificant."

Billy, I think the Graun might have got in there and deleted a few comments since you read it. I didn't read all the comments, mind.

340

I've emailed to ask Jess Phillips to clarify that she has indeed confused heckling with digital rape.

I look forward to her reply.

344

Is anyone able to tweet the petition to prominent (or just gobby) celebs. The numbers are creeping up, we need to get word out there though.

I wrote to the Guardian readers' editor too. Frankfurter Allgemeine (big, respected paper) is reporting today that the number of complaints continues to increase, and is currently 1016 (for Cologne only). So the Guardian had minimised it tenfold.

It also has a in-depth article looking at the possible causes of the attacks: power, dominance over women, anger, patriarchal family structures, crowd conduct. It questions whether it can be classed taharrush gameâ.

It ends by saying that research shows that willingness to accept gender equality increases with education. So men from rural areas in patriarchal societies, whose education is likely to be low, are more likely to find the self-confidence of German women 'a shock'. It cites a project in Berlin where German-Turkish men and boys are trained (voluntarily) to question patriarchal attitudes, eg towards their sister going out in a miniskirt. It has had some success, so the article thinks education of the new arrivals could work too.

www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/warum-frauen-seit-koelner-uebergriffe-verunsichert-sind-14040977.html

Well done on getting the petition up, I've signed it.

I've just sent an email to the Guardian reader's editor at [email protected] pointing out that the figures they give in the Jess Phillips article are long out of date and directing them to this article for figures from the German police

Are they still blatantly lying about the figures and nitpicking the wording of the original police statement without clarifying (apart from arguing with people BTL) a) that they have made such a judgement call and b) what their reasoning is? As almost everyone in the comments pointed out in an article about two weeks ago? Because that would be truly disturbing.

Jess Phillips as quoted:

“It happens to young women all the time, and we shouldn’t think that is a phenomenon brought to us by one group of people.”

She added: “Everyone who took part in a sexual assault in Cologne should be convicted. But if we convicted everyone who groped women in this country, we’d have no space in our prisons to put them in.”

Well that's fucking helpful, thanks so much, Jess. We'll just STFU about male violence from all sources completely, shall we?

venus This is what the Guardian has in the Jess Phillips article:

"A ferocious debate erupted in Germany this month over the handling of mass sexual assaults and muggings carried out by groups of young males during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne. About 100 complaints were made to police, two-thirds of which were linked to sexual assault, including two rapes." - which would mean around 66 cases of sexual assault.

As you say, people were correcting them on the figures BTL two weeks ago, but they don't seem to have listened.

The Deutsche Welle article I referred to has these figures:

"In Hamburg there were 195 complaints, most of them for sexual offenses. Investigators in North Rhine-Westphalia reported 1,076 crimes altogether, mainly in the cities of Cologne, Dusseldorf and Bielefeld. That number included 692 bodily harm or property offenses and 384 sexual offenses."

It is also noticeable that the Guardian's regular feminist opinion writers, people like Jessica Valenti ("We can't stop rape if we prize men's reputations over women's safety", "We need to walk the streets without fear"), are ignoring the NYE atttacks completely.