Cologne attacks: “This is sexual terrorism directed towards women” [View all]

[Dems to Win]

Last edited Tue Jan 19, 2016, 03:01 PM - Edit history (1)

As the extreme right exploits mass assaults in Germany to mobilize against refugees, European feminists are in a battle over where their sympathies should lie
EMMA-KATE SYMONS01.19.16

http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2016/01/19/cologne-attacks-this-is-sexual-terrorism-directed-towards-women/

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Now, after all the victim blaming and despite what Spiegel magazine declared “the end of political correctness” in Germany, a pall of selective silence and victim shaming has persisted.

Except this time, it includes feminists who have found their voices and, their detractors say, are working against the interests of the women they are supposed to represent. Any discussion of the collective sexual assaults as ethnically, racially and ideologically motivated is off limits. “I am sad but not surprised,” Alice Schwarzer, the leading second-wave German feminist, and editor of Emma.de magazine told Women in the World.

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Instead of frank and open discussion, an Omerta has been imposed. Its leading backers are mostly younger European women’s activists, cultural relativists and anti-racists, who are accused of being more concerned about not offending migrant communities and Muslim men than standing up for the women subjected to the marauding gropers, and group rapists who attacked so-called “easy,” “white” German “whores” (among the obscenities hurled at the victims as they battled their way through walls of grasping, pulling hands, crawling over their breasts and between their legs).

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Laurie Penny raised the ire of some feminist critics when, in a New Statesman column titled “After Cologne we can’t let the bigots steal feminism,” she ridiculed the reaction to Cologne as mostly “excited” right-wing outrage that was just a “good excuse to bash Muslims and migrants”. “It’s easier to pin misogyny on cultural outsiders than it is to accept that men everywhere must do better,” Penny said in an argument that prompted Canadian political commentator Tasha Kheiriddin to assert that “cultural relativism harms women”.

Some have gone so far as to draw a direct parallel between the vulnerabilities of German women and Muslim men. “If I, with my black hair, were to ride the bus after eight o’clock in the evening in rural Saxony, I’m guessing it’s highly likely I would be accosted or verbally abused,” said Aiman Mazyek, head of the Central Council for Muslims in Germany, in a redirection of the post-Cologne debate onto Muslim men as victims. “But I would never allow myself to make assumptions about the whole of Central Europe on that basis.”

Long, excellent article. Overview, with links, of most of the feminist commentary about the New Year's Eve mass sexual attacks in Germany. I've read most of the links, and there is an awful lot of mealy-mouth contortioning going on to pretend that the NYE assaults were just another OktoberFest. Far too much disgusting minimization of the mass sex assaults that are UNPRECEDENTED in Germany, according to the police.

Self-identified German feminist groups are actually advocating silencing the victims:

German feminist groups like #ausnhamslos [no excuses] issuing “warnings” against open discussion because “it is harmful for all of us if feminism is exploited by extremists to incite against certain ethnicities.”