Taharrush
The BBC yesterday on the Cologne attacks on women:
The men suspected of attacking women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve were “almost exclusively” from a migration background, mainly North African and Arab, an official report says.
…
Addressing state MPs on Monday, [North Rhine-Westphalia state’s interior minister Ralf] Jaeger criticised police for not calling for reinforcements on the night, and also for the way they informed the public about the investigation in the days after the events.
His report details how a group of around 1,000 men of North African and Arabic origin gathered on 31 December. Smaller groups formed, surrounding women, then threatening and attacking them, he said.
These groups were predominately made up of North African men who had travelled to Cologne from different cities.
There’s one new element, that I heard from other sources yesterday too:
Monday’s report into the attacks in Cologne says that the combination of group sexual violence with robbery had not previously been seen in Germany.
It notes that similar crimes took place in other parts of Germany on 31 December, including in Hamburg.
The report describes a modus operandi known as “taharrush gamea” in Arabic, meaning group sexual harassment in crowds, and compares it to incidents reported in Cairo’s Tahrir Square at the time of the Egyptian revolution.
Friends of mine say that’s real, and that it started a couple of years before the Tahrir Square attacks. A new technology, enabled by the new technology of Twitter, perhaps.
Maybe if they can analyze message traffic they can find who’s involved. There needs to be a crackdown, but a targeted one, not based on profiling but evidence.
I’d never heard of this before. That’s not an aspect of immigrant culture we want imported to Europe. If this turns out to be correct it needs cracking down on quickly and severely.
I had read about this during the Arab spring. I’m not sure that was what it was called; perhaps the name was Anglicized for the articles I read.
Re new technology/enabled by new technology:
I think I can honestly say that, despite (or perhaps because of) my long residence in the tech sector, I’ve never been one of those ever figured invention x or y or technological field z in general was ever going to bring about world peace, make your cats stop barfing on the rugs nor make everything perfect forever or what have you, whatever the pitch the investors or customers were given. Serious technophiles don’t so much amuse me as alarm me; it’s seems almost certain that anything that can do great things will also have the potential for really awful ones. Partly I assume this from lots of empirical results just like this one, partly it’s just picturing what might go wrong. The general synthesis of it all is: give arboreal apes any capability, they’ll also use it to be jerks in essentially the same old ways they ever did, but with new efficiency.
Moving it beyond mere pointless despair, however, the thing is: of late the real problem is, I think, the very pace of change makes it difficult for our social (including informal/customary, as well as legal, and government) structures to adapt quickly enough. So much of the history of networking technologies is, yes, people who couldn’t talk to each other before doing so. And a lot of it is people finding new ways to stay one jump ahead of the laws while ripping someone else off or intimidating or stalking someone they couldn’t before. People have been after the police for screwing this up, and I guess it’s fair to say they did, but I wonder if they weren’t every bit as overwhelmed, out of their depth, making bad decisions in part because they just had no template for this. Won’t do and has to be fixed, sure, but I’m not sure it’s just institutional sexism at work here, not taking women’s complaints seriously enough, but also that it is a somewhat new variant of an, admittedly, old phenomenon.
Apparently, we’re going to have to adapt.
I say also: I don’t think I’ve ever been real naive about the potentials of technology. What I have been concluding, loosely, of late, though, is I was always more than a bit wrong about how you fix such underlying problems as those leading to those attacks. Not so much in a formal sense (I’d always have said I didn’t think just ditching religion would necessarily get you far, so much as it was a probably helpful first step), but in a lot of the general, hazy assumptions around that. What really strikes me over the last few years from watching the bitter, nasty misogynists of the net especially, is: they do quite transcend religion, at least in their formal declaration. Lots of the assholes who harass women every bit as systematically (if usually more virtually) declare themselves atheists; ain’t like this is news to anyone here, I guess…
All of it not news, I guess, and see also probably necessary but not sufficient conditions. Old dogmas associated with religions are just one of a lot of things excusing and protecting the behaviours, the attitudes, the whole underlying gestalt is quite a weave. What’s especially saddening is watching these people essentially trying to use the tools that took apart the (more easily discarded) cosmologies essentially to defend exactly the same, twisted ethics those cosmologies had once been the justification for, twisting logic however they must to put the layers of the social pyramid right back where they always were again. But again, I guess, no surprise. People can accept the planet’s not the center of the universe; accepting the caste into which they were born isn’t exactly where it was always declared to be, especially if it was, also, apparently what everything was supposed to revolve around is a whole ‘nother level of painful, apparently.
This migration must be halted and then re-tooled
Canada is taking in ‘Syrian’ migrants, but certain conditions must be met. Our migrant plan forbids entry to young single males. NO young single males. Single females of pretty much any age are most welcome ( they are probably the most desperate of all) and young families with young children ( preferably with parents under 35). Special consideration will be given to the grandparents of these families who are still considered young enough to enter the workforce…ie under 55.
We can’t save Syria, Iraq or indeed the Middle East, but we can at least save some of the furniture.
I certainly recall, with horror, the reports and images of the attacks upon women in Tahrir Square. In the time since, has any investigation implicated the use of social media? My impression at the time was that the violence was a spontaneous expression of ‘sincerely held’ religious misogyny.
Are the Cologne/Hamburg attacks a spontaneous outburst, enabled by Twitter? Or a premeditated ‘event’ staged by some planner(s)?
I think, if I remember correctly, it seemed at the time that the attacks were in some sense co-ordinated – that it was as if everyone had all at once decided it was ok to attack women again, and that that implied some agreement or arrangement or similar. I think. Not sure.
Gemeinschaftlicher Taharrusch, Testgelände für Männerherrschaft und Allahkratie
Kollektives Frauenerniedrigen in der Neujahrsnacht 2016 am Kölner Dom und an vielen anderen Orten, deutschlandweit viele hundert nach Koran und Sunna sozialisierte junge Männer kesseln an insgesamt vielleicht 500 junge Frauen ein, drängen ihre gegebenenfalls vorhandenen männlichen Begleiter ab, greifen den weiblichen Opfern an Busen und Genital, gelangen vielfach mit dem Finger in alle Körperöffnungen, es kommt zu einigen Vergewaltigungen. Dabei sorgt der Mob dafür, dass die Opfer alleine oder zu zweit bleiben, seltener sind drei oder vier junge Frauen von beispielsweise 20 oder 30 Tätern umstellt. Etlichen der Opfer werden Mobiltelephon und Geldbörse entwendet, doch geht es offensichtlich weniger um den Diebstahl als um das Frauenentwürdigen. Politik und Presse bemühen sich sehr, Kontext und Kausalität von Islam und kollektivem Taharrusch (Taharrusch dschama’i) zu verschleiern. Von Jacques Auvergne.
https://schariagegner.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/taharrush-gamea-islamisches-entwuerdigen-von-frauen-in-der-oeffentlichkeit-teil-i/
@6
I spoke to a couple of people who were in Tahrir at the time and they told me that – judging by their dress – the perpetrators (generally) weren’t the ultra-religious but were certainly not “liberals” either. This behaviour is a product of the culture, a toxic mixture of religion and and sheer misogyny that has become worse as the tide of “conservative” Islam has flooded Arab countries and all across the Muslim world in recent decades.
sandmonkey’s post on the Eid sexual harassment in Cairo in 2006 bears re-reading, if you’ve the stomach for it. And the police did nothing, and the media didn’t report it. http://www.sandmonkey.org/2006/10/30/the-eid-sexual-harassment-incident/