New years eve sexual assaults in Cologne - a psyop?

[Beau]

I am being serious. And a prudent person who was even vaguely aware that his "politics" were potentially discriminatory or even 'racist', or could be construed that way, would NOT use his work email address to sign up to a forum where he intended to express such opinions. So it suggests more than a bit of Dunning Kruger on your part, which goes a long way to explaining your "politics", which appear to be not so much opinions as an exercise in the ancient art of being impressively obtuse.

Ah, so now we're engaging in ad hominem insults. Interesting how, rather than addressing the ethical issues here, the response has been to call me stupid.

No one has called you stupid. Your writing SUGGESTS Dunning-Kruger, which is where a person can't recognize their incompetence because of their incompetence. Essentially, you can't think about the way you think with the way you think. Ad hominem is when one person attacks another person rather than their position, yet the comments about Dunning-Kruger and your obstinance is directly related to your position, basically you're writing but NOT you. So you seem to not really understand what you're talking about, or what people are saying to you. That means either you could be suffering from some Dunning-Kruger like issues, or you are purposefully twisting people's words in order to suggest malicious intent where there was none.

 

[Keit]

That's just one reason why anonymity is important (and I really thought SotT would respect that, and am still appalled that it wasn't respected).

Actually, it's us, both SOTT readers and editors should be appalled at your recklessness, and that is after giving you the benefit of the doubt that it was unintentional. If your posts were left "unattended", it would leave SOTT and its readers open for a legitimate attack, as a source that condones racist views, by not opposing them in an active way. Because that's how such views should be opposed. Not the Dalai Lama way, but Putin's way. So excuse me, if I think that you even got off pretty easy.

 

[Alana]

I'm quite aware that the world's Muslims aren't going to stop being Muslim any time soon. I'm totally OK with that. I think we should let them be, and not invade their countries, bombing and killing them so a few rich psychopaths in our countries can get rich from oil and arms sales. Just because I don't much like Islam doesn't mean I want to go to war with them over it. But I also am not a huge fan of letting huge numbers of them into our own countries, precisely because I don't want my country to become like their countries. That's basically a live and let live philosophy. It's also predicated on precisely the expectation that, if large numbers come, it will precipitate an ultranationalist counter-reaction which will suck in all sorts of ways for them and us. I would like to avoid that, please.

What I am reading in your words is a huge amount of fear. A fear of the "other" that are going to come and "change your way of life". How is this going to work though? You said in previous posts that you live away from big cities, in the country-site. The Canadian government is planning to give asylum to 25,000 refugees. The population of Canada is over 35 million. And given how huge is Canada and how not very populated it is, it is likely that you will live through the rest of your life and never meet any of these refugees. So where is your fear coming from? Perhaps the natives of Canada did not feel as much fear as you do now when they saw the first white people arriving on their eastern shores, though they should have, given the history that followed - and follows to this day.
So where is your fear stemming from now?

What do you think these 25,000 refugee Muslims are going to do to you and your life? You would like to avoid an "an ultranationalist counter-reaction" to the refugees coming, you say. And you choose to do that by taking the side of the "ultra-nationalistic counter-reactors", by contributing to the very problem you are afraid is going to happen?! It seems that you think yourself knowledgeable and intelligent, psychegram, but it looks to me that the fascist racist propaganda about the refugees has bypassed all reason you might have had and drove right into your deepest and most primitive fears. I don't hold it against you, very few people are able to resist it, as we've seen time and again through history. But stop using this forum and the SOTT page to spread your fears around. If you want it, create your own fear-mongering against the refugees page (you have a couple of blogs already, yes?), us here don't want to be part of it.

 

[casper]

Today I read an interesting article that came out last month in a Croatian newspaper.
The article talks about the fear of refugees.
These are the key sentences from the article, quote:

"We are afraid that it will change our culture. We forget that, above all, people.
They" do not come to change even threaten "us". "We" are not brittle, and opening the door to "them" can only become - stronger. When they are in disasters, the first reaction of people to help, but empathy, unfortunately, does not have an infinite lifetime. That is why we must teach tolerance and combating prejudices.
The fundamental motive that dictates negative reactions towards refugees fear of the unknown and the different.
Walter and Cookie Stephen, known to researchers prejudice, said: If the father fear of prejudice, ignorance is their grandfather.From ignorance comes a lot of fear.
If we accept food from across the world, why can not we accept the people?"

 

[SeekinTruth]

Well, Bjorn gave a good personal account of his city and his experience of immigrants and Muslims. I'll give my background experience in a bit of a different way.

All my family from both sides were victims of the Armenian genocide carried out by the Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman Turks, by the way, adopted Islam but were not originally Muslims. So the survivors from my family went to Syria and then Egypt. Most Armenian survivors were actually saved and brought up by Arabs and desert Bedouins, mostly in Syria. They literally brought many young children who had lost their families up as their own. But, amazingly, they did not try to convert them to Islam or let them forget their identities. In my family, the empathy and hospitality of the Arab peoples is very highly regarded.

Both my parents were born in Egypt (a Muslim majority country). They were brought up in the Armenian culture and went to Armenian language schools, etc. That is to say, the Egyptians allowed the Armenian community in their country to have their schools, religion(Christian), language, culture, etc., without any discrimination or animosity. Both sides of the family started with nothing and made a very comfortable upper middle class lives for themselves.

My father had a family business and dealings with people of many different backgrounds. He told me that the vast majority of the Muslim Arabs were thoroughly trustworthy and hard-working. Pretty much their word was their honor. The Christian Arabs generally, much less so. How to explain that, I don't know, but that was his experience.

The painting of Muslims as inherently untrustworthy/worthy of suspicion is supposedly coming from personal experience? Don't know how to square that with my own experience (I also had a very good friend in the U.S. from Bangladesh whose family was very deeply influenced by Islam, and again can't see anything inherently bad about that). Just don't know where this nonsense is coming from. For me, it's not only totally repulsive to see this demonization of the Muslims, led by the MSM since 911, but it totally contradicts my own personal experiences with Muslims. Not only are they normal human beings, many still have very strong traditional customs of hospitality, something that was lost a long time ago in the "West". After letting their pathological politicians destroy so many Muslim majority countries in the last years, for the Western population to have this hysterical reaction to the "Muslim hordes invading" is beyond words. Many of these "outraged" westerners didn't raise a peep about the atrocities their countries were committing against these Muslim countries so that their greedy elite can have their riches and the rest, now gripped by this anit-Muslim hysteria, were just going along to get along so they could eat the crumbs that fell from the fat cats' table. That's that's the way I see it.

 

[Alana]

... and I just came across Charlie Hebdo's new low:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/charlie-hebdo-sparks-new-controversy-with-cartoon-depicting-aylan-kurdi-as-an-ass-groper-in-germany-a6810331.html

From: https://roarmag.org/2016/01/14/what-if-alan-kurdi-did-grow-up-in-france/

An open letter to Charlie Hebdo explains what really might have happened if Alan Kurdi would have had a chance to grow up in France.
Author: Dilar Dirik


Dear Charlie Hebdo,

Free speech blabla/it’s not racism blabla aside, your latest cartoon depicting Alan Kurdî as a groper in Europe if he had grown up is neither funny, nor does it express anything meaningful in any way.

It is tasteless anyway, but since you have chosen Alan Kurdî to be the protagonist of your cartoon, let us look at the context of this child that was drowned in the Mediterranean and that you are mocking now beyond his death: Alan Kurdî was a Kurd from Kobane, the bastion of resistance against ISIS. Kobane restored hope in humanity, and above all, it has shown the world the strength and power of women against fascism.

If Alan Kurdî had grown up — and he would have, if states like France wouldn’t turn Europe into a supremacist castle of untouchability to protect themselves from the results of their colonial legacies, if they wouldn’t have destroyed countries from which millions of Alans now flee partly as a result of French policies and arms sales, if France hadn’t drawn these artificial borders in the Sykes-Picot agreement, the devastating outcomes of which we now experience exactly 100 years on — he sure would have known throughout his life what the meaning of Kobane is.

He would have known that it was women who liberated his hometown. Perhaps, like most organized Kurdish youth in our communities in Europe — most of whom also once arrived as refugees there — he would have become an active advocate of free speech, a political activist, a defender of rights. He would have grown up with, and gotten used to women in leadership roles all around him. Photos of women guerrillas on walls would have been normal to him.

If he had studied, the jokes about how Kurdish students always study sociology, politics or law would have also applied to him. He perhaps would have challenged the fact that France purposefully still doesn’t expose the role of the Turkish secret service in the murder of three Kurdish women activists, Sakine Cansiz, Fidan Dogan, and Leyla Saylemez in Paris, who were killed almost on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attacks, but two years earlier.

He would have perhaps protested that the French state creates reasons to arrest and terrorize Kurdish activists in France for their political activities and opinions. The same French state that yells “freedom of speech” and which has revoked the broadcasting license from the Kurdish television channel Medya TV in 2004, which was the only way for the millions of diasporic Kurds in Europe to get news from their home and have a voice.

But yes, Alan Kurdî died, his future was taken away and your racist imagination of his future is laughable when you try to decorate it with free speech, when it is among other things the fascism and the silence of the French state that is directly responsible for refugee bodies being rendered disposable!

Dilar Dirik is part of the Kurdish women’s movement. She is a writer and PhD student at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge.

 

[Solie123]

... and I just came across Charlie Hebdo's new low:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/charlie-hebdo-sparks-new-controversy-with-cartoon-depicting-aylan-kurdi-as-an-ass-groper-in-germany-a6810331.html

From: https://roarmag.org/2016/01/14/what-if-alan-kurdi-did-grow-up-in-france/

An open letter to Charlie Hebdo explains what really might have happened if Alan Kurdi would have had a chance to grow up in France.
Author: Dilar Dirik


Dear Charlie Hebdo,

Free speech blabla/it’s not racism blabla aside, your latest cartoon depicting Alan Kurdî as a groper in Europe if he had grown up is neither funny, nor does it express anything meaningful in any way.

It is tasteless anyway, but since you have chosen Alan Kurdî to be the protagonist of your cartoon, let us look at the context of this child that was drowned in the Mediterranean and that you are mocking now beyond his death: Alan Kurdî was a Kurd from Kobane, the bastion of resistance against ISIS. Kobane restored hope in humanity, and above all, it has shown the world the strength and power of women against fascism.

If Alan Kurdî had grown up — and he would have, if states like France wouldn’t turn Europe into a supremacist castle of untouchability to protect themselves from the results of their colonial legacies, if they wouldn’t have destroyed countries from which millions of Alans now flee partly as a result of French policies and arms sales, if France hadn’t drawn these artificial borders in the Sykes-Picot agreement, the devastating outcomes of which we now experience exactly 100 years on — he sure would have known throughout his life what the meaning of Kobane is.

He would have known that it was women who liberated his hometown. Perhaps, like most organized Kurdish youth in our communities in Europe — most of whom also once arrived as refugees there — he would have become an active advocate of free speech, a political activist, a defender of rights. He would have grown up with, and gotten used to women in leadership roles all around him. Photos of women guerrillas on walls would have been normal to him.

If he had studied, the jokes about how Kurdish students always study sociology, politics or law would have also applied to him. He perhaps would have challenged the fact that France purposefully still doesn’t expose the role of the Turkish secret service in the murder of three Kurdish women activists, Sakine Cansiz, Fidan Dogan, and Leyla Saylemez in Paris, who were killed almost on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attacks, but two years earlier.

He would have perhaps protested that the French state creates reasons to arrest and terrorize Kurdish activists in France for their political activities and opinions. The same French state that yells “freedom of speech” and which has revoked the broadcasting license from the Kurdish television channel Medya TV in 2004, which was the only way for the millions of diasporic Kurds in Europe to get news from their home and have a voice.

But yes, Alan Kurdî died, his future was taken away and your racist imagination of his future is laughable when you try to decorate it with free speech, when it is among other things the fascism and the silence of the French state that is directly responsible for refugee bodies being rendered disposable!

Dilar Dirik is part of the Kurdish women’s movement. She is a writer and PhD student at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge.

It's disgusting that they would attack a deceased child victim. It's not only tasteless but it shows how much disregard they actually have for a human life, let alone a innocent child's life. But somehow they dare to then stand up and point the finger at Arabs/Muslims as the 'bad' ones.

I haven't seen anywhere someone speak about a tragedy in such a way, and god forbid someone makes fun of the recent terror attacks and they'd be labeled as 'sympathizers' or heartless or something along those lines. It's hypocritical, but of course, as long as we keep projecting ourselves onto someone else, we can avoid looking at our own horrors.

 

[Windmill knight]

Well, Bjorn gave a good personal account of his city and his experience of immigrants and Muslims. I'll give my background experience in a bit of a different way.

All my family from both sides were victims of the Armenian genocide carried out by the Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman Turks, by the way, adopted Islam but were not originally Muslims. So the survivors from my family went to Syria and then Egypt. Most Armenian survivors were actually saved and brought up by Arabs and desert Bedouins, mostly in Syria. They literally brought many young children who had lost their families up as their own. But, amazingly, they did not try to convert them to Islam or let them forget their identities. In my family, the empathy and hospitality of the Arab peoples is very highly regarded.
...

Thanks for the account ST. When I went to Egypt I was very impressed by the hospitality - and I grew up in a country that is supposed to be good at that. One day I visited the old part of Cairo on my own. I was a bit apprehensive as I stuck out as the only tourist around and the area looked rather poor. A guy approached me and asked if I wanted him to show me around his neighbourhood. Hesitantly I accepted, assuming that he would ask me for money. Instead, he spent a good two hours with me, introduced me to some of the locals, including the imam of the mosque and a guy who sold papiruses and his family, had some shisha and tea with me in a coffee shop, and then said goodbye. I felt it was unfair that he had taken all that trouble for me, so I did offer some money and he said he was doing it out of hospitality and because he wanted to become a tourist guide one day. Apart from taking me to his papirus selling friend, I couldn't see how he could have taken any advantage of me, and the selling job of the papirus wasn't even very insistent. I left scratching my head and thinking that had I been in any western country I would have probably been mugged instead of being treated so well.

I haven't lived in a Muslim or Arab country, but I have met quite a few Muslims in the UK and France, and generally I find them to be lovely people, even if a bit conservative. (I like Eastern Europeans too, but that's another story.)

 

[psychegram]

Well. That's actually ... hmm. Everyone's replies are certainly food for thought. I certainly must retract my earlier statement about 'experience', now that others have shared their personal experiences, which are indeed quite different.

I'm not worried about Canada. Canada's a long way from everywhere, and we can more or less pick and choose who comes into our countries. We're bringing over families, women and children, and all of them really are Syrian refugees. 25,000 is also not so many. It's Europe that my concern lies with, as I have a deep affection for the continent. As some have noted, I seem scared ... if I do, it's because I am. I'm scared Europe could be over-run, and I'm scared Europe will go full-fascist again specifically in order to head off that fate. That fear of being overrun is, again yes, informed partly by my acute awareness of what happened in Canada and the US over the past 400 years. Are these fears being manipulated? Again, yes, that's a distinct possibility. Then again, as Harrison noted (and I agree with this), it is also our compassion, as well as our fear, that is being used to manipulate us.

I wasn't threatening Harrison. I was pointing out that, if fascism comes, that is what will happen: certain kinds of speech will be interpreted as treason, and dealt with the way fascists deal with such things, i.e. violently. Not that I, personally, would do such a thing, which is physically implausible and repulsive. A previous commenter noted that what I said about Islam could really piss off certain people and get me in trouble ... using the same reasoning, was that a threat against me? Obviously not and nor did I take it as such. A warning about what others might do is not the same as a threat to do such oneself.

Niall's threat was by contrast a very direct and unambiguous personal threat. I feel it was also disproportionate to any offence I may have caused. His manner with me in the comments has often felt frankly abusive (contrasting greatly with the replies here on the forum, which have been, by and large, thoughtful, calm, and respectful even while disagreeing vehemently, and thank you all for that).

 

[luke wilson]

Well. That's actually ... hmm. Everyone's replies are certainly food for thought. I certainly must retract my earlier statement about 'experience', now that others have shared their personal experiences, which are indeed quite different.

I'm not worried about Canada. Canada's a long way from everywhere, and we can more or less pick and choose who comes into our countries. We're bringing over families, women and children, and all of them really are Syrian refugees. 25,000 is also not so many. It's Europe that my concern lies with, as I have a deep affection for the continent. As some have noted, I seem scared ... if I do, it's because I am. I'm scared Europe could be over-run, and I'm scared Europe will go full-fascist again specifically in order to head off that fate. That fear of being overrun is, again yes, informed partly by my acute awareness of what happened in Canada and the US over the past 400 years. Are these fears being manipulated? Again, yes, that's a distinct possibility. Then again, as Harrison noted (and I agree with this), it is also our compassion, as well as our fear, that is being used to manipulate us.

I wasn't threatening Harrison. I was pointing out that, if fascism comes, that is what will happen: certain kinds of speech will be interpreted as treason, and dealt with the way fascists deal with such things, i.e. violently. Not that I, personally, would do such a thing, which is physically implausible and repulsive. A previous commenter noted that what I said about Islam could really piss off certain people and get me in trouble ... using the same reasoning, was that a threat against me? Obviously not and nor did I take it as such. A warning about what others might do is not the same as a threat to do such oneself.

Niall's threat was by contrast a very direct and unambiguous personal threat. I feel it was also disproportionate to any offence I may have caused. His manner with me in the comments has often felt frankly abusive (contrasting greatly with the replies here on the forum, which have been, by and large, thoughtful, calm, and respectful even while disagreeing vehemently, and thank you all for that).

Why are the refugees here psychegram?

 

[Windmill knight]

I'm not worried about Canada. Canada's a long way from everywhere, and we can more or less pick and choose who comes into our countries. We're bringing over families, women and children, and all of them really are Syrian refugees. 25,000 is also not so many. It's Europe that my concern lies with, as I have a deep affection for the continent. As some have noted, I seem scared ... if I do, it's because I am. I'm scared Europe could be over-run, and I'm scared Europe will go full-fascist again specifically in order to head off that fate. That fear of being overrun is, again yes, informed partly by my acute awareness of what happened in Canada and the US over the past 400 years. Are these fears being manipulated? Again, yes, that's a distinct possibility. Then again, as Harrison noted (and I agree with this), it is also our compassion, as well as our fear, that is being used to manipulate us.

I sympathize with your fear of Europe going fascist, and I share it. I can also understand not wanting to feel that somebody else is going to somehow impose their ways on your (or other) people, or as you put it, that Europe may be 'over-run'. But to be honest, I think that's an unfounded fear, for several reasons. First, the numbers. How many immigrants would Europe need so that white Europeans become a minority? And how much time would that take? Second, the immigrants get 'europeanized' too. When I was in the UK, many of the children of immigrants were undistinguishable from British youths in the way they dressed, talked and the things they did - even if their moms were still wearing jihabs. Third, I am a firm believer that multiculturalism enriches countries rather than the opposite. That's one beauty of Europe: that there are so many countries within a relatively small piece of land, and there are so many immigrants from within and without Europe, that you can find places with all sorts of languages, races and cultures coexisting together in what I think is a fascinating mix.

Finally, as Harrison says in his article, Europe is never going to be 'Islamicized' or 'Sharia-fied' because much before that happens the extreme right will take over and create another Holocaust. That's the real concern.

 

[Siberia]

It's Europe that my concern lies with, as I have a deep affection for the continent.

How about concern and affection for the suffering people and not "for the continent", psychegram? And the ones suffering the most in Europe are refugees right now. Those are the people who lost their homes, their loved ones, their jobs, because of the long-term colonial Western policy. Try to imagine yourself in their position for a moment.

For example, you live in Canada and Canada is a northern country. What if one day the climate changes so drastically that you will have to move to the south to survive? And you will come somewhere to Latin America or the Middle East or Africa, for example, and they'll tell you: "Get out of here, you, barbarian NATOjob. We've got our continent here."

Would that be fair, what do you think?

 

[Joe]

As some have noted, I seem scared ... if I do, it's because I am. I'm scared Europe could be over-run, and I'm scared Europe will go full-fascist again specifically in order to head off that fate.

And how is that you cannot figure out that, by supoprting the demonization of Muslims, you are effectively helping the fascists to get what they want? My mind boggles at your repeated obtuseness on this single point.

 

[Joe]

But I also am not a huge fan of letting huge numbers of them into our own countries, precisely because I don't want my country to become like their countries. That's basically a live and let live philosophy. It's also predicated on precisely the expectation that, if large numbers come, it will precipitate an ultranationalist counter-reaction which will suck in all sorts of ways for them and us. I would like to avoid that, please.

Right, so your "politics" should be that you are against letting large numbers of Muslim migrants in to a country because you are fully aware that that situation can be manipulated to allow the rise of "white" fascism in Europe. You should NOT, therefore, engage in any tangential and irrelevant bashing of "Muslims" or "Muslim culture" or religion, tarring all 1.5 billion of them with a ridiculously broad and inanely simplistic brush. The main reason why you should NOT do this is because it will, by your OWN admission, help to create a fascist takeover of Europe, the very thing you claim to fear.

Since your main problem is the refugees, it would be logical for you to wonder why there are refugees coming to Europe, what is the cause? The answer to that is obvious: Western "white" warmongers who want to get rich from the wars and cause a refugee crisis in Europe that they can use to justify a fascist takeover. And they're planning to do that with the help of people who take the bait and engage in sectarian hate speech against "Muslims". I am sorry to have to say it about someone who has been a member of this forum for almost 8 years, but you appear to be one of those people.

 

[Joe]

Niall's threat was by contrast a very direct and unambiguous personal threat. I feel it was also disproportionate to any offence I may have caused. His manner with me in the comments has often felt frankly abusive (contrasting greatly with the replies here on the forum, which have been, by and large, thoughtful, calm, and respectful even while disagreeing vehemently, and thank you all for that).

Niall's "threat" was made in exasperation at your Islamo-phobia and blaming of the victim, which suggests a serious lack of conscience. There was never any intention to follow through on it, and all personal information provided by Sott.net subscribers remains private. You will not, however, be allowed to post there again until you can show that you are able to conduct yourself in a mature, responsible and respectful manner and not repeatedly attempt to stoke the flames of hatred, thereby potentially creating a legal problem for Sott.net. You seem to have been under the impression that the comments section of a website like Sott.net is a playground where you can 'get dirty'. Obviously, you were mistaken.