Guardian.UK: Let’s not shy away from asking hard questions about the Cologne attacks.
This is only slowly making some waves in America. Hard to tell what happened, in current reports. Hard to gauge who’s a ‘paper of record’ on this. Clearly social mores broke down, and hard. I’m having a hard time with this, however. Is this true, German friends?
Comments:
I found one short report, a longer article and a commentary by German blogger and journalist Sascha Lobo, all published on Spiegel Online International: Happenings in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. I’m still looking for other reliable resources.
Your initial posts, Andrea, woke me up to the news item. I translated a couple of them, then went in search of English language ones. Eventually the American media caught up, but it seems the right-wing anti-immigration sites are the ones who focused on it most strongly.
If it goes the same way the reporting on the “Oregon Militia” takeover has gone, ‘fact’ will be very hard to come by.
And a side note - if anyone ever gives you a hard time, I’ll come over and help Andre “clean house"as we say in these parts. “Don’t make me angry - you won’t like me when I’m angry.”
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Since we don’t own a TV, my information comes solely from online publications so far. The second article you linked seems to confuse some facts. They write: “thousands of imports from Islamic lands threw bottles and fireworks into crowds and at the police, as well as molested, raped, attacked, robbed, knifed, spat, defecated, urinated, vomited, ranted, and raved as they turned an area of a beautiful city into a site of utter barbarism.”
The articles in Die Zeit I linked a few days ago talked about around 1,000 people being in the area between the main train station and the cathedral in Cologne, but only some of them threw fireworks or acted aggressively. Up to now around 180 persons (mostly women, I assume) pressed charges at the police, but only two rapes were reported. The other charges were theft and sexual harassment.
I’ll try to find some links to reputable publications in English and link them here and/or on my weblog.