call me 'comrade'

The attacks were absolutely horrific and those responsible deserve to have their heads kicked in - I hope they do. The reactions from just about every quarter have been awful too - from the police and politicians who seem to have been more concerned with covering their own backs than dealing with the problem, to the racist bigots who have decided they care about rape culture all of a sudden. 

As I understand it, these attacks were coordinated by criminal gangs comprised of relatively new immigrants, people who have come from a social and cultural context in which opportunistic sexual assault in public places is a widespread phenomenon. What this doesn’t mean is that Islam is ok with sexual assault, or that men from these areas are all sexual predators - Europeans don’t judge our own culture by the actions of our most reprehensible violent offenders, and the vast majority of Muslims worldwide are as disgusted by these attacks as anyone else. At the same time this also doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem that doesn’t need dealt with. Feminists and activists operating within these cultural contexts are painfully aware of the issue and have been developing strategies to counter it for a long time now - their voices are conspicuously absent from the mainstream narrative, which is a problem since they are undoubtedly the experts on what it is and how to fight it.

For a lot of people, the “solution” seems to be to just close the borders and leave the refugee crisis to solve itself. This neither desirable nor viable - the refugee crisis is not going to go away, in fact it’s going to get worse. Nothing is going to stop millions of displaced people from attempting to settle in Europe, and even the most militarised border in the world isn’t going to stop them. Western countries are entangled in the Syrian crisis practically, historically, economically, politically - it’s simply not something that we can just declare ‘not our problem’. It is our problem and if we don’t try and be part of the solution the blood of the kids that wash up on our beaches is on our hands. The hypocrisy of those who feign solidarity with oppressed Muslim women while simultaneously condemning their children to drown in the Mediterranean is disgusting.

The specific form of sexual assault that those scumbags took part in at NYE might be relatively new to Germany, but rape culture isn’t - and I think that it’s really important to place the fight against this phenomenon in the context of a wider fight against violent patriarchal oppression across the board. According to German police there are on average 20 rapes and sexual assaults in Germany every day - this is a cultural phenomenon which is socially produced. Acknowledging that street level sexual assault by immigrants is only a small fraction of the overall problem does not in any way excuse or diminish the horrendous crime - but it is important if we’re not going to let Germany’s home grown culture of sexual violence off the hook by only addressing this as an external problem.

When Good TV Goes Bad: The Worst Episodes Of The Best TV Shows

The Wire

In-case you havent heard my ska-punk band you should give us a listen. Our goal is to be as goofy as possible yet people still tend to throw down hard at our shows.