I have nothing but compassion for women who are actually sexually assaulted, and I've actually done something to try to ameliorate the situation, unlike any of you, but are we really supposed to take the picture of a man spewing water or soda at a woman as the face or "image" of these horrendous crimes? Is that basically the extent of what happened in the vast majority of the cases? This picture hasn't become iconic because he happens to have a very prominent and Semitic nose?
You should go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans; the streets are clogged with drunk "white" men spewing their guts all over everybody. If they arrested all of them there wouldn't be enough room in the state penal system to hold them. One of them vomited all over my Bruno Magli shoes. I got so mad I pushed him right into the street to land on top of a pile of it. Know how hard I worked to earn them? Plenty of groping, too, and a woman would have had to be mad to walk down side streets alone. Hell, on crowded subways in New York I deliberately wore my spike heels instead of keeping them in my bag to put on at work. As soon as I felt a hand I'd just yell at the top of my lungs and stomp on whatever male feet were closest. That was before Rudy, bless him, cleaned them up. Have to say Louis Sliwa and his made a difference too. That's what aggressive policing and volunteer patrols are all about. You don't want to hear about that, however. Instead of coming up with constructive propositions, you just want to rant.
What started out as a reasonable discussion has just turned into hysteria. Men who in one post said no woman's word should be taken at face value now want to accept every accusation and newspaper report as gospel. People who agreed with me when I said that many of the cases in the U.S. where police were accused of racist murders of young black men were driven by unsubstantiated rumors (most notoriously the "Hands Up Don't Shoot" BS that never happened) now believe every report in every ultra right wing anti-immigrant rag. Obviously, some bad stuff happened and action has to be taken, but exaggeration as to both the quantity and quality of the incidents just feeds the hysteria and is starting to look agenda driven.
I don't know how many actual assaults and batteries were committed, and neither do any of you. If the police didn't want to or were instructed not to inflame the situation because immigrants were involved, that's obviously a problem, but to turn this into some sort of vast conspiracy is ridiculous.
Europe is in this mess because you're all so consumed by your tribalism that you weren't able to organize an effective response to the situation, not to mention your cowardice in refusing to confront what was going on in the Near East, a cowardice in which you were joined by the present American administration. Then, of course, there's the normal incompetence of government, an incompetence that grows as government grows. I've yet to see many Europeans understand that, however. Instead, there's this pervasive idea that government can take care of all your problems. You want nanny government to take care of you from cradle to grave, and that doesn't leave anything for your defense against outside threats or for adequately staffed and trained police forces either, apparently. The only difference I can see between the left and the right in Europe is that the left has some tolerance of immigration, and the right would probably happily vote in Hitler again.
Have you ever suddenly felt that you didn't know the people around you? Well, that's how I feel right now. The masks are off some of you, and it's not a pretty picture.
