Tipote said:

qman said:

Are you as passionate for Russia, China, Japan, Australia, and others to take in "refugees", or just the US and EU as you live in Canada.

---

all countries should do there part. yes the regional countries like the gulf states and israel should do more. ofc israel won't do shit, but the gulf countries should take some. They are taking small numbers but nothing of significance.

Yes we should be helping from a distance financially and logistically.. but our countries have not.

I have followed this conflict from the very beginning. I was actually going to go to Syria in 2011 before things kicked off and had to change my flight. The help that was needed never came. The crisis we now face is an inconvenient truth and result of our countries own incompetence and ambivalence.

---

No, it's the incompetence of the entire region, how great was it when Saddam was in power?  It still sucked.

Take the US out of the world and the Middle East and Africa would still be the same shitholes.

How do you manage always living with the burden feeling guilty about everything bad in the world?  It must be beyond stressful.

qman said:

No, it's the incompetence of the entire region, how great was it when Saddam was in power?  It still sucked.

Take the US out of the world and the Middle East and Africa would still be the same shitholes.

How do you manage always living with the burden feeling guilty about everything bad in the world?  It must be beyond stressful.

---

It sucked a lot more after Saddam, you cant really deny that. Saddam was also backed by the West throughout the times he was gassing the Iranians and the Kurds.

You honestly can't know that these areas would be shitholes without the US, interference and the propping up of dictators has gone on so long you can't say that fairly. You go on an assumption of how you see the people are. You believe them to be inherently like that. You ignore the environmental, political, financial and social factors around them.

I dont feel guilty about everything bad in the world. I didn't do it. Doesnt mean i can't point out wrongs where there are wrongs. It doesnt mean that I can't call for something better. You can deny history if you like

Tipote said:

qman said:

No, it's the incompetence of the entire region, how great was it when Saddam was in power?  It still sucked.

Take the US out of the world and the Middle East and Africa would still be the same shitholes.

How do you manage always living with the burden feeling guilty about everything bad in the world?  It must be beyond stressful.

---

You honestly can't know that these areas would be shitholes without the US, interference and the propping up of dictators has gone on so long you can't say that fairly. You go on an assumption of how you see the people are. You believe them to be inherently like that. You ignore the environmental, political, financial and social factors around them.

---

Tipote said:

qman said:

No, it's the incompetence of the entire region, how great was it when Saddam was in power?  It still sucked.

Take the US out of the world and the Middle East and Africa would still be the same shitholes.

How do you manage always living with the burden feeling guilty about everything bad in the world?  It must be beyond stressful.

---

It sucked a lot more after Saddam, you cant really deny that. Saddam was also backed by the West throughout the times he was gassing the Iranians and the Kurds.

You honestly can't know that these areas would be shitholes without the US, interference and the propping up of dictators has gone on so long you can't say that fairly. You go on an assumption of how you see the people are. You believe them to be inherently like that. You ignore the environmental, political, financial and social factors around them.

I dont feel guilty about everything bad in the world. I didn't do it. Doesnt mean i can't point out wrongs where there are wrongs. It doesnt mean that I can't call for something better. You can deny history if you like

---

WAN said:

Tipote said:

qman said:

No, it's the incompetence of the entire region, how great was it when Saddam was in power?  It still sucked.

Take the US out of the world and the Middle East and Africa would still be the same shitholes.

How do you manage always living with the burden feeling guilty about everything bad in the world?  It must be beyond stressful.

---

You honestly can't know that these areas would be shitholes without the US, interference and the propping up of dictators has gone on so long you can't say that fairly. You go on an assumption of how you see the people are. You believe them to be inherently like that. You ignore the environmental, political, financial and social factors around them.

---

Can you explain this part please?  like specifically who is doing it etc

---

Tipote said:

You can deny history if you like

---

WAN said:

Tipote said:

qman said:

No, it's the incompetence of the entire region, how great was it when Saddam was in power?  It still sucked.

Take the US out of the world and the Middle East and Africa would still be the same shitholes.

How do you manage always living with the burden feeling guilty about everything bad in the world?  It must be beyond stressful.

---

You honestly can't know that these areas would be shitholes without the US, interference and the propping up of dictators has gone on so long you can't say that fairly. You go on an assumption of how you see the people are. You believe them to be inherently like that. You ignore the environmental, political, financial and social factors around them.

---

Can you explain this part please?  like specifically who is doing it etc

---

Quote:

Three of the 58 suspects arrested in connection with the mass sex attack on women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve were refugees from Iraq or Syria.

Refugees have been widely targetted following more than 1,000 reports of theft, sex assault and rape of women at Cologne’s central train station - leading to a hardening of attitudes towards Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open door policy.

On Sunday, it emerged that of those arrested only two had recently arrived from Syria and one from Iraq.

The majority of the suspects were of Algerian (25 people), Tunisian (3) or Moroccan (21) origin and three were German citizens, according to Cologne public prosecutor Ulrich Bremer.

Speaking to German newspaper Die Welt, he said that of 1,054 complaints received, 600 were connected to theft rather than a sexual offence.

On Monday, Mr Bremer dismissed how his remarks had been reported, saying that the overwhelming majority of those arrested "fall into the general category of refugees".

He said some had entered Germany saying they wanted to apply for asylum while others have formally filed an application.

A refugee is commonly understood to mean either an individual who has been granted asylum or someone who has fled a conflict zone.

In January,  the German government backed plans to include three north African states - Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia - on a list of 2safe countries of origin", meaning people form those nations would be highly unlikely to be granted asylum.

Cologne’s newly installed  police chief Jurgen Mathies said the technique of hemming women in and cutting them off from their friends did appear to have come from countries where “they might be familiar with this behaviour”.

He said he had never seen it in Germany before.

He said there was no evidence the attacks were premeditated and believes it was “transmitted through social networks".

“A few people did in fact say, ‘hey, we’re going to Cologne, there’s going to be a big party’”, he explained.

A total of 1,075 criminal complaints have been filed, including 467 alleging crimes of a sexual nature ranging from insults to rape.

Since the attacks, German far-right groups have capitalised on increased feelings of mistrust towards refugees with Pegida using the attacks to stage mass anti-immigration marches through Europe.

Germany has seen a spike in racially motivated arson attacks on refugees’ homes since the incident with vigilante gangs threatening to “clean up” Cologne.

The increased animosity has forced Ms Merkel to scale back her welcome towards refugees - in late January she agreed a deal with her coalition partners to speed up deportations of failed asylum seekers and restrict family reunions for people granted partial protection.

It comes as the police reported 22 cases of sexual assault at the Cologne carnival - including a Belgian TV reporter who was groped live on air by man who appeared to be of European descent. 

---

Quote:

Dark myths about sexual assaults in Cologne came into sharp focus last week when a female television journalist was attacked live on air. Esmeralda Labye, a reporter from Belgium, was covering the German city’s annual carnival when three men variously touched her breasts, kissed her and simulated intercourse behind her back.

It followed claims of multiple sex crimes on women around the city’s station on New Year’s Eve, when refugees were blamed. This allowed conspiracy theorists to outline their most starkly racist fantasies, painting a picture of demonic brown-skinned Muslims fleeing war zones to defile white European womanhood. No need for court cases: marauding savages had planned everything on the Internet and were all guilty without trial.  




This time, however, Labye’s cameraman captured the absolute truth: footage shows white European males from overwhelmingly Christian Germany molesting her. Cologne was full of Caucasian drunks acting with the same kind of macho abandon which contributes to some half a million adults being sexually assaulted in England and Wales alone each year.

After the events of New Year’s Eve, one commentator specifically cited uneducated “youths from Afghanistan and Syria” as the culprits, expanding the global threat to one posed by “several hundred thousand young Muslim males”. More ambitiously still, the whole Cologne affair was linked to Brexit, as we were told by one newspaper: “The EU referendum is about nothing less than the safety and security of British women – and that means we must get out of Europe.”

On Friday, the Cologne prosecutor Ulrich Bremer in fact told me that, of the 59 suspects pinpointed so far, just four are from war-torn countries (Syria and Iraq), only 14 are in custody, and nobody has yet been charged. Nearly 600 hours of CCTV reveals very little, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the alleged attacks were planned in advance.

The refugee-as-rapist construct is the kind that has been used to demonise people throughout history. The idea is that you apply frightening characteristics to those you view as political enemies. In the 1930s Cologne’s Jews were described as 'Untermenschen' (inferior people) menacing European culture, before 11,000 were murdered during the Nazi Holocaust by “racially pure” Aryans, many of them beer-swilling Christians. 

Merging racism into a wider discussion about law and order, feminism and even the future of the EU project does not make it any less objectionable. Brown men are not inherently more misogynistic or brutal than white men, and Muslims are just as likely to be family-orientated, peaceful citizens as their counterparts from other religious and cultural heritages.

Neo-Nazi groups such as Germany’s Pegida – an organisation becoming increasingly active in Britain – instead jump on the propaganda, using sacred half-truths about Cologne to spread hatred and violence. In their world, victims like Labye – white and blonde-haired – mean nothing if they are not prepared to scapegoat and lie in the cause of protecting European “civilisation” from the dark invaders.

---