1 - Today marks the fifth anniversary of the mass sexual attacks in Cologne.

Around 1000 Muslim men, most of whom had only arrived in Germany a few months before, claiming to be refugees, subjected 100s of German women celebrating New Years Eve to savage racial + sexual assault

2 - Working in groups, the men systematically encircled and separated their prey – the white, Christian women that their religion and culture deem racially and religiously inferior – from their friends.

https://t.co/onynC99LDM
3 - Once isolated, they tore at their clothes and groped them.

They stuck their fingers up their vaginas and anuses, and inside their bras.

They shot fireworks at them.

They robbed them.

Some were raped.
4 - It took days for the attacks to come to public attention as the authorities and media scrambled to downplay or lie about them.

The truth came out on social media + when the scale could no longer be denied, they tried very hard to pretend that it was nothing to do with Islam
5 - Some of the most revolting excuses came from feminists – those ‘wh*res for Islam’ that @patcondell so aptly describes - insisting it was all about ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘patriarchy’ and all the other meaningless mantras they use.

https://t.co/9yVZxrvCk0
6 - The worst media excuse I’ve found came from the Guardian which twisted the narrative onto “xenophobes’ and ‘racists’ and, even more deceitfully, shoehorned Farage and Brexit into the mix.

https://t.co/siT69BcMNo
7 - The racists were the men who premeditated their attacks on the white women.
8 - To understand how obscene these reactions are, consider what would have happened if the races and religions had been reversed?

If 1000s of white, Christian men had walked into a Muslim country and racially and sexually assaulted 100s of Muslim girls celebrating Ramadan?
11 - The kindest I’m prepared to be is that the attacks where so extreme, so brazen, so utterly foreign to the way European men behave that the police and media simply couldn’t understand what they were dealing with.
12 - I was not remotely surprised.

Only shocked by the scale and audacity of the attacks
13 - I’d watched with growing alarm a few months earlier, in the summer of 2015, as hundreds of thousands of Muslim men – both economic migrants and those who had chosen to leave the safety of the refugee camps the UN had established for them - forced their way into Europe.
14 - I knew it would be a disaster for European women, especially the blonde ones that the men retain the most visceral entitlement and racist contempt for.

But then I’ve lived in Muslim countries and knew what was coming.
15 - The worst was when my sisters and I were moved to Turkey as teenagers because of my father’s job with the UN Refugee Agency.

1We were subjected to unremitting sexual + racist harassment, and sometimes assault, every time we left the house, because we were female and blonde
16 - Leered at.

Jeered at.

Hissed at.

Spat at.

Groped.

Mocked.

Insulted.

Hit.

Flashed at.

Masturbated at.

Sperm thrown on us.

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Two things can be true at once:
1. There is an issue with hostility some academics have faced on some issues
2. Another academic who himself uses threats of legal action to bully colleagues into silence is not a good faith champion of the free speech cause


I have kept quiet about Matthew's recent outpourings on here but as my estwhile co-author has now seen fit to portray me as an enabler of oppression I think I have a right to reply. So I will.

I consider Matthew to be a colleague and a friend, and we had a longstanding agreement not to engage in disputes on twitter. I disagree with much in the article @UOzkirimli wrote on his research in @openDemocracy but I strongly support his right to express such critical views

I therefore find it outrageous that Matthew saw fit to bully @openDemocracy with legal threats, seeking it seems to stifle criticism of his own work. Such behaviour is simply wrong, and completely inconsistent with an academic commitment to free speech.

I am not embroiling myself in the various other cases Matt lists because, unlike him, I think attention to the detail matters and I don't have time to research each of these cases in detail.

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