Charlie Hebdo does it again!
Charlie Hebdo is never out of ideas to stoke
up the flames of racism, bigotry, intolerance and hatred. Remember Aylan Kurdi,
the two-year-old, whose picture lying
face down on a beach in Turkey caused an international
outcry over the human cost of the migrant crisis?
The magazine’s latest cartoon is about that Syrian
refugee - an infant who drowned - as an adult committing a sex assault in Germany . The cartoon depicts
Aylan's body alongside a caption suggesting he would have become a "groper
in Germany ".
It follows the revelation that gangs of migrants carried out organized sexual assaults in Cologne on
New Year's Eve.
I find the cartoon not only distasteful but
also very insulting.
It is high time to correct such serious
charges against migrants. The likelihood of a migrant becoming a sex pervert or
a groper in Europe and western world is not
more, but much less than the national average in his/her adopted country. Crime
statistics in those countries are sufficient to prove me right.
For our purpose, let’s limit our
discussion to Germany .
German General Act on Equal Treatment
(AGG) that went into force in 2006 defines sexual harassment as "unwanted
conduct of a sexual nature, including unwanted sexual acts and requests to
carry out sexual acts, physical contact of a sexual nature, comments of a
sexual nature … [that take] place with the purpose or effect of violating the
dignity of the person concerned.”
Crime statistics show that sexual
assaults against women in events like the Oktoberfest
and New Year's Eve have always been there. As a result of fear of being
sexually molested or assaulted, including groping, nearly half the German women
avoid joining in such events where they could be victimized. Even a year ago,
before the refugee problem became a reality in Germany many German women were
groped by unruly beer and wine drinking German males.
In 2010, a survey by Germany’s
Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth stated
that 60% of women said they had experienced sexual harassment in public, at the
workplace, or socially. Out of those, one out of two (~50%) women said she had
feared for her own safety and one woman in ten (~10%) reported actual physical violence.
In 22% of cases, the incident took place at work or school. Germany , like many of the western
countries, has a serious sex crime problem. [See, e.g., Wake
Up Germany, You've Got A Serious Sexual Harassment Problem, Jan. 30, 2013]
To
now put the blame squarely on the fleeing refugees that have settled in recent
months in Germany
is wrong. It was not clear that any of the men involved in the assault against
females in Cologne were among those who arrived
in Germany over the past year from conflicts in Syria , Iraq ,
Afghanistan
and elsewhere.
Henriette Reker, Cologne ’s mayor, who was stabbed during a campaign event in October by a German man who opposed her
welcoming attitude toward migrants, sought to play down the links to refugees,
after meeting with police, state and city officials. “There are no indications
that this involved people who have sought shelter in Cologne as refugees,” Ms. Reker said.
Since
the start of the year, Chancellor Angela Merkel has come under renewed pressure
from within her own conservative bloc, with Horst Seehofer, head of the
Bavarian sister party to the chancellor’s Christian Democratic Union, calling
for a cap of 200,000 refugees allowed into the country per year.
It is not difficult
to postulate that the event in Cologne may have
been exaggerated to paint a very damning picture on the migrants that are
fleeing many parts of Asia and Africa to Europe
and to force Ms. Merkel to change her position on the refugee debate.
For a fleeing
refugee from a war torn country committing evil acts like groping or having
forcible sex with anyone local is highly unlikely. He is not stupid to commit
an act that could only jeopardize his chances of getting immigrated.
So the logical question that we should
answer is: who benefits from painting the fleeing migrants as sex perverts or
gropers?
The fascist, xenophobic groups in
many parts of Europe oppose pluralism and
diversity; they are against immigrants and refugees. And, sadly, in some
countries like France
they have been able to exploit the current crisis to rally the crowd behind
them and win elections.
The far-right and anti-immigrant
groups are also strong in many parts of Germany . They oppose the influx of
refugees and seized on the attacks, saying they demonstrated the dangers
associated with accepting huge numbers of migrants. “It is time to send a
signal,” said Christopher Freiherr von Mengersen, head of the nationalist
Pro-NRW movement, based in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. “We locals can
no longer put up with everything that is being routinely swept under the rug
based on a false sense of tolerance.”
Such far-right groups have their supporters within the racist and
bigot intelligentsia. Take, for instance, the 59-year-old Akif Pirincci, an
outspoken right-winger and German writer, who has warned that Christian Germany
is becoming Islamic. His books, one of which is called Germany Gone Mad, were
best-sellers until last autumn, when big publishers and bookshops chose not to
distribute these any more because of their message of racism and bigotry.
It is not impossible
that some of the criminal elements from the fascist groups had masqueraded as
migrants to implicate the wider migrant community. The Veterans
Today says: “There are reports of police standing around with their hands
in their pockets while nightclub bouncers come to the aid of women being groped
and mobbed. Thus, when police officials say this seems like an
organized attack, we feel safe in looking at police as not only standing aside
but undercover police as the
likely parties involved in the assaults as
well. We expect to see more incidents like these, staged by police and
carefully coordinated with the press, playing on and building hysteria against
not only refugees but Islam as well."
The Charlie Hebdo magazine
has been widely condemned on social media and accused of racism. Twitter users
called the image "disgusting" and "tasteless", as well as
accusing the magazine of racism and Islamophobia.
The magazine’s attempt to promote
intolerance and hatred against the immigrant community is simply preposterous. It’s
impossible to predict how one would end up. As Jordanian queen Rania had twitted, “Aylan could've been a doctor, a teacher,
a loving parent."
We
simply don’t know how Aylan would have turned up some 20 years later. We are
surely entitled to imagine the best: if Aylan were alive, like Steve Job’s
Syrian father, he would one day father another Steve Job. We simply don’t know!
Playing
with anxiety, fears and the worst of our imagination is not funny, it is down
right criminal. After
all, imagination can not only shape our minds but it can also weave
the fabric of reality itself by playing a very real role in our decision
making. Thus, as much as a positive imagination can provide us with rich
lifelike experiences and give us a powerful opportunity to develop empathy and
compassion for the ‘other’ people, and literally reshape and retrain our brains,
similarly, a negative imagination can reshape and retrain our brains to do just
the opposite - the most appalling crimes against the ‘other’ people.
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