“This is how the sex mob rages in our cities!” O RLY? Somebody’s pants are smoking here. Get the fire extinguisher!
Via the UK Independent, a shocking new development in the case of the alleged mass sexual assaults of this past New Year’s Eve. Turns out, according to the Frankfurter Rundschau, that the alleged victim of a pawing wasn’t even in country at the time, and is now facing charges for lying about it:
In conjunction with the alleged sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve in Frankfurt, the police are now openly charging Fressgass* [restaurant] proprietor Jan Mai and witness Irina A., over false allegations of a crime. A now-erased social media entry of Irina A’s revealed that she wasn’t even in Germany at the time.
On Tuesday morning, during a press conference, police announced: “The allegations of the named witnesses, guests and employees [of the restaurant] raised considerable doubt about the events portrayed, as one of those alleged affected by the events was, at the time, not even in the city.”
The police report is unequivocal: “On New Year’s Ever there were no massive mob-style assaults by refugees in the ‘Fressgass’. The accusations are baseless and without any foundation.”
On February 6, Irina A appeared in the local edition of the Bild newspaper as a witness to alleged sexual assaults by allegedly Arab men in Jan Mai’s “First In” bar. She was cited as having said that she had been grabbed between the legs and under her skirt. Mai, for his part, reported that guests in his bar had been robbed and harassed by a gang of about 50 men. In another of Mai’s establishments, the Garibaldi inn, there were allegedly riots. The proprietor of the “Victory-Bar” was injured in the violence that same night.
According to Bild, these occurrences took place in connection with the arrival of an alleged 900 drunken refugees from Mittelhessen. The paper’s headline read: “Sex mob raged in the Fressgass”. Frankfurt police were astonished at these reports. Until the Bild article came out, the police headquarters had seen no reports of sexual assaults in the neighborhood of the Fressgass.
In an interview with FR, Jan Mai stuck to his story about the events of that night. He says that he did not tell the Bild newspaper that a “sex mob” ran through the Fressgass. A detailed report is still to come.
Translation mine.
So it would appear that the right-wing German tabloid, the Bild (the name means “picture”, because it’s for those who can’t read much else) is responsible for spreading the false accusation that rape-gangs of hundreds of stone-drunk refugees roamed and raged through Frankfurt on the New Year’s Eve in question.
And it looks as though the owner of several different local dining and drinking establishments claims he and his employees did see the gangs roving about, robbing and harassing his customers. Convenient how the same man was allegedly in so many different places at the same time to witness all that! And the bartenders and bouncers didn’t? What about the waitstaff? Surely one of them must have…no? NO!
Incidentally: I don’t know who this “Irina A.” is, but that’s not a typically German first name. She could easily be an Eastern European immigrant, or daughter of immigrants. Polish, Ukrainian or Russian, in particular. They’re not technically refugees, but given the dire poverty in Eastern Europe since the fall of communism, they might as well be. In which case this adds an extra layer of irony onto the whole thing. The racist right-wing press, hungry for scandals about those evil foreign invaders, got taken in by a foreigner? Oh, ha ha ha…how embarrassing!
One thing is definite, though: Refugees are not responsible for the alleged gang-rape epidemic in Germany during party-hearty holidays. IS there even such an epidemic? Sure there is, and I can guarantee you that it’s a home-grown phenomenon, as German as Sauerkraut and Löwenbräu. And that white guys from all over Europe are just as guilty of such shitty behavior, in far greater numbers than any brown guys from the Middle East, Afghanistan or North Africa.
In the end, it’s not a refugee problem; it’s a MALE problem. And it’s a GERMAN problem. In a land where megabrothels are legal, drinking yourself into a stupor is celebrated, sexism is rampant throughout the good old German culture, even pastors are pushing prostitution as an “answer”, and there’s no firm age of majority for drinking (although if you appear to be under 16, good luck getting served), that’s a problem that’s downright inevitable.
And it was a problem long before refugees ever started arriving in any significant number.
ADDENDUM: According to the German edition of VICE, it appears the landlord pushing the “sex mob” stories had right-wing sympathies, and this may be why they gained traction with the tabloids and the local anti-refugee partisans at the “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) party:
“Sex-mob raged in the Fressgass,” reported the Bild newspaper on February 6 about New Year’s Eve in Frankfurt. And also: “37 days after New Year’s Eve, the victims break their silence”. Frankfurt proprietor Jan M[ai] told Bild of the “masses of refugees who rioted in his “First In” bar, allegedly groping women and stealing his guests’ drinks. “They grabbed me under my skirt, between my legs, my breasts, everywhere”, a 27-year-old employee, Irina A, was quoted as saying.
Five weeks into the New Year, the right wing got another “sex-mob”, like the one from the previous year, that confirmed all their prejudices — through a Bild article over “900 mostly drunk refugees” who had travelled specially by train to Frankfurt from Mittelhessen. A second Köln, which “the media” had somehow kept quiet until now. The Frankfurt chapter of the AfD party seized on the report right away, and in a press conference, hurled accusations at the city’s security forces, speaking of a “mob of aggressive Arabs”, and naturally blaming it all on open borders.
Just one day later, the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper reported the first doubts about the report — and even for the police, the incidents seemed completely new. This Tuesday, February 14, the Frankfurt police released their findings: the accusations were “baseless and without any grounds.” There were no charges laid, and statements by alleged witnesses “raised considerable doubts”. Deployment protocols and emergency phone logs were double-checked, with no indicators of any of the alleged crimes. That is: The “sex-mob” in the Fressgass never existed.
The Bild report spread rapidly over the Internet: the Junge Freiheit newspaper snapped up the headline, as well as Breitbark UK and other British and German media. Dozens of citizen groups and AfD fractions shared the Bild article over Facebook and Twitter. Bild had created Fake News.
Bild apparently relied without any further checking on the testimonies of the landlord and his two employees. [Mai’s] Facebook profile, which is no longer to be found, was revealed by the Allgemeine in a look at the AfD sympathies of the “First In” boss. A knock on the doors of neighboring pubs in the Frankfurt club district would also have helped, because none of the other locals could confirm the incidents. The police have since found out that one of the allegedly groped workers wasn’t even in Frankfurt on that night.
On Monday, Bild began to row back. “Did he lie to everyone?” they asked, under a picture of the 49-year-old gastronome. The police are now charging M[ai] with falsification of a crime. When the police made their press release public on Tuesday, Bild apologized a few hours later. “This report in no way represents Bild’s journalistic standards”, they said. The original article was removed from their website. A call to “First In” led nowhere; an employee told VICE that she didn’t know when Jan M[ai] would be back in.
Even the AfD in Frankfurt don’t seem to be believing in the story anymore. The local fraction told the Allgemeine: “Our impression of the case was obviously wrong.”
Translation, again, mine.
Here’s a tweet from a German reporter that really sums it all up:
“Everybody’s warning against ‘Fake News’. The so-called journalism of the Bild newspaper scares me a lot more.”
Me too, Simon…me too.
*PS: “Fressgass” is an informal name for the district and means “Pig-Out Alley” in local dialect.
