Well, well, well: Deutsche Welle reports something ‘politically awkward’:

City authorities identified some suspects in the Cologne New Year’s Eve attacks as asylum seekers from Syria, detaining or questioning some of them, according to reports by local newspaper “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger” and national daily “Die Welt,” which published an online preview of investigations by its “Welt am Sonntag” Sunday paper.

According to the newspapers’ reports, citing officers on duty on New Year’s Eve, officials checked the IDs of at least 100 people present at Cologne’s central station on December 31 after their behavior became conspicuous. Seventy-one people were identified, 11 people were remanded into custody and 32 criminal complaints were registered, according to the Welt am Sonntag (WamS) report.

“There were, quite to the contrary of what was said publicly, identity checks on numerous people,” the WamS quoted an unnamed officer as saying. “Most of them were recently-arrived asylum seekers.”

The first internal police report on the event – a so-called “wichtige Ereignis Meldung” (“important event announcement”) – spoke of a crowd mainly of “North African and Arab” origin. According to the Kölner Stadt-anzeiger, the officer leading the team at the station wanted the report to include mention of the Syrians and asylum seekers, but the senior officer writing the “WE-Meldung” decided not to, saying it would be “politically awkward.”

It is still unclear whether the same persons were involved in the assaults.

More:

WamS also received information contradicting another official statement by the city police, which said the main intention of the men in Cologne was to steal from passengers and that assault was secondary. However, “what actually happened was the exact opposite,” a police officer said on condition of anonymity.

“For the mostly Arabic offenders, sexual assault was the priority, or, to express it from their point of view, their sexual amusement was thepriority. A group of men would encircle a female victim, close the loop, and then start groping the woman,” WamS quoted the officer as saying.

The deputy chief of the trade union for police employees (the GdP), Ernst Walter, suggested that the Cologne police’s mishandling of the case could cost city police chief Wolfgang Albers his job: “I’m asking myself this,” Walter said. “How could the police publish a message on January 1, saying that New Year’s celebrations had been peaceful?”

So the authorities lied because the truth was “politically awkward.” And not just the authorities. Maajid Nawaz writes:

Though this all occurred on New Year’s Eve, the absolute scandal is that we only found out about it five days later. Amid accusations that it deliberately covered the incident up in order not to spark panic, the public broadcaster ZDF was forced to issue an apology for failing to include the assaults in its main evening news broadcast. It appears that, as the authorities and the media were choosing between stirring up racial tension and these women’s rights, we were faced with a conspiracy of silence.

Eventually, this was bound to happen. Recent mass migration patterns across Europe have meant that misogyny has finally come head to head with anti-racism, multiculturalism is facing off against feminism, and progressive values are wrestling with cultural tolerance.

Yes, it is racist to suspect that all brown men who look like me are rapists. It is bigoted to presume that all Muslim men who share my faith advocate religiously justified rape. It is xenophobic to assume that all male refugees are sexual predators awaiting their chance to rape. But let me be absolutely clear: What will feed this racism, bigotry, and xenophobia even more is deliberately failing to report the facts as they stand. Doing so only encourages the populist right’s rallying cry against “the establishment.”

If liberals do not address such issues swiftly, with complete candor and courage, the far-right and anti-Muslim populist groups will get there first. They have been doing so for a while now.

This is how it happens, though, in Europe, in America, everywhere: mainstream parties, institutions, and figures cannot bring themselves to deal with difficult truths, so they ignore them and dismiss people who pay attention to these things as racist, or otherwise bigoted. But the contradiction between observable reality and the Official Story may finally cause things to snap.

This, reported by the BBC, via Steve Sailer, only heightens the contradictions:

Ralf Jaeger, interior minister for North Rhine-Westphalia, said police had to “adjust” to the fact that groups of men had attacked women en masse.

Three suspects had been identified, he said, but no arrests had been made.

Scores of women say they were robbed or sexually assaulted by men, reportedly of Arab or North African appearance.

Mr Jaeger also warned that anti-immigrant groups were trying to use the attacks to stir up hatred against refugees.

“What happens on the right-wing platforms and in chatrooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women,” he said. “This is poisoning the climate of our society.”

Right. Noticing what happened and drawing the “wrong” conclusions about it is “at least as awful” as actual rape and sexual assault. If Ralf Jaeger and the local authorities have any credibility at all with the German people, it is a miracle.

Writing at The Grauniad, Gaby Hinsliff bravely counsels her fellow liberals not to be afraid to ask questions about the sexual assaults, as long as the answer is always, “More immigration.” And:

Liberals shouldn’t be afraid to ask hard questions. Young German women thankfully enjoy historically unprecedented economic and sexual freedom, with their expensive smartphones and their right to celebrate New Year’s Eve however they want. The same isn’t always true of young male migrants exchanging life under repressive regimes, where they may at least have enjoyed superiority over women, for scraping by at the bottom of Europe’s social and economic food chain. It is not madness to ask if this has anything to do with attacks that render confident, seemingly lucky young women humiliated and powerless. But even if it does, the answer wouldn’t be to halt immigration – even if that were possible, which it isn’t regardless of whether Britain leaves the EU – just in case a few immigrants are sexually aggressive, any more than the answer to Savile is to keep all men away from children.

Think about what you just read: a liberal woman columnist at the left-wing Establishment newspaper in the UK has just said that it is “not madness” to see the Arab immigrant rapists as victims of political oppression at home and economic oppression in Europe. Anything — anything — to protect the Narrative. European liberals would do much better to pay attention to their Maajid Nawazes than their Gaby Hinsliffs and Ralf Jaegers. But they won’t.

UPDATE: Chancellor Merkel says the assaults will have far-reaching consequences. Chancellor Merkel is also refusing to put a cap on the number of refugees Germany will take in this year. As long as the right hand doesn’t notice what the left hand is doing, hey, no problem!