"Reports: asylum seekers among Cologne attacks suspects"

"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."

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

Meanwhile, the German government, in charge of protecting their citizens, (I'm assuming) most of all the physically less capable, like the women, is cracking down on "anti-immigration speech."

Prosecutors are charging people who are “inciting hatred” in Germany by speaking out against immigrants and their impact on German society. Prosecutors and judges are determining what criticism will be allowed and what will be treated as criminal. In the meantime, the government has reached a deal with Facebook, Google and Twitter to crackdown on Internet speech. It is an effort to create the artificial appearance of agreement and tolerance by denying free speech to critics. While it is still not clear how many of the Cologne attackers were immigrants (two of the suspects have been identified as Moroccan citizens), the incident has been a flashpoint as numerous stories of women and girls being harassed about their clothing or assaulted by immigrants. For example, a 26-year-old Berlin man’s home was raided by police, who confiscated his computer and phones after he had posted the image of a dead 3-year-old Syrian boy on a Turkish beach and wrote “We are not mourning, we are celebrating!” A disgusting comment and one that is worthy public condemnation. However, it is also an act of free speech.

Nevertheless, many citizens are celebrating the denial of their own free speech rights. So long as they disagree with the speakers, there appears little concern over the rising tide of censorship and criminalization of speech. People are now unsure what they can say about immigration, which is precisely the chilling effect that governments seek in such measure. The result is a forced silence . . . which is golden for governments like Merkel’s that do not like what they are hearing.