In its opinion pages, the New York Times regularly prints a "Room For Debate" feature, with opinion pieces by six or so writers of varying opinions. Reader comments on these pieces are taken, and the comments may be sorted in order of how many reader recs they receive.
Today's "Room For Debate" was entited "Pulling in the Welcome Mat as Fear of Attacks Rise", regarding the New Year’s Attacks on women in Cologne, Germany.
www.nytimes.com/...
Following are excerpts from the comments most highly recommended by NYT readers:
Here in Saudi Arabia the men (with whom I work) very readily, casually, and with not the least trace of malevolence or anger that if their sister was discovered to have TALKED to a man not a male relative or husband, they would literally kill her.
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Women in the male-dominated Islamic world are to be subjugated by males.
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The minimizing of the sexual attacks -- "Most refugees don't do it!" -- display a callous attitude towards the victims.
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Anyone who defends the mindset of the thousands of criminals who violated women around Europe on NYE is a bigot and a misogynist.
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Islam is misogynistic, homophobic and anti-secular. No amount of twisting oneself into a PC pretzel is going to change that.
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Just as troubling is the cultural mindset that women are subhuman and exist only as the property of men.
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Just what kind of national leader is so stupid as to not know the costs, financial and social, of admitting 770,000 young adult healthy males from a mysoginist culture into a western democracy?
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The people who find themselves publicly castigated for expressing their opinions will inevitably discover that they have no choice but to align with the radical right.
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Telling European women that they have to give up their hard won rights and freedoms to accommodate the culture of migrants moves reasonable moderate people into the anti-refugee camp very quickly.
This is certainly not a scientific sample of American opinion -- it represents the statements on this topic most recommended by NYT online readers. And perhaps opinions will moderate with time as the German authorities report their findings, arrest perpetrators, etc.
But it seems very ominous to me, particularly when the Republicans are busy peddling Islamophobia and xenophobia.