Someone didn’t read the refugee pool rules cartoon.
As you might have heard, quite a few of the millions of asylum seekers that have inundated Western Europe are having a rather difficult time adjusting. Specifically, there seems to be some confusion about pool etiquette.
Last month, Bornheim - a town of 48,000 some 30 km south of Cologne, Germany - banned adult male asylum seekers from the public swimming pool after numerous reports of sexual harassment and “chatting up” - whatever that means.
"There have been complaints of sexual harassment and chatting-up going on in this swimming pool ... by groups of young men, and this has prompted some women to leave (the premises)," deputy mayor Markus Schnapka told Reuters. "This led to my decision that adult males from our asylum shelters may not enter the swimming pool until further notice."
Bornheim's decree came two weeks after "gangs" of "Arabs" allegedly assaulted scores of women amid New Year's Eve festivities in Cologne and other cities across Europe.
This weekend, we learn that on December 2, a 20-year-old Iraqi migrant apparently raped a 10-year-old boy at the Resienbad pool in Vienna.
The attack wasn't reported to the press at the time in order to protect the victim who ran crying to a lifeguard after the assault which took place in a "cubicle."
The refugee - who at that point had gone back to swimming and diving - was arrested on the spot and taken into custody where he told police that he was experiencing a "sexual emergency."
"I followed my desires," the man said, adding that he "hadn't had sex in four months." He went on to say that although he was fully aware that his actions were "forbidden in any country in the world," he had "a marked surplus of sexual energy."
The man said he had a wife and a daughter in Iraq.
Asked if information about the attack was deliberately withheld from the public in order to avoid sparking a backlash against asylum seekers, Thomas Keiblinger, spokesman for the state police in Vienna said that the fact the man was Iraqi had nothing to do with the decision not to publicize the crime. "It played no role whatsoever," he told Kronen Zeitung.
Needless to say, that seems like a dubious proposition. The anti-migrant sentiment is palpable in Austria (the country has suspended Schengen) and Iraqis raping 10-year-old boys at swimming pools likely wouldn't reflect all that well on officials who have agreed to take in asylum seekers.
In any event, we're reasonably sure that the perpetrator's "sexual emergency" excuse isn't going to fly with the Austrian public, so you can expect this rather unfortunate event to add fuel to a fire that, as evidenced by Saturday's bloc-wide PEGIDA rallies, is already burning brightly.