And of course hate against arabs is totally unjustified?

Sure. "Hate" against any group is unjustified. I don't "hate" white males because they tend to be the majority of school shooters and serial killers. Judge a person by the content of their character not their ethnicity. 

You're not bringing anything positive into the world if you bias yourself with situations like this and then turn around and espouse more hate probably against someone who hasn't done shit and is a nice person, but all you can see then is "well this dude look an Arab, so he's not my type of person" or whatever. That's how that whole cycle goes and it always ends in shame. History is rife with examples (ie: locking Japanese Americans into internship camps). 

Where does "hate" take you? Is it going to lead you somewhere good? I doubt it. 

What I'm saying is that everyone's working off exactly the same information - a "claim". It's still a rumour at this point in time, as they have not identified any of the perpetrators, have not provided anything more than hearsay to justify the claim that they were "arab or north african appearance", and most notably "arab" and "north african" appearances are actually quite different from each other.

Do you want to know how easy it is for things to get twisted? It only takes ONE perpetrator having relatively dark skin (even Greek or Italian would be sufficient - heck, just a tan would be sufficient), and the victim interpreting the perpetrator as arab, and then when other victims hear about it, having not gotten a good enough look at the perpetrator, they fill in the gaps with the information they've heard, and suddenly they're "remembering" an arab.

It's called the Misinformation Effect.

There are other, similar effects that can also influence it. And we haven't even touched the possibility of things like mass delusion (note: I'm not asserting the assault didn't happen, I'm asserting a delusion about the perpetrators).

But I do like how you invoke my nationality, as though that somehow invalidates my understanding of the media, the trustworthiness of information, and my right to comment.

Note that nowhere did I say that the stories are false. What I said was that we can't take this information as absolute fact just because a lot of media ran with it.

Also, when did Merkel say anything about their appearance? The only thing I can find her saying is that the perpetrators have to be punished as quickly as possible without regard to origin or appearance.

It's not a strawman to point out similarity. I'm not sure you even understand what the "strawman fallacy" is - it's where a person creates a totally different argument that has weaknesses not found in the original argument (the strawman), claims that's what the original argument was, and then proceeds to destroy the strawman.

The argument at hand is that Islam promotes anti-female sentiments, supports rape, etc, and that this has some connection with events in Germany. By pointing out the equivalent lines from the bible, what deskpro has done is demonstrated, quite efficiently, that the same attitudes are found in the Bible, and therefore if there's a connection, a similar connection should be able to be made elsewhere due to the influence of the Bible. If such a connection doesn't exist, then there's no reason to assume the presence of that sentiment in the Quran has any connection to recent events, either.

This is an entirely legitimate form of argument, not a fallacy.

Incidentally, many Christians still follow the bible literally (see Westboro Baptist Church, for instance), while many Muslims will tell you that the verses you refer to are being misinterpreted - which implies that those verses aren't literal, in their view. Therefore, YOU are the one who has constructed a strawman, when you implied that the difference is literalism.

This is f-cked up if true. I have not heard anything about this in the U.S. but well be checking sources. However Religion has been the main cause of all this crap. It's always some Religious dude thinking he is doing gods work and in U.S. you have a lot more to worry about a right wing christian than you do a Muslim. However I blame religions. We need to use the Scientific method and grow out of these myths before they kill us all.

You are way more likely to be killed by a Christain than a Muslim in U.S. That's just the facts. Our Screening process of refugee's is the best in the world. We do this for over 2 years with massive investigations etc... However you can get a tourist visa with in weeks, with out all these back ground checks etc. Ted Cruz is using the fear card for something that is very well vetted. Getting past as a Refugee would be almost impossible, if not impossible. We destabilized the area, we should help as much as we destroyed. If you want to be sure, Let in the Woman and kids only. The Men are the over all massive percentage of terrorist and this is who we have been letting in.

If anything Ted Cruz and Donald Trump make us way less safe by the racism they use. This is what happens. You get used in terror regruitment video's and it works. You catch more bee's with Honey than you do with Vinegar. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-al-shabaab_56874dcbe4b0b958f65bd383

This story appeared in Swedish newspapers today. I'm almost proud that they actually reported on it.

Pity that lots of media will be very happy to raise this on the "racial" level.

I thought this was like a hoax then I saw on the news earlier that 31 people has been identified for actually taking part in this incident and some of them were refugees. This will just add unnecessary tensions.

There are tons of reports of women being harassed and even some raped at Germany's Oktoberfest by German locals ... I wonder how many of the "outraged" people here were "outraged" by that

http://www.thelocal.de/20131002/52191

http://www.thelocal.de/20121004/45349

http://www.worldcrunch.com/culture-society/at-oktoberfest-sexual-assault-and-abuse-on-the-rise/oktoberfest-germany-violence-rape-beer/c3s9753/

Not even men are safe apparently, a British man was even raped and a 16 year old ripped the clothes off a woman:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/11127814/British-man-raped-at-Germanys-Oktoberfest.html

Should we have a discussion about the problems with rape in Christian culture? I'm not religious, but the double standard is pretty glaring here.