The
refusal to acknowledge that grooming gangs are Muslim has had a catastrophic
effect
In
her report on the shocking Rotherham child abuse scandal, Louise Casey, head of
the government’s troubled families programme, threw the book at the council as
“not fit for purpose”. The lessons of this story, however, surely go way beyond
this one disgraced local authority.
Last
summer’s Jay report found that at least 1,400 children in Rotherham, mainly
white girls from troubled backgrounds, were enslaved, sexually attacked and
prostituted by gangs of overwhelmingly Pakistani-heritage men. Jay found a
“collective failure” by both the council and police to stop this abuse and
bring the perpetrators to justice. Casey found this huge cover-up was
continuing.
Council
staff and members had looked the other way for fear of being seen as racist or
“upsetting community cohesion”. Yet Casey found they were even now in
“overwhelming denial” of what had happened on their watch.
How
to explain such persistent, almost pathological denial? The answer surely lies
in a wider culture gripped by a terrifying group-think. With the duty to
protect children abandoned, blanket protection has been given instead to
ethnic, religious or sexual minorities that have been placed beyond criticism.
There
are nevertheless hierarchies of protection here, driven almost entirely by
terror of the perceived power of the minority in question. Indeed, both the
Casey and Jay reports themselves bow to political correctness by failing to
acknowledge that the cultural factor behind the Rotherham grooming gangs is not
that they are Pakistani but Muslim.
It’s
not Pakistani Christians, Hindus or atheists who are involved in these crimes.
Nor is it just white girls who are targeted: Sikhs have been complaining for
years that their girls are attacked by Muslim men.
In
Australia, gang rapes in Sydney in 2000 were committed by Lebanese Australians.
In the Netherlands, it’s Moroccans and Turks who have entrapped non-Muslim
girls as sex slaves. The reason is that in Muslim society women are treated as
inferior people, and non-Muslims are widely regarded as trash. That’s why
decent British Muslim leaders have reacted to Rotherham with horror and shame.
Muhbeen
Hussain, founder of the Rotherham Muslim Youth group, said: “We need Muslim
leaders to go out there and condemn this and make it clear it’s wrong.” The
issue is not minority ethnicity. It’s Islam, the greatest PC unsayable of the
lot.
There
is, though, an even deeper level of denial beneath all this. Casey notes that
Rotherham council dismissed the pioneering reports in this paper by Andrew
Norfolk, which exposed the entire scandal, as a malevolent and politicised
attack by “the Murdoch press”.
This
is far more significant than just a cheap attack on the proprietor of the paper
you are currently reading. It reflects the syllogism that drives left-wing
thinking, and which goes like this: I am left-wing and virtuous because I care
about the vulnerable. Right-wing people are wicked because they are the
opposite of me. Anyone who is not left-wing is right-wing. Anyone who disagrees
with my virtuous beliefs, such as in multiculturalism, is thus wicked and
right-wing. Anything at all they may say about anything is also wicked and
right-wing. It must therefore be ignored, dismissed or destroyed.
This
Manichean attitude, which shapes our society, has demonised not just
individuals and groups but facts, evidence and truth itself over wide swathes
of public debate, from immigration to man-made global warming, from family
breakdown to Islamic extremism.
Among
many other contributory factors, it is the single most deadly reason why the
authorities in Rotherham refused to countenance the evidence of Pakistani
Muslim grooming gangs. Casey says the authorities were terrified of giving
ammunition to the British National Party. But denying the grooming gangs
immeasurably strengthened the BNP, enabling it to pose as the only people
“telling the truth”.
What
is much more likely is that these claims were denied precisely because they
were being made by the far right, and therefore couldn’t possibly be true. But
they were true.
Yet
even now, anyone who raises concerns about immigration or Muslim misdeeds is
branded and demonised as racist, Islamophobic and (always) right-wing. Whether
such concerns are actually justified isn’t even considered. The truth is made
toxic by the vilification of those who speak it.
Britain’s
entire administrative class now genuflects to these orthodoxies. Which is why
Rotherham’s grooming gangs and their cover-up are unlikely to be the end of the
story, either there or elsewhere.
