European Islamophobia?

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.