RUTHFULLY YOURS

What is striking is that whenever a group of Muslims commits a crime of this kind, the press and broadcasters go out of their way to avoid identifying the religion of the malefactors. They are even less willing to suggest any causal connection between these acts and the central practices of that religion, the connection that makes it both ethical and necessary to identify and stress the faith of the perpetrators.

When Muslim sex attacks are reported in the British press, the guilty ones are nearly always referred to as Asians (meaning South Asians) which is a gross insult to Britain’s many Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists and Parsees, who very rarely commit offences of this kind. The members of all these other South Asian religious communities are remarkably law-abiding and much respected. It is only the Muslims who are grossly over-represented among the prison population. The use of the word Asian as a racial category misleads the reader into thinking that it is a racial issue, something which plays into the hands of Muslim pressure groups, which respond to any criticism of their community with shouts of “Racism!” Sometimes when a Muslim is convicted of an appalling sex crime he will shout from the dock that the judge and the jury are racists and there will be supporting cheers from the public gallery.

This report appears in the October edition of Quadrant.
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What the Muslims should be asking themselves is why Sikh and Hindu Punjabis in Britain do not commit rapes or assault children as Muslim Punjabis do, and why Muslim Bengalis get convicted of sex crimes but Hindu Bengalis do not, even though the respective groups are racially identical. Race is irrelevant. Social exclusion and poverty are equally irrelevant. Many poor Sikh and Hindu immigrants have come to Britain with empty pockets and have felt excluded because they are brown people within a white majority, but they have behaved in an exemplary way towards local women. The Muslims have a question to answer: Why is it always you who get into trouble and not the other South Asians?

Even when the misleading word Asian is not used, it is replaced with the coy phrase “men of Pakistani heritage”. But what heritage other than Islam do Britain’s Pakistanis have? Besides, many of those recently convicted of serious sex offences are Bangladeshis or Somalis, that is, Muslims but not Pakistanis. In Scandinavia, where rape used to be a rare crime, it is now common and the perpetrators are almost without exception Muslims, mainly Arabs, Turks and Kurds who all have a very different “heritage” from the Pakistanis and only one thing in common with them. I leave you to guess what it is. In Australia the gang rapists of August and September 2000 in Sydney were all Lebanese, but there were no Christian Lebanese among their number.

There is one single connecting thread that ties together these sex crimes in countries as far apart as Britain, Scandinavia and Australia—that integrated system of religion, law, politics and social life called Islam. It was all summed up for me by a case tried in 2012 when Shamrez Rashid, Amar Hussain and Jahbar Rafiq and others were convicted of abducting and raping two girls aged fifteen and sixteen from Telford to celebrate the Muslim festival of Eid. They laughed and grinned and smirked in the dock at the memory of how they had joyfully ended Ramadan in 2009.

For many years the police and social workers were unwilling to take any action or even to investigate these crimes lest they be accused of being politically incorrect and racist; prosecutors looked the other way. When girls complained, they were ignored or treated as liars, and police and prosecutors falsely claimed it would be difficult to get a conviction. For fear of disturbing what was laughably called “community harmony” the authorities were willing to let under-age girls be groomed by Muslim pimps on a massive scale. In Rotherham, Muslims on a local council blocked the tighter regulation of taxi drivers, many of whom were Muslims who had dealings with the gangs and from time to time helped them. It was not that these councillors were in league with them, merely that their main concern was to protect the image of the Muslim community, even if it meant that the sexual exploiters of children could continue with impunity.

The police and social workers have since been heavily criticised in official reports for their tardiness, but not those numerous local Muslims who knew full well what was going on but kept silent about it. You can’t keep that sort of thing secret within a tightly knit group where everyone knows everyone else’s business. The truth is that the members of these Muslim communities did not care about what was happening because the victims were non-Muslims and therefore did not matter. Group solidarity and the maintaining of the good image of the followers of the Prophet were all that counted. That sounds like racism to me, but no one dares to say so. In the multicultural mad-house that Britain has become, only members of the indigenous Anglo-Celtic majority can be denounced as racists.

Once the first significant successful prosecution of a gang had taken place in 2011 others rapidly followed, and prosecutions are continuing all over Britain. Special police teams are now investigating old cases that had been ignored for years as well as contemporary crimes. It has been a national scandal, but in marked contrast to earlier cases involving Catholic priests no one ever mentions religion. When that scandal broke critics were swift to denounce clerical celibacy and in Australia it was even demanded that matters confessed to a priest should have to be revealed to investigators. Rarely have religious leaders been so grilled in public and reviled in the press. Muslim leaders have not been exposed to anything like that degree of rough handling following the English sex scandals; indeed they are largely shielded from cross-examination by the media. They can always avoid awkward questions by screaming “Islamophobia!” or saying, “That’s not the real Islam.”

A particular and curious example of the downplaying of religion occurred in the case of Abdul Mukim Khalisadar, a preacher at a mosque who was convicted in 2008 on DNA evidence of breaking into a woman’s house and raping her. Khalisadar first claimed that the sex had been consensual and then changed his story saying that he had never met her but had been at the mosque on the night of the attack. He called seven witnesses from the mosque to support his alibi. All of them were sent to jail for twelve months for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. The press went out of its way to point out that Khalisadar was not an imam, but merely a preacher who gave religious talks at the East London Mosque, and to suggest that the seven perjurers from the mosque were merely friends of his.

It is not difficult to trawl through the Koran, the Hadith and the statements of noted Muslim clerics to find religious justifications for the exploitation of non-Muslim women or sex with under-age girls but it is doubtful whether many of the criminals were sufficiently literate to know these sources. What they did know is that under Islam women are inferior beings who should be denied autonomy—particularly over their own bodies—sexual property, the property of their male relatives. If Muslim women step out of line, they are liable to be the victims of an honour killing. If they suffer a sexual assault, they are forced to say nothing, lest disgrace fall on their families, even when they themselves are entirely innocent.

For Muslims, non-Muslims are in every way inferior and the freedom enjoyed by their womenfolk is the worst aspect of that inferiority. In consequence non-Muslim women may be attacked and exploited without compunction. There is a direct link between the insistence on the wearing of a hijab for those within the fold and the raping of those outside, between an obsession with modesty for those women who are family property and the utter disregard for the rights of those women who are free. They are the two sides of the same Islamic coin.

Only a minority of male Muslims in Britain ever indulge in the kind of brutal crimes I have described, but that is beside the point. What is important is that the size of that minority in relation to the proportion of Muslims in the population is far greater than it is for the indigenous British. Likewise most paedophiles are of “European heritage” whether Christians or agnostics, but then so are nine-tenths of the inhabitants of our island. It is proportion that matters.

You would think that British, Scandinavian and Australian feminists would make a point of speaking out against, indeed vociferously condemning, this aspect of Islam, which is not a mere local cultural accretion but goes to the heart of that religion. But they don’t. They are not interested in the welfare of individual women, merely of voicing an ideological protest against their own bourgeois Christian society. There are against “patriarchy”, yet when confronted with the extreme patriarchy of the Muslims they are not more strongly against it, as logically they should be, but instead they pretend that it is not there or is solely the concern of Muslim women to sort out, even though the weak position of women in the Muslim order makes this very difficult. Our privileged, chattering feminists will never speak out with sufficient vigour against any group, however vile its attitudes towards women, once it has been defined by progressive opinion as a “marginalised minority”.

These sexual attacks on non-Muslim women and under-age girls are not just sex crimes but hate crimes. The Lebanese Muslims in Sydney in 2000 called their victims of gang rape “Aussie pigs” and told them, “You deserve it because you are an Australian.” Yet there are many in Australia who refuse to regard these utterances as racist.

But the unwillingness to use the M-word is to be found in many other contexts. In Perugia in January this year a man was praying before a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in a small chapel while holding in his hand a photo of a loved one, for whom he was asking the intercession of the Mother of God. Suddenly a group of men (described in news reports merely as “immigrants”) attacked him, snatched away the photograph, smashed the image of Mary into fragments and urinated over the pieces. Truly that was an act of sacrilege by men who hated the Catholic faith of the Italians and its use of images. They were clearly Muslims, as are many of the illegal immigrants in Italy. But when the local priest was told, he described them merely as “foreigners”. The local people knew better and were indignant at his evasiveness. An auxiliary bishop in the diocese rushed to refute what they were thinking, claiming that Muslims revere the Virgin as the Mother of Jesus (even though they deny His divinity and regard Him as a lesser prophet). The bishop was forced by the people to confront the fact that the assailants were Muslims, but then evaded the fact by making a staement that was true but irrelevant. What motivated the attackers was not that the Italian was praying to Mary but rather to what they saw as an idol, a graven image, the very worst thing that Muslims can conceive. Who else in Italy would have been so outraged by the man’s kneeling in prayer before a statue to the point where they would become violent? It is unlikely that the perpetrators were members of the iconoclastic Free Presbyterian Church from the Outer Hebrides.

In 2008 the terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba, based in Pakistan, mounted an extremely well-planned attack on the Taj Hotel in Mumbai and caused great loss of life. It was generally treated in the Western press as part of the conflict between India and Pakistan. What was rarely mentioned was that Indian Muslims from Mumbai had secretly travelled to Pakistan to coach the Punjabi-speaking attackers in Marathi and Hindi, the everyday languages of Mumbai. While in Pakistan these local Mumbai Muslims went out of their way to persuade the terrorists to extend their attack to include Nariman House, a Jewish welfare centre in Colaba in the south of the city. The rabbi and his pregnant wife were shot in front of their two-year-old son, who, covered in blood, was rescued by his Indian Christian nanny. Other Jews were taken hostage and murdered. The autopsies showed that they had been tortured and their genitals mutilated. The Left-liberal press reporting the attack said little about this piece of cruel and total hatred. Hindu India was always free of anti-Semitism and notably tolerant and accepting of its Jews. Mumbai Muslims have no connection with Palestine. It is, as always, about religion.

It is much the same in Britain whenever there are attacks on synagogues or Hindu temples. The perpetrators are very rarely caught and when the crimes are discussed the word Muslim is kept firmly in the background. Indeed attempts are often made to pin the blame on some nebulous group of indigenous “right-wing extremists”. Let me suggest a more accurate way of deciding who was responsible. Plot on a graph the number attacks on British synagogues and other Jewish buildings or on people of Jewish appearance, say a man wearing a yarmulke, over time and then see whether there is a correlation between the frequency of the attacks and periods of heightened tension between Israel and the Palestinians. Likewise ask whether the timing of the attempts, sometimes successful, to burn down the temples of Britain’s Hindus correlate with religious clashes in India. If there is a good match, then there is a strong likelihood that the criminals are Muslim.

In 1992 militant Hindus in India destroyed the Babri Masjid, the mosque of Babur, in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, which had been built in 1527 in place of an ancient Hindu temple. Soon there were Muslim attacks on temples all over Britain. The Shree Krishna temple in West Bromwich was gutted and other temples in Bolton, Manchester, Birmingham, Derby, Bradford and London were damaged. Graffiti in Urdu, the main language of Pakistan, was sprayed on the walls of temples and Hindu businesses; Urdu is little used by indigenous right-wing extremists. These incidents have entirely demolished the left-wing myth that the only social division that gives rise to conflict in Britain is that between the Anglo-Celtic indigenous population and recent immigrants of a different hue. In reality the key such division is between the Muslims and everybody else. In Slough, near London, Sikh and Muslim youths brawl in the streets, but it has gone largely unreported.

The real problem is that Muslims believe in their own superiority and supremacy over others. They hate Israel and India because these are lands that they believe are theirs by right of conquest. Over a millennium ago conquering Muslim armies detached Palestine along with the rest of the Middle East from the Christian world. Likewise the Muslims invaded India, subjugated the Hindus and forcibly converted many of them. Now the Jews have returned to their ancestral land and the Hindus are masters of their own country and “impudent” enough to want to reclaim their own history. According to Muslim doctrine no country that was once under Muslim rule can ever finally escape from it. What is happening in Britain is that the Muslims are fighting out their foreign conflicts on our territory against our Hindus and our Jews, two groups who have made an unparalleled contribution to the prosperity and intellectual life of our society. We have an overriding duty to defend them.

In Britain the Muslims are always complaining that they get a bad press. In truth they get a far better press than they deserve because of the excessive caution employed by journalists and broadcasters in apportioning blame. It is a contemptible display of political correctness and moral relativism. But it rests upon the fear of the politicians, civil servants, and other elites that the great mass of ordinary British Muslims—whose main concerns, just like the rest of us, are their jobs, their families and their health—might be nudged into extremism. That policy was perhaps understandable in the past. But it has plainly failed.

We now need to demand that Muslim community leaders and ordinary respectable Muslims reject the notion that Muslims are superior to others in modern society, condemn unreservedly the misogynistic crimes and religious hatreds to which that notion has led, and denounce those Muslims who cling to such cruel and atavistic practices and beliefs. Insofar as only Muslims can succeed in drawing their co-religionists away from Islamist fanaticism, these demands on the respectable Muslim community become all the more vital, not less.

Thus far the people in power in Britain and Australia have only interpreted the Muslims in various ways; the point, however, is to change them. We can begin by being bluntly honest about just how bad matters are.