Culture Was a Factor. Denying It Just Prolongs the Silence

We cannot continue to ignore the cultural aspect of these crimes.

The list of people who should hang their heads in shame over 'Asian' sex gangs is stacking up. First off, the police, who - although made aware of the issue in 2002 - made a calculated move not to act on it until it was too late. They'd rather fawn over a utopian and long-since past it dream of unfettered cosmopolitan harmony, than actually make an effort to fulfill their role of protecting the public - even when they know that horrific abuse is taking place. Such craven moral cowardice has since led to the disfigurement of tens, if not hundreds, of lives, and can only be described as a serious breach of the terms of their existence. If they truly put politics above people, then quite simply they are not fit for purpose.

Second, those who would seek to put the boot into the families, friends, and even the young girls themselves rather than the adult men. That means you, Reverend ..., who thought it easier to criticise how young girls dress than place the blame on the perpetrator, on national television. 'Growing up too quickly' and dressing provocatively (not that we know of any of the girls involved doing either) is not an invitation for rape - except, ironically, in the self-same Islamic cultures which the reverend insists are not to blame. And there are others, too, who, so rightly vehement in their resistance to such things previously, now sacrifice their women's right's credentials purely to avoid one inconvenient truth - that culture was a factor, and that all the evidence tells you so.

It is well within the realm of fact to state that not all Islamic immigrants are child-groomers. The staggering majority of Muslims - like everyone else - are thoroughly appalled at these crimes, no-one is contesting that. At least not anyone with any semblance of reason. But what we are seeing is that the statistics point in a completely different direction to the one which some elements of the media seems to want us to look. Take this little nugget of information, for starters, fresh from the pages of the Guardian and ultimately sourced by the Home Office:

CEOP suggest there are over 2,000 "potential offenders" in the UK. Most of these, however, will never have been formally identified, let alone arrested, charged or prosecuted. Ethnicity data were available for just one-third. Of these, 49% were white and 46% Asian: the proportion of Pakistani Asians remains unknown.

The Guardian itself was forced to confess that, for a country where 'Asians' (a useless demographic term if ever there was one - what is the correlation, exactly, between South Korean criminals and Israeli ones?) make up only 7% of the population, that is a 'striking figure.' Striking. But none the less true. Anyone who denies it isn't arguing against the 'far-right,' or some guy with a blog - they're arguing against the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, a 'part of UK policing' dedicated to eradicating the sexual abuse of children, a source that not only has access to the kind of first-hand information that no eejit on the Internet can shake a stick at, but also a vested interest in making sure that its statistics are accurate.

That does not prove that culture is to be blame - it merely shows that 'Asians' are, as that article puts it, 'over-represented' in the statistics (or, in other words, proportionally commit more of that type of crime). But the Guardian also noted, correctly, that:

They seem much more likely to offend in groups, lending their abuse a curiously social dimension

So, not only are there vastly more Asian offenders than there are offenders of any other demographic, but there also tends to be a difference in the manner in which the crimes are committed. Surely, there must be some explanation for this, beyond 'coincidence,' especially as it is seen not only in the UK, but also abroad, in particular the southern Swedish city of Malmo. Not only does that city have one of the highest incidence of rape and other sexual offences anywhere in Europe, but studies by the National Crime Prevention Council, and one of violent crime at Svea high court by lawyer Ann Christine Hjelm, have found that over 70% of the crimes are committed by persons 'born on foreign soil.' Undoubtedly there are many Europeans and other nationalities caught up in that, but by far the largest cultural groups in Malmo - other than that of the Swedes themselves - is Islam. In particular, that practiced on the subcontinent. And, just like in the UK, the crime usually consists of a group of men assaulting girls under fifteen. These girls are also, almost without exception, white.

Why? Swedish media is a lot less scared of facts than ours, and reported freely the words of one Islamic student, Hamid.

It is not as wrong raping a Swedish girl as raping an Arab girl. The Swedish girl gets a lot of help afterwards, and she had probably fucked before, anyway. But the Arab girl will get problems with her family. For her, being raped is a source of shame

 I don’t have too much respect for Swedish girls. I guess you can say they get fucked to pieces

The words are only available in English via a small selection of admittedly biased websites, and may be a fabrication. But nonetheless the sentiment behind them is very real.

A great number of muftis (expounders of shari'ah law) and other Islamic scholars have gone on record as saying that women who don't wear headscarves are asking to be raped. Mufti Al-Hilali, the most senior authority on shari'ah law in Australia, shared this view with the congregation in a Sydney mosque. 'If you take out uncovered meat,' he said, 'and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it...whose fault is it - the cat's or the uncovered meat?' Most western or westernised men and women would of course say the cat's. The meat didn't ask to be eaten. But that's the way we see it. If you're a fundamentalist Muslim from a culture where sexual subjugation of women is the norm (i.e. rural Pakistan and Afghanistan), you're going to take a different view, and although most who come to western countries from those areas are willing or at least able to follow the law, many are not.

The Mufti's views are not at all uncommon in the fundamentalist Islamic world. Shahid Mehdi, of Copenhagen, said that women who do not wear the veil are 'asking to be raped,' as have many other muftis and imams across Europe and Scandinavia. Most, again, pay no heed to them. But if you're from an area where the word of muftis is - literally - the law, and imams are the leaders of the village community, they are your spiritual leader, and chief source of moral guidance. You'd regularly attend their sermons and their speeches, and you'd not be exposed to any conflicting views - except through that 'western media' which any fundamentalist preacher worth their salt would have already taught you to despise. Is it any wonder, then, that the number of Pakistanis and Afghans convicted for grooming disproportionately high, when an sizeable element of their community lives in exactly this fashion, closed off from the western world, with a misogynistic mufti as their sole source of moral guidance, and their families teaching them no better?

We should make an example of them as individuals, yet continue to self-indulgently deny that the backwards Islamic culture of the Indian subcontinent is the root cause, we'll have taken one step forward and two steps back. Some may wish to maintain the pretense that there is no correlation between culture and anything that happened in Rochdale. But government statistics and empirical evidence points against them, and what's more their attitude is only serving to further suppress information on incidents that have gone unreported for long enough. Political correctness and outdated dreams of multicultural harmony should not be worth more than the well-being of people; it is time to put aside the increasingly thin denialism that allowed these men and others like them eight more years of freedom, and to take an objective eye. Only by doing so will we be able to solve the problem.