By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, January 07, 2025
Justice delayed is indeed justice denied, but it’s
preferable for justice to arrive late, even by a decade or so, than for justice
to never show up at all.
Ask the victims of Harvey Weinstein, or families of the
victims of the Golden State Killer, or those who were oppressed by Bashar
al-Assad’s regime. We all would have preferred for longtime al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri to be suddenly disassembled closer to the
events of 9/11, but his appointment with two Hellfire missiles on August 1,
2022, was a useful reminder to the world’s evildoers that the United States of
America does not forget, and does not forgive.
In that light, it is welcome to see the political system
of the United Kingdom shaken up by Elon Musk calling attention to the longstanding, egregious,
disturbingly widespread practice of child sexual abuse, largely ignored and
excused by authorities in the name of cultural tolerance, appreciation of
diversity, and a terrified fear of worsening racial tensions.
What seems a little weird is that if you’ve read
conservative media for a long while — ten years? Fifteen years? — you’ve known
about this, and been outraged by it, and perhaps concluded that authorities in
the United Kingdom are so terrified of being accused of being anti-Islam that
they’ll never muster the will for a sufficient response.
Our Abigail Anthony wrote up an edifying summary of why,
seemingly out of the blue, this decades-old problem is suddenly front and
center again:
So why the renewed interest on
social media regarding Britain’s child-abuse gangs? There are a few reasons.
The first is that some court transcripts revealing details about the gangs were
recently released to the public. Second, judicial sentencing for the harrowing
Sara Sharif case occurred in December. Although the Sharif case wasn’t exactly
about “grooming gangs,” it did expose flaws in the immigration system, child
services, and cultural assimilation; the judge’s sentencing remarks state that Sara had over 70
fresh injuries and 25 separate bone fractures when she died at age ten in 2023
at the hands of her father, stepmother, and uncle, who all fled to Pakistan
after murdering her. Third, Jess Phillips (the U.K. safeguarding minister)
recently denied an investigative inquiry into the gangs and
suggested that such matters can be pursued by the local authorities — a big
task for a local authority and insufficient to address the nationwide problems.
Fourth, the town of Rotherham was declared the “Children’s Capital of Culture” for
2025; such a title is like a giant middle finger to the city’s long roster of
child victims. And fifth, the abuse is still ongoing, not some historic tragedy
that we can claim was squashed.
The Telegraph offers a detailed, jaw-dropping account of how “the child
victims of rape were denied justice and protection from the state to preserve
the image of a successful multicultural society”:
In Telford, Lucy Lowe died at 16
alongside her mother and sister when her abuser set fire to her home in 2000.
She had given birth to Azhar Ali Mahmood’s child when she was just 14, and was
pregnant when she was killed.
Her death was subsequently used to
threaten other children. The Telford Inquiry found particularly brutal threats.
When one victim aged 12 told her mother, and the mother called the police,
“there was about six or seven Asian men who came to my house. They threatened
my mum saying they’ll petrol bomb my house if we don’t drop the charges.”
Yet in a pattern that would repeat
itself, Telford’s authorities looked the other way. When an independent review
was finally published in 2022, it found police officers described parts of the
town as a “no-go area”, while witnesses set out multiple allegations of police
corruption and favoritism towards the Pakistani community. Regardless of the
reason, the inquiry found that “there was a nervousness about race . . .
bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes committed by what was described
as the “Asian” community”.
If you’re wondering, Telford is not a big city; its
population in the 2021 census was about 155,000 people. That’s a population
comparable to Charleston, S.C., Lakewood, Co., or Paterson, N.J.
Vicious crimes from more than a decade ago are back in
the news again. It’s a powerful demonstration that when the world’s richest
man, with an enormously influential social-media network, starts talking about
an issue, the rest of the world will start talking about it, too.
And judging from the Wall Street Journal, that
terrifies European politicians; the WSJ headline states that Musk has
“flooded X with posts criticizing European politicians, causing a diplomatic
conundrum for the continent’s leaders.” It reports, “In a possible sign of
Musk’s clout, U.K. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, whom Musk had sharply criticized
in recent days, late Monday unveiled legislation making it a crime to cover up
or fail to report allegations of child sexual abuse.”
Great, but . . . why did it take Musk using his
social-media platform like a flamethrower to make it happen? Why did so much of
the previous reporting get shrugged off or ignored?
For what it’s worth, the woman who led the previous U.K.
government probe into sexual abuse contended
to the BBC there’s no need for further inquiries, just enactment of the
previously recommended changes:
Victims “clearly want action” and
do not need a new national inquiry into grooming gangs, the woman who led a
seven-year probe into child sexual abuse has said.
Prof Alexis Jay told BBC Radio 4’s
Today program that “people should get on with” implementing her reforms and
“locally people need to step up to the mark and do the things that have been
recommended.”
“We’ve had enough of inquiries,
consultations and discussions — especially for the victims and survivors who’ve
had the courage to come forward,” she said. . . .
“I am pleased that the subject
matter and the inquiry recommendations are finally getting the attention they
deserve but this is definitely not the way I would have chosen for it to
happen, but it has had the effect of moving on the agenda.”
And as our Haley Strack noted, some of the previously
convicted perpetrators have already served their (absurdly brief) sentences and
are back on the street:
In January 2024, the Daily Mail
reported that some of the convicted Rotherham rape-gang members had already
been released from prison. One member, Zalgai Ahmadi, was recommended for
parole last year. Ahmadi was sentenced in May 2017 for nine and a half years
for holding a 14-year-old girl against her will and conspiracy to commit sexual
assault.
The current prime minister, Keir Starmer, was the
director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, and boasted yesterday
that he “brought the first major prosecution of an Asian grooming gang,” and
that when he left office, “we had the highest number of child sexual abuse
cases being prosecuted on record.” You don’t have to look too far to find
people who find the efforts of Starmer and his office far too little, arriving
far too late.
In his press conference yesterday, Starmer made clear
he’s found the true victims in this story — himself and his cabinet, because Musk has been so harsh in his criticism:
Those that are spreading lies and
misinformation as far and as wide as possible, they’re not interested in
victims — they are interested in themselves. . . . We have seen this playbook
many times — whipping up of intimidation and of threats of violence, hoping
that the media will amplify it. . . . When the poison of the far right leads to
serious threats to [government minister] Jess Phillips and others, then in my
book a line has been crossed.
You can see this reflexive invocation of “far right” as
an almost mystic legerdemain that somehow invalidates any statement by anyone
who gets called that label, regardless of its factual accuracy. Some of the
people who are angry about the child sex abuse are indeed far-Right; that
doesn’t make the actual crimes committed any less bad.
Again, if you were reading the right publications, this
is a story that’s been around for a long time.
Douglas Murray, writing in National Review in 2018:
Ten years ago, when the English
Defence League was founded, the U.K. was even less willing than it is now to
confront the issue of what are euphemistically described as “Asian grooming
gangs” (euphemistic because no Chinese or Koreans are involved and what is
happening is not grooming but mass rape). At the time, only a couple of such
cases had been recognized. Ten years on, every month brings news of another
town in which gangs of men (almost always of Pakistani origin) have been found
to have raped young, often underage, white girls. The facts of this reality —
which, it cannot be denied, sounds like something from the fantasies of the
most lurid racist — have now been confirmed multiple times by judges during
sentencing and also by the most mainstream investigative journalists in the
country.
But the whole subject is so ugly
and uncomfortable that very few people care to linger over it.
In fact, one of the writers at NR who wrote most bluntly
about how child sex abuse was tolerated or even encouraged within certain
Muslim cultures was our old friend . . . David French, now writing for
the New York Times. David, writing back in December 2015:
Yes, they were in the middle of a
war — but speaking from my own experience — the war was conducted from within a
culture that was shockingly broken. I expected the jihadists to be evil, but
even I couldn’t fathom the depths of their depravity. And it was all occurring
against the backdrop of a brutally violent and intolerant culture. Women were
beaten almost as an afterthought, there was a near-total lack of empathy for
even friends and neighbors, lying was endemic, and sexual abuse was rampant.
Even more disturbingly, it seemed that every problem was exacerbated the more
religious and pious a person (or village) became.
The recent events in Cologne and
other German and Austrian cities represent a necessary, reality-based
corrective to this absurd binary thinking. On New Year’s Eve, German women
faced attacks from roaming gangs of North African and Middle Eastern immigrants,
including asylum-seekers. According to German officials, “sexual crimes took place on a huge scale.” More than 100
women were victimized in a single evening, with up to 1,000 attackers involved.
As my colleague Ian Tuttle notes,
this sexual violence is part of a “disturbing trend” in European countries with large
Muslim-immigrant populations. Sweden now has the “third-highest rate of rape
per capita in the world.” Britain’s horrifying Rotherham rape scandal — where
1,400 children were systematically raped and abused over a period of 16 years
while authorities turned a blind eye — still shocks the conscience.
And — here’s a name that’s a blast from the past — Michelle Malkin, writing at NR in 2015:
American soldiers are being
punished for blowing the whistle on the systematic rape and enslavement of
young boys at the hands of brutal Afghan Muslim military officers.
Honorable men in uniform have
risked their careers and lives to stop the abuse. Yet, the White House — which
was busy tweeting about its new feminism-pandering “It’s on Us” campaign
against an alleged college rape crisis based on debunked statistics — is AWOL
on the actual pedophilia epidemic known as “bacha bazi.” On Thursday,
Obama-administration flacks went out of their way to downplay Afghan child rape
as “abhorrent,” but “fundamentally” a local “law-enforcement matter.”
Our Michael Brendan Dougherty spotlighted reports from
Ireland of “multiple cases where girls in the care of Tusla, the child and
family agency, were ‘being coerced or enticed to provide sex acts to multiple
men in exchange for a variety of goods.’”
Nor did the British press completely ignore these
stories. The Times of London, in 2007:
Until these convictions, the police
in over a dozen towns and cities, including Leeds, Sheffield, Blackburn and
Huddersfield, had appeared reluctant to address what many local people had
perceived as a growing problem — the groups of men who had been preying on
young, vulnerable girls and ensnaring them into prostitution.
It was a very uncomfortable
scenario, not least because many of these crimes had an identifiable racial
element: the gangs were Asian and the girls were white. The authorities, in the
shape of politicians and the police, seemed reluctant to acknowledge this
aspect of the crimes; it has been left to the mothers of the victims to speak
out.
What’s so mind-bogglingly outraging about the entire
disgrace is that this is the whole point of police and the criminal-justice
system. If the cops and prosecutors aren’t willing to go to bat to protect
schoolgirls from vicious sexual abuse, why do they exist? Nobody really needs
them to write parking tickets and investigate social-media posts for so-called
“hate speech.” And if the price of modern “tolerance” and “multiculturalism” is
turning a blind eye to widespread abuse of children, it’s not worth it.
Meanwhile, stateside this morning, Michelle Cottle of the New York Times has found the
true villain of this story — Elon Musk, for not giving Starmer credit for the
cases he did prosecute. I am reminded of the number of journalists who really
wanted to treat the Covid pandemic as a Donald Trump story.
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