After a few symbolic prosecutions
Dominic Green at The Free Press has the details.
The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years. It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.
That’s a very large claim. Is it really Europe’s biggest peacetime crime? Bigger than what Anders Breivik did for instance? Bigger than the July 7 bombings in London? These things are hard to measure.
British governments, both Conservative and Labour, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded—until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.
Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.
The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.
Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia.
Which are, of course, two very different categories. We’re allowed to hate religions. Islam is peculiarly hateful in many ways. It’s revoltingly hostile to women. We’re allowed to say that, and it’s imperative that we remain allowed to say that.
The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.
They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.
Class snobbery as in “the girls are slags so they don’t matter.”
All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s.
What we do know is that the epicenter was the postindustrial mill towns of England’s north and Midlands, where immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh settled in the 1960s. White locals say the grooming and rapes began soon after. In Rotherham, the rundown Yorkshire city where the scandal first broke, local police and councilors were notified about systematic grooming and sex abuse by 2001. The first convictions did not occur until 2010, when five men of Pakistani background were jailed for multiple offenses against girls as young as 12 years of age.
…
Several girls were murdered. In Manchester in 2003, Victoria Agoglia was repeatedly drugged and raped before being given a fatal dose of heroin at the age of 15. In Blackpool that same year, 14-year-old Charlene Downes disappeared—her body was never found.
In Telford, Azhar Ali Mehmood groomed Lucy Lowe from the age of 12 and impregnated her at 14. He burned her alive in her own home with her mother, her disabled sister, and her unborn second child, also fathered by Mehmood. Mehmood was jailed for life in 2001 for murder—not sex crimes.
In the age of “Say Her Name,” no one important thought it worth saying the names of these girls. The girls, their rapists told them, were “white slags,” worthless and expendable. Apart from a few whistleblowers, most of them women, and courageous journalists such as Julie Bindel, Andrew Norfolk, Douglas Murray, and Charlie Peters, the media showed no interest.
And the result is Elon Musk is showing interest, which is almost as bad as Donald Trump showing interest would be.
Ah, I see that ‘Islamophobia’ has struck again. It is a tern deliberately ambiguous, and designed to conflate attacks on Islam (a religion) with attacks on Muslims (those unfortunate enough to have been born into that religion, and some of those to have their brains so addled with it that they be come Islamists; ie terrorists.)
Islam has never been a ‘race,’ however defined. If I was suffering from chronic leprosy, I would likely be denied entry to the once-imperial UK. Not the case with chronic Islam. Perhaps the term ‘non-muslimophobic islamophobe’ would cover cases like mine.
My thought for today.
I am glad to see Julie Bindel getting credit. A very quick search found a piece by her from a few years ago that seems to be open access.
Bigger than the Breitscheidplatz or Magdeburg car-rammings of, respectively, 2016 and 2024? Bigger than the car-ramming in Barcelona in 2017? Bigger than the daylight murder of Theo van Gogh with a note promising that Ayaan Hirsi Ali would be next? Bigger than the Charlie Hebdo massacre? Than the thousands of yearly gang rapes across Western Europe perpetrated in the main by men of similar ethnic or religious background to the groomers in England?
I don’t know that it is. But I also don’t know that it isn’t.
It is a large claim, but it is a large crime — or, rather, an enormous complex of crimes, with the supervening crime being one of neglect of a level akin to indulgence (if not tacit collaboration) by the authorities tasked with keeping British girls of every ethnic, linguistic, religious, or national origin safe on their streets. This conspiracy of silence is an amorphous moral crime, if not exactly a prosecutable legal one, and it (and those like it in other countries of Western Europe) portend to raise the bloody spectres of the past yet again, sooner or later.
And the thing about “sooner or later” is that things never get any later; they only get sooner.
Those spectres, the biggest wartime crimes in Europe, were the systematic murder of millions of Jews and hundreds of thousands of other civilians in the Holocaust alongside the annihilation war against the various Slavic peoples of the Bloodlands, all during World War Two. A close second were the crimes of revenge perpetrated against Germany and its allies during and in the immediate aftermath of that conflict, during which some 14 million ethnic Germans were evacuated, expelled, and force-marched from the conquered lands — and, along with many deaths of these wretches, upwards of two million German women were brutally raped in the East, along with untold tens to hundreds of thousands coerced into prostitution for Allied soldiers in the West.
The “native” peoples of Western Europe have, since then, done an admirable job of putting this evil behind them and at least striving to be worthy of the civilisation they made, and of the ideals upon which that civilisation was built. But these peoples have also seen these ideals turned against them; they have seen rises in poverty, crime, terrorism, and ethnic strife as their societies have become rapidly more diverse, often against those peoples’ express wishes; they have been asked to accept ever-increasing strain on their healthcare and education and housing and pensions and social welfare by an underclass of new arrivals whose grandchildren might, eventually, become net contributors to these systems.
They have borne witness to a transatlantic liberal order which promises to end the very idea of ethnic cohesion within European peoples whilst guaranteeing it — conceivably to the level of parallel justice systems — for the aforementioned immigrants; they see elected officials governing in their own name turn a blind eye when horrific crimes such as the ones outlined in the original post are perpetrated against them, but those same officials fall all over themselves to appease a social movement which rose in the context of the American empire and makes no real sense in Europe. They see an imperial military alliance wagering their futures and what little is left of their prosperity to fight the last rearguard action of the Cold War, ostensibly in the name of freedom, all the while their governments arrest and fine and even imprison their own citizens for airing their grievances and disagreements in public.
And they see that any political parties speaking anything like half the truth about any of this are automatically labelled “right-wing extremist”, that the heroic sacrifices of the past become relativised and trivialised and suborned to the rainbow religion and to COVID measures of highly questionable efficacy and to the war in Ukraine, and they begin to forget the horrific ethnic-based crimes of the past. They begin to see themselves in ethnic terms once more; they begin to reject transnational liberalism as preached by Washington and as repeated by London and Paris and Berlin; they begin to think in zero-sum terms not only economically but also ethnically and culturally.
These peoples still form a solid majority of the nations upon which their states are based, but that majority is slipping all the time. When these peoples become mere pluralities in “their own” countries, or when it seems credible to them that this might happen, and they look around at the state of their nation-states during this transition, they are like as not to recall, and thence to revive, a deeper past. And I truly do shudder to think which crimes may be committed then. (Perhaps, if any of us remain, we will look back on the “postwar crime” described in this article and call it a “prewar crime”, too.)
Elon Musk is no friend of England, nor of Germany; as Eugyppius noted, he is a battery salesman hoping to sell batteries. But, pace the conventional wisdom of people who read his trollish tweets, he is by no means a stupid man. Then again, even a stupid man could look at the last decade in Western Europe and sense that something deeply troubling was afoot. I seriously doubt he nor Trump can make the situation here better, it is true, but mere reaction to them is almost certain to only make it worse.
The hyperbole that writer is showing only highlights that this issue stokes biases in both directions.
Yes, it’s an absolutely terrible scandal. No, it’s very likely not the “worst peacetime crime in modern Europe” but it very likely looks like it is to someone who’s already primed to resent anti-racists for being occasionally performative and naïve and getting things wrong sometimes.
For just one example of another contender for “worst peacetime crime in modern Europe”, let’s revisit when the Catholic Church in Spain literally STOLE THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND BABIES from their unwed or otherwise “undesirable” mothers, lying to them that the babies had died in childbirth and then
sellingadopting them off to Catholic parents.https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15335899
Oh what the heck, here’s another contender: the estimated THIRTY THOUSAND enslaved women and girls at the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland.
“Islamophobia” is indeed a tricky term. “Phobia” suggests an element of irrationality. There are some rational reasons not to be fond of Islam. (Such as its attitude towards women.) Of course, there are also irrational reasons for it, but those are not the same thing.
I don’t think conflating the two ever has good results, and it probably would be best if the term of “islamophobe” was reserved for people in the latter category. Spurious accusations of Islamophobia on people from the former group are counterproductive to fighting actual Islamophobia. And actual islamophobes are all too happy to use these accusations to pretend their own concerns are legitimate, even though they’re not.
We have every right to hate Islam.
Hating Muslims is another matter, but the word for that should be Muslimophobia.
I agree. To clarify, I am not saying that Islam should not be hated, I am saying that hatred of Islam should not necessarily be regarded as “islamophobia.”
How easy is it to hate the sin and not the sinner though? What usually happens in practice?
To add to Der Durchwanderer’s perceptive comment:
If one asks a question like: “African ex-colonies have been independent for more than 50 years, if it was colonisalism that was holding them back and making them poor, then why are they not on a rapid trajectory towards prosperity and equality?” …
(… and noting that some ex-British colonies like Singapore and Hong Kong did indeed do that and are richer than the UK, rather a problem for anyone maintaining that colonisation is disasterous per se …)
… the standard answer trotted out in academia is “… because the new nations were just arbitrary lines on the map drawn by colonial powers, rather than being drawn up around sensible tribal and ethnic groupings, and that has made them dysfunctional”.
In other words, multiculturalism and mashing together different ethnic groups is those countries’ greatest weakness, producing dysfunction and preventing growth towards prosperity.
Now, what do those very same people say about mass immigration into Europe, producing multiculturalism and mashing together different ethnic groups?
Well, you know what they say, they say that “diversity is our greatest strength!” and that it is a great boon that will ensure our prosperity!
[Note: King Charles, in his Christmas address, uttered the “diversity is our greatest strength” mantra, while Keir Starmer, in his Christmas address claimed that “Britain is far richer” owing to Pakistani immigration. He did not proffer any evidence.]
And a more basic question:
If large numbers of people from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, etc, are a boon to the host nation, how come Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Somalia are not idylls of peaceful prosperity?**
Somehow, the mainstream media doesn’t address this question, all we get is intonation of the catechism: “boosts the economy”, “diversity is our strength”.
[**No doubt woke academics will have schemed up some way in which this is all the fault of white people.]
#9 Coel
Your examination of the nations does not run very deep. Hong Kong and Singapore were built up, invested in by the owning nations. They were and continue to be centres of trade, located as they are on key shipping lanes. Self-freed African nations by contrast were dominated from afar and not built up, invested in, are not located on key shipping lanes. They were plundered of their natural resources which were shipped out, and when they gained their own footing, abandoned.
For a particularly shameful example, see Haiti and France.
@Holms: #11:
Not really, Britain imposed British institutions, yes, which those places then benefitted from. But they also did that (or tried to as best they could) in all their other colonies. The wealth generation was done by the locals.
[And note that the claim that they invested wealth runs counter to the more-common accusation that the imperialists extracted wealth.]
Somalia is right on the world’s primary shipping lane, which is why Somalian pirates can cause problems. And ships tend to go where it is beneficial for them to go. Hong Kong and Singapore are “centres of trade” and “on shipping lanes” because the locals have made them attractive places to trade with.
The problem is that once you get beyond 60 years of independence it’s hard to keep blaming the colonialists. If the colonialists were the problem you’d expect such nations to have been on a strongly upward trajectory since independence, and to now be approaching parity.
But the natural resources that were shipped out (minerals, oil, etc) were by no means used up. Plenty of such nations in Africa are still rich in natural resources (whereas places like Hong Kong and Singapore are not).
“Abandoned” is an interesting choice of word here; was the involvement of colonial powers beneficial or not? And in the case of many former British colonies, the newly independent states had as much involvement with Britain as they wished to have. That’s why the “Commonwealth” exists,
The Haitians kicked the French out in 1804. How long are you going to continue making excuses for?
Who are the people who read his trollish tweets? His audience is vast. Even if you don’t participate on X, the ridiculous ideas he proffers are widely reported and relayed in all media outlets. It’s nearly inescapable for anyone who’s paying the least amount of attention to any media anywhere. Should we accept any “conventional wisdom” that says he’s not a stupid man? Exposure to the inane garbage in his mind may lead some to think he’s an eccentric, complex intellect (despite his shallow, reflexive, brief and sometimes cryptic comments (which is intentional, in order to leave room for followups after seeing the reactions (which also allows him to consult and revise in light of criticism (either that or tell people to fuck off))), but some others of us to think he’s just a run of the mill moron. His game is not a complicated one.
Instead of presenting ignorant and dishonest rubbish as knock-down truths, Coel should read the history of Haiti since 1804 and the parts played by both France & the USA in extracting ‘reparations’, not to mention the constant meddling in Haiti’s politics. But Coel is not interested in actual history, only in reducing the world to the confines of his ignorant and simple-minded prejudices.
Also, as Holms has pointed out, Coel has no understanding of the history of colonialism in different places, nor of the (as yet unfinished) history of its aftermath – since history, much as Coel would like it to, does not suddenly stop somewhere and then begin again utterly anew in the way that Coel likes. He is astoundingly ignorant, and parrots sound-bites he’s picked up on the internet simply because they suit his prejudices. It is not the behaviour of anyone who has a serious interest in truth and reality. The fool’s confidence with which he displays his ignorance is risible.
Coel, try to remember the specific examples you brought up: Singapore and Hong Kong, not British colonies in general. And if you don’t know why Haiti stands as a counter-example to your nonsense, I can only conclude you do not know the first thing about that bit of history.
Thank you, Holms. The man’s ignorance, dishonesty & frivolousness, not to mention the obvious racism that goads him, is astonishing. If interest paid on loans to enable the payment of the debts is included, Haiti’s ‘debts’ to French slave-owners and their heirs and financial institutions that took over the debts were finally paid off in 1947, it appears.
As for the rubbish about Somalia, Coel clearly knows nothing of the mess that various colonial powers made of the country in the late 19th and well into the 20th century. Even post-World War II Italy did more good for the Somalis than Britain did. And nothing about the mess they made of a number of other countries. He suffers from the infantile delusion that any recognition of what actually happened historically must be rejected as, I suppose, Marxist. or, to use a term he habitually uses, “woke”.
The whining self-pity he exhibits about what he supposes is the treatment of ‘whites’, as well as references to ‘DEI hires’, picked up from such as Charlie Kirk, do not help.
Coel, for all his flaws and perhaps ill-considered arguments which could use some nuance and some fleshing out, at least bothered to *make arguments*. As far as I can tell, Tim Harris and Holms have shown little but sneering contempt for those arguments and for the man himself. Even the germs of a counter-argument are presented scantily, in the form of a dismissal for his not knowing (or at least not expounding in detail upon) the entire breadth of, say, Hatian or Somalian history…without actually elaborating these. The closest to an actual counter-argument, Holms’ post at #9, is itself riddled with contradictions and the very shallowness of analysis it accuses Coel’s remarks of.
In other words, in a blog whose byline is, and I quote, “discussing all the things”, there is precious little discussion going on here in this exchange. There is sophistry and pomposity in spades, and not a little childish name-calling, mostly from Mr. Harris. It reminds me of a couple of years ago when he and I disagreed over the wisdom of granting our governments sweeping regulatory authority over social media, with me being rather skeptical that governments would not abuse any proposed Ministries of Truth and him being rather adamant that this made me an idiot and a fascist (direct quotes of his personal diatribes escape me at the moment). He even unsubscribed from my blog over it, though at the time I remained studiously (and honestly) jovial, perhas even a bit befuddled at why a difference of opinion in the comment section of a blog should rise to the level of such vitriol.
Now, I don’t agree with very much of what Coel has written here in this thread in response to my own post (at least not without a large amount of nuance, caveats, and several thousand words of exposition), and I very much doubt that if Coel and I ever had a face-to-face discussion that we would actually agree on very much (though I expect the conversation would be interesting and civil and informative on both sides). And, here, I can respect him for *having made an argument*. I lack the time and interest to offer him a counter-argument to his theses, which is why I was so hoping to read one from Mr. Harris or Holms or Twiliter or whomever, who might have actually presented counterpoints and details to the various intentions and effects of varying colonial policies within and across European states during the Scramble for Africa, and also the different modes and tempos of decolonisation and the different relationships various post-colonies have with their former overlords (or, as in the case of so many West and Central African states with respect to France, their current overlords).
But I got none of that. Instead I see sneering contempt, the equivalent of “educate yourself”, and a bunch of prissy name-calling, and a complete refusal to even minimally engage in several interesting points of contention Coel raised.
There was an interesting discussion to be had here, about the debts the West owes to the world, and whether those debts justify so many of the largely self-made crises Western Europe is subjecting itself to; of the tension between the nation-state and the liberal ideals out of which the very concept of the nation-state sprung, as those ideals have come to undermine the very notion of nations upon which those states were founded; of the justness of European peasants facing the blunt and direct consequences of policies which modern European elites have enacted and allowed to assuage their moral guilt over the actions and decisions which ancestral European elites made — consequences which those modern elites themselves will never have to directly face.
This is, in fact, the most important discussion that faces modern Europe and modern Europeans — who counts as European? Where are Europe’s borders? Is Europe allowed to have borders at all? How will European nation-states accommodate the fact that, in Western Europe, almost all of them are being rapidly transformed into multiethnic states whose majority “indigenous” populations see themselves as naturally distinct and aren’t very fond of the notion of becoming minorities in “their own” countreis?`
We will need more than sneering contempt and disdain to answer these questions, and to talk about them. We will need more than contradicting shibolleths which work in the United States and the Anglophone settler colonies. We will need more than name-calling and a studious refusal to engage in anything that doesn’t conform to what we already think we know is true.
Do better, Tim. I know you have it in you.
Firstly, thanks for the honorable mention DD. Secondly, and for the record, I haven’t made any arguments about the historical points either Coel, you, or anyone else has made. My comments have been more meta, or peripheral if you will. If I’m honest, I feel like I know enough about world history to keep me out of trouble, but not so much as to drone on about it, or even offer an argument, simply because I find world history boring AF, and always have. But if the Musk fans are going to pipe up about how wonderful he is, then I’m going to say something.
I’m not so sure I can be included in the sneering contempt, not of anyone here, not on this occasion anyway. I’m also not inclined to stand by while otherwise intelligent people are duped by the likes of Musk or Trump. If I do have a reasonable argument to offer though, you’ll be the first to know.
The subject matter of this post has ballooned beyond all recognition…which is ok, that kind of ballooning can be very interesting and informative. This one is, in its way, but it’s also a tad peppery. Deep breaths, all.
Twiliter,
You’re welcome. I didn’t mean to insinuate you *were* part of the sneering contempt (of Coel, at least; Musk is another matter), but that I had hoped you’d have more substantively engaged in the potential discussion. The contempt, as I said, mostly comes from Tim Harris — who is capable of producing interesting thoughts, but seems to have a habit of derailing himself into a frothing rage as soon as an interlocutor does not fall in line with them. Holms only slightly, if at all, and you not at all. I apologise if that was not clear.
As for your direct reply to my post, I didn’t bother replying to your own reply of my throwaway line on Musk precisely because I don’t hold him in particularly high regard, he wasn’t the focus of the points I was making, and don’t think he needs defending from the likes of me, anyway. I only ever really became aware of his existence about a decade ago, when a cunning-but-not-very-bright boss of mine sang his praises, which set me against him at an almost spiritual level from the jump; stomaching two longform appearances on the Joe Rogan podcast convinced me that he was quite keenly intelligent in some narrow technical fields and had the particular mix of autism and vanity required to drive a man of such subject-matter intelligence to the heights of business…well, “success”, I guess. But they also convinced me that he isn’t a particularly wise or admirable or even interesting person (unlike, say, Rick Rubin). (I am also not a “fan boy” of Joe Rogan, and only maybe once or twice a year watch his podcast if he has on a guest I want to learn more about, as I wanted to learn more about Musk a couple of years ago when he seemed to go from progressive tech-bro darling to a cringey in-joke among the terminally online.)
I honestly mostly pity him, Musk I mean, to the extent that I think about him at all. That he is so driven by an addiction to Twitter and to the aforementioned “business success” that it has apparently robbed him of a meaningful family life, among other things. His ventures in space exploration could indeed prove revolutionarily path-finding (for example, in establishing a space elevator on the Moon and giving us access to the vast resources locked in asteroids around us, and thus freeing us from relying on minerals mined by children), but these things will happen sooner or later regardless of the man himself. His ventures in electric cars seem to have been a long-term mistake, given the questionable return on the intense resource extraction and pollution they produce (unless and until the materials used to make them could be mined in space, I suppose), and the lack of actual savings on carbon production (especially in Germany, where we have replaced nuclear power plants with coal-fired ones, so the per-kilometer CO2 generation of a Tesla isn’t really any better than for a decent diesel engine even ignoring the one-time cost of producing and transporting the car to its point of sale).
I don’t believe that makes me a “fan” of his, and I certainly didn’t “pipe up about how wonderful he is” in my throwaway line. If anything, my remarks were a bit insulting, noting that one doesn’t need to be particularly intelligent to have made the observations he has about Germany and England. Especially not now, when several social forces set in motion over the last few decades are coming so rapidly to a head. He is a troll, or rather a shark fisherman, chumming the waters — but the sharks are already there, not too far away from the surface. In Germany, for example, the AfD has increased its polling from about 20 percent to about 21 percent since Musk started squawking about them, but this is well within the margin of error and also within the general trend of increasing AfD support in the face of a collapsing government, so it is difficult to tease out a “Musk effect” amongst voters here.
Furthermore, as I hope my post illustrates, I have not been “duped” by the likes of him, nor of Trump. Indeed, I have been thinking and writing in my own small corner on these subjects off and on for years, and have been reading and discussing them for years before that. I am under no illusion that Musk or Trump are in any position to know, or to care if they did, what solutions there might be to Europe’s problems; to the extent that Musk has engaged with them at all, they will be to benefit his business enterprises or to feed his Twitter addiction (or both).
But just because Musk and Trump rattle on ignorantly about Europe’s problems doesn’t mean that Europe has no problems to rattle on about. Ignoring these problems, consigning them to the realm of the undiscussable just because they have been touched upon by people whom you hold in contempt, doesn’t make them go away; it doesn’t help to solve them, nor to prevent the very real chance of some very, very bad consequences from occurring, should things continue to take the course they’ve been on.
So if you are really interested in discussing the problems faced by Europe, I would love to have that conversation; if you are just looking to pick out individual lines about Musk or Trump and call them names, I’m not interested. I’m vaguely nauseated that I have spent so many words on them here, to be honest, and I hope to never need to spill so many pixels on either of them again (though there is a fat chance of that, I suppose).
Fair enough DD, thanks.I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have anything substantive to add to the conversation about Europe’s politics, so I probably won’t engage. Therefore I will read the rest you all with interest, as per usual. :)
I know that feeling. When Trump won I kept telling myself I should simply ignore him this time around…but I also knew I probably wouldn’t be able to, and sure enough, I’m not.