Monday, May 21, 2012

Gatestone Update :: Soeren Kern: Muslim Child-Rape Gangs in Britain, and more


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Muslim Child-Rape Gangs in Britain

by Soeren Kern
May 21, 2012 at 5:00 am
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It recently emerged that British police had known for more than a decade that Muslim rape gangs were targeting young girls, but they ignored the evidence of rapes because "they were petrified of being called racist." Rather than acknowledge that there is a problem, Muslim groups have decided to play the victim card instead. They are working overtime trying to silence public discussion about Muslim sex crimes by branding critics as "far-right racists" and "Islamophobic." Several of the men on trial in Liverpool apparently told their victims that it was all right for the girls to be passed around for sex with dozens of men "because it's what we do in our country."
Nine Muslim men belonging to a child-rape gang in northwestern England have received hefty prison sentences for trafficking and raping young British girls.
The three-month sexual grooming trial at a court in Liverpool, which ended on May 9, has drawn nationwide attention to the sexual abuse of children and women by Muslim immigrants, and British police are currently investigating at least 40 other cases of child rapes perpetrated by Muslims in northern England.
While Muslim groups have sought to discredit the police investigations by accusing British authorities of "racism" and "Islamophobia," it recently emerged that British police had known for more than a decade that Muslim rape gangs were targeting young girls in England, but they ignored evidence of the rapes and failed to act because they were afraid of being accused of racism.
The Liverpool Crown Court heard horrific testimony from five victims -- the youngest was 13 when the abuse began -- who were plied with alcohol, drugs and gifts so they could be "passed around" among a group of men aged between 24 and 59 for sex in apartments, houses, cars, taxis and kebab shops.
The nine defendants -- eight are from Pakistan and one is from Afghanistan -- were sentenced to a total of 77 years in prison after being convicted of rape, aiding and abetting rape, conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child, sexual assault and trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation.
All of the Muslims live in Rochdale, a grimy suburb of Greater Manchester in northwestern England. Some of the men were regarded as pillars of their community.
One of the men, Abdul Rauf, 43, is a married father-of-five and an Islamic studies teacher at a local mosque. According to court testimony, Rauf asked a 15-year-victim if she had any younger friends and he drove some of the girls to other men who would use them for sex, even though he knew the girls were minors. He was sentenced to six years in prison.
Another man, Adil Khan, 42, who is married with one child, fathered the child of a 13-year-old victim; he received an eight-year sentence. Hamid Safi, 22, an illegal immigrant with no fixed address, will be deported to Afghanistan at the end of his four-year sentence.
Mohammed Sajid, 35, was sentenced to 12 years for rape, six years for conspiracy, one year for trafficking and six years for sexual activity with a child. Known as "Saj," he would regularly ply victims with alcohol before having sex with them at his apartment, where groups of men would gather and "pass around" the girls.
Judge Gerald Clifton said: "One of the factors leading to that [rape] was the fact that they [the victims] were not part of your community [Pakistani] or religion [Muslim]. Some of you, when arrested, said it [the prosecution] was triggered by race. That is nonsense. What triggered this prosecution was your lust and greed."
Clifton said that in some cases, the girls had been raped "callously, viciously and violently" at a time when they were going through difficult periods in their lives. "One had left her parents' home, another had been in [foster] care for many years. You attracted them to your company by flattery, free food, and alcohol. Some of you acted to satiate your lust, some to make money out of them. All of you treated them as though they were worthless and beyond all respect."
The guardians of British multiculturalism have been quick to argue that it is merely coincidental that the rapists in the Rochdale case are Muslims and that sex abuse also occurs in white gangs. Some in British have also sought to portray the Muslims as the true victims in this case.
Defense attorney Simon Nichol told the BBC that his client "has objected from the start for being tried by an all-white jury, and subsequent events have confirmed his fears. He believes his convictions have nothing to do with justice but result from the faith and the race of the defendants. He further believes that society failed the girls in this case before the girls even met them and now that failure is being blamed on a weak minority group."
But Simon Danczuk, Labour Party MP for Rochdale, said in an interview that "it would be daft not to believe that race plays a part." He added: "There is a subculture of a small group of males that are Asian, that are collaborating to abuse young white girls who are vulnerable. The subculture is under the radar. Some people in communities are in denial about it but we need some home truths if we are going to address this."
According to experts interviewed by The Telegraph, while white pedophiles generally operate in isolation, the Muslim-led grooming is being done mostly by large numbers of men acting as a group. Several of the men on trial in Liverpool apparently told their victims that it was all right for them to be passed around for sex with dozens of men "because it's what we do in our country."
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Britain's most senior Muslim politician, told the London Evening Standard that there are "Pakistani men who believe that white girls are fair game. And we have to be prepared to say that. You can only start solving a problem if you acknowledge it first."
Warsi said the color of the victims' skin, as well as their vulnerability, helped to make them a target. She also said that some Pakistani men "see women as second class citizens and white women probably as third class citizens" and that these men "are to be spoken out against."
Warsi called on British authorities to stop being squeamish about investigating allegations involving Muslims. "Cultural sensitivity should never be a bar to applying the law," she said.
Greater Manchester Police and the Crown Prosecution Service [CPS] have apologized for failing to protect the first victim -- a 15-year-old known as Girl A -- following her plea for help in August 2008.
Girl A told police that she had been raped and provided DNA evidence from her attacker, but the CPS twice decided not to prosecute him.
Girl A's abuse intensified and she was being driven to apartments and houses to be raped by up to five men a night, four or five days a week. She was singled out because she was white, vulnerable and under-age. Her ordeal only ended when her teachers forced social workers to intervene after she became pregnant and they became concerned by the number of Muslim men picking her up from school.
Girl A said that in a six-hour interview she gave police details about her abusers and where the attacks took place. She said: "I hoped they were going to do something and it would stop. But it just carried on. It just started again with different men and more men this time, and that's when it started becoming up to five men a day."
When the Greater Manchester Police finally forwarded a file on Girls A's rape to the CPS in 2009, a government lawyer decided not to charge anyone because he said she would not be a sufficiently credible witness to put before a jury. A second CPS lawyer backed that opinion.
It was only after social workers noticed an upsurge in cases of "child grooming" – pretending to befriend children with attention and gifts to gain their trust, and eventually lead them to think that underage sexual activity is "normal" -- that police reinvestigated and made a series of arrests which led to the convictions on May 9.
According to Ann Cryer, a former Labour MP for the town of Keighley, who has campaigned to draw public attention to the issue of Muslim sex gangs, complaints to social workers and the police were ignored because they were "petrified of being called racist."
Cryer said: "This is an absolute scandal. They were petrified of being called racist and so reverted to the default of political correctness. They had a greater fear of being perceived in that light than in dealing with the issues in front of them."
Rather than acknowledge that there is a problem, Muslim groups in Britain have decided to play the victim card instead. They are also working overtime to try to silence public discussion about Muslim sex crimes in Britain by branding critics as "far right racists" and "Islamophobic."
The Muslim Council of Britain has complained about a "climate of hate" against Muslims and it has warned Muslims to brace themselves for "Islamophobic" attacks on Muslims and mosques.
Faith Matters, a pro-Muslim "inter-faith think tank" which established a helpline called Tell Mama to monitor "Islamophobia" when the Liverpool trial began in February, said the "Islamophobic hatred" prompted by the case has added to the "poison" against Muslims.
Fiyaz Mughal, a spokesman for Faith Matters, said: "This is dangerous for community relations. There's lots of discussion about 'Muslim paedos,' like saying the prophet Mohammed married a young girl. All of this disgusting talk is adding to the poison against Muslims."
Although five girls testified at the trial in Liverpool, British police are pursuing leads that the Rochdale gang exploited at least 50 other girls.
On May 12, just three days after the nine Muslims from Rochdale were sentenced to prison, Greater Manchester Police arrested another nine Muslims, aged between 24 and 38, on suspicion of sexually abusing a child. And on May 19, police arrested two more Muslims, both aged 33, on suspicion of sexual assault and rape.
In January 2011, researchers at The Times newspaper identified 17 prosecutions in Britain since 1997 -- 14 of them in the past three years -- involving the on-street grooming of girls aged 11 to 16.
The victims came from 13 towns and cities and in each case two or more men were convicted of offenses. In total, 56 people, with an average age of 28, were found guilty of crimes including rape, child abduction, indecent assault and sex with a child. All but three of the men were Muslim.
Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.
Related Topics:  United Kingdom  |  Soeren Kern

Apartheid: The Big Lie

by Michael Curtis
May 21, 2012 at 4:00 am
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Unlike Muslm countries, Israel has no state religion, but rather cntains some 15 recognized religions, There are no segregated roads as there are in Saudi Arabia. If Jews and Arabs do live in different areas in the country it is not through state-imposed segregation, enforced by legal means. Discrimination does not exist on the basis of race, religion or sex, and all groups have equal protection under the law.
The time is now long overdue to recognize that Adolph Hitler's contribution to political wisdom -- the Big Lie -- has reappeared in the Palestinian narrative of the state of Israel as an "apartheid state." "[T]he broad masses of a nation," Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, "will more readily fall victim to the big lie than to the small lie." The constant repetition of the Big Lie, he explained, made it acceptable, especially when it could be manipulated to appear to have a certain credibility. The world is all too familiar with the success of Hitler's Big Lie narrative that the Jews were internationally powerful, responsible for World War I -- and, in his view, for most of the problems of the world.
This new Big Lie about Israel being an "apartheid state" that has been trumpeted by the Palestinian narrative of Middle Eastern history and politics has, in recent years, been accepted not only been accepted by "the broad masses," but also by more educated and supposedly politically sophisticated individuals in the media, the churches, and academia.
The official definition of the crime of "apartheid" was first formulated in the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on November 30, 1973. The definition was "inhumane acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group…over another racial group…and systematically oppressing them." A later version of the definition was included in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, of July 17, 1998 which came into force in July 2002. The definition became inhumane acts concerning an identifiable group on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious grounds "committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime."
The change in legal terminology is important for political reasons. Israelis and Palestinians can be considered as "identifiable groups" and therefore the provisions of international law in the 1973 Convention and the 1998 Statute can be applied to them, thus opening the opportunity for a legal charge of the crime of apartheid against Israel.
Yet this legal issue has little to do with the real life political attempt to bring the charge against Israel. That action began in the 1970s when the Soviet Union, for its own political purposes, organized a coalition with Arab states and other willing countries in what was then considered the group of "non-aligned" countries of the world. The greatest success of the coalition was to obtain an overwhelming majority, 72-35-32, for the infamous UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 of November 10, 1975 which defined Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination, and years later repealed only after great efforts by American diplomats, including, fnally, the US Ambassador to the Unted Nations, John Bolton.
Similar declarations followed. The most forthright was the Declaration of the first Durban conference (The UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance) in September 2001 that "We declare Israel as a racist, Apartheid state in which Israel's brand of Apartheid as a crime against humanity has been characterized by separation and segregation, dispassion, restricted land access, denationalization, 'bantustanization' and inhumane acts." Since then an "Israel Apartheid Week" has become an annual event on many college campuses in the United States and elsewhere.
The declaration of Durban 1, which reads as an indictment, was certainly applicable to the old, unlamented South Africa where blacks were indeed segregated in many ways by legal and other restrictions, and were treated as inferior human beings; but it has no application to the state and society of Israel. Within the state of Israel, Israeli Arabs, 20% of the population, have equal political and social rights as Jews; full citizenship; members of the Israeli Parliament, called the Knesset; a seat on the Supreme Court; diplomatic representation at the most senior levels, a free press in Arabic, which is, along with Hebrew, an official language; the capacity to move freely; equal opportunity to enter universities, to be employed, and to enter freely into marital relations with fellow Arabs or with Jews. If Jews and Arabs do live in different areas of the country it is not through a state-imposed segregation, enforced by legal means, but by choice. There are no segregated roads, as there are in Saudi Arabia, and there are no segregated schools, housing, drinking fountains, buses or any officially imposed limits whatsoever. Discrimination does not exist on the basis of race, religion, or sex; and all groups have legal protection of the law. Unlike Muslim countries Israel has no state religion, but rather contains some 15 recognized religions. Israel, unlike the old South Africa, is a multiracial society.
In the absence of a peace settlement between the parties that will determine the boundaries of territories currently dispute, both the Palestinian Authority and Israel control parts of the West Bank. Measures such as roadblocks, checkpoints and a fence have been imposed not for the purposes of segregation, but for security and for self-defense. Although it is true that these security measures cause inconveniences and some hardship, they have been created to prevent terrorist attacks, not to impose discrimination by an oppressive regime. It is a tribute to the nature of democracy in Israel that its Supreme Court on a number of occasions has ordered the state to make changes in the fence route, often by a small amount, when the fence seemed to be imposing hardship on the Palestinians.
The world is all too well aware of the disputes between Israel and Palestinians, especially on the complex issues of settlements, refugees, and Jerusalem, but to accuse Israel of being "apartheid" is not only false, it is unhelpful and counterproductive for any hope for a peaceful settlement .
The unjustifiable, misguided, and extensively expressed "moral outrage" over the Big Lie directed against Israel can partly be explained by ignorance of the reality of political and social conditions in Israel and in the territories. For all the problems encountered by a state created by Jews, and with 21 Arab and Muslim neighbors openly threatening to destroy it -- sometimes, as with Iran, to the illegal point of publicly advocating genocide -- it is a remarkable success story -- unlike the failures of every surrounding Arab and Muslim state except those benefitting from enormous oil resources.
One must conclude that the enemies of Israel, or inflexibly biased critics, are maliciously demonizing it with repetition of the word "apartheid" in the hope of goading the international community into denying Israel's legitimacy as a state, in an effort to destroy it. Regrettably, one must also conclude that the perceptions of Israel have been colored for many people, now including Muslims, by an antisemitism which has become increasingly conspicuous both by rhetoric and physical assaults on Jews and Jewish institutions.
Critics of Israel may understandingly claim the mantle of compassion and express empathy for the Palestinians whom they consider the weaker party in the enduring conflict with Israel. They may argue the case against what they consider oppressive behavior by Israeli authorities, and point to instances of injustice. Yet at the same time they ignore not only the repressive and corrupt governance of the Palestinian Authority to its own citizens, but also the principles of liberty and equality inherent in the state of Israel, and above all the need for all nations to take appropriate measures to defend themselves against those in hostile environments who are eager to destroy them.
Those individuals, groups, and organizations making use of the word "apartheid" are appealing to the emotions of those who rightfully find the concept deplorable, but by doing so they are polarizing political positions and unjustly oversimplifying a complex situation, in which one side, Israel's, has so often offered reasonable compromises for peace, and the other side, the Palestinians, backed by many of the 21 Arab and Muslim countries has refused to enter into any real meaningful negotiations.
Michael Curtis is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Rutgers University and author of Should Israel Exist? A Sovereign Nation under attack by the International Community.
Related Topics:  Michael Curtis

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