Multiculturalism, Islam, and child abuse in Britain

Alexis Jay: Those who failed to act should resign

I heard the shocking story on NPR early yesterday morning: 

"More than 1,400 children suffered sexual abuse in a small English town from 1997 until as recently as last year. The report says local authorities were aware of the problem for years but did nothing."

Host Steve Inskeep asks, "Why? Why would authorities act like that?"

The reporter answers:

The report gives a couple answers to the question. One is that people refuse to believe something this systemic and widespread was happening in a place like Rotherham despite all the evidence that it was. Another answer is that there was a racial element to this. The report says the abusers were of Pakistani descent. And police and politicians---many of whom were white---were afraid of inciting ethnic tensions or being accused of racism if they tried to tackle the problem.

In other words, this was also about Islam and political correctness, not just child abuse. 

Islam is a religion, not a race. And this is also about a goofy "liberal" definition of multiculturalism:

Denis MacShane, the former Labour MP for Rotherham, has admitted that as a “Guardian reading liberal leftie” he shied away from the issue of the oppression of women in the Muslim community. Mr MacShane...admitted he should have “burrowed into” the issue. He told the BBC: "I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat if I may put it like that.”

A writer in the Spectator zeros in on the issue:

How could this have happened? A clue is given by the report’s authors, who state that ‘several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist’. ‘I didn’t want to appear racist’ is truly the ‘I was only obeying orders’ of our time...Political correctness was supposed to make us nicer, but in reality it just makes people stupider.

Where have we experienced this kind of stupidity before? Right here in Progressive Land, when City Hall and all right-thinking city progressives denounced Pamela Geller's anti-jihad ads on Muni buses (see this also). Moslem terrorists were apparently considered part of the multicultural society of San Francisco.

Islam doesn't have a good record on the abuse of women and girls. Muhammad himself had a nine-year-old wife.

Recall that Theo Van Gogh was murdered ten years ago on the streets of Amsterdam by a Moslem fanatic after he made a movie about how women are treated under Islam.

The NY Times story yesterday on the British child abuse scandal: Abuse Cases in British City Long Ignored, Report Says.