Telling the truth about the real rape crisis in Rotherham, England has caused a Member of Parliament to be booted from her job as Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities.
PowerLine neatly sums up the situation in a headline:
Labour Demotes MP over Making True But Politically Incorrect Statements about Rape
Rotherham is a town where unassimilated Muslim immigrants have raped or trafficked women. PowerLine reports that about 1,400 women, some just girls, have been affected. The men involved are mostly from Pakistan.
Sarah Champion, who represents Rotherham and was until recently a Shadow Secretary of State, committed the cardinal sin: she noticed what was happening and dared to write about it.
Champion wrote an article for the Sun, which stated that Britain "has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls." She immediately added:
There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?
For too long we have ignored the race of these abusers and, worse, tried to cover it up.
No more. These people are predators and the common denominator is their ethnic heritage.
We have to have grown-up conversations, however unpalatable, or in six months’ time we will be having this same scenario all over again.
The irony of all of this is that, by not dealing with the ethnicity of the abusers as a fact, political correctness has actually made the situation about race.
The perpetrators are criminals and we need to deal with them as such, not shy away from doing the right thing by fearing being called a racist.
I’m writing this as I don’t know what else to do to try and protect our children from grooming and sexual abuse by gangs.
I wish that Champion, who deserves an award for courage for speaking an unpleasant truth, had emphasized the culture of the men and not their race. It is not a racial matter but a cultural one. These men come from societies that have not embraced the Western values that include respect for women. But Champion does highlight problem that is uncomfortable to us liberal westerners.
My colleague Carrie Lukas wrote this after the Cologne attacks on women that the western media tried to ignore or play down:
It’s taken hundreds, even thousands, of years for our customs and laws to embrace a concept of human rights that holds that the strong should not take advantage of the weak, and that all human beings have dignity and warrant respect.
Not all societies have evolved to this point. Women remain second-class citizens in much of the world, and they are denied basic rights including freedom of movement and the freedom to decide when and whom to marry. Many are all too aware of their physical vulnerabilities and how men can make use of their superior strength. Not only do some societies lack laws against the abuse of women, even where such laws exist, the culture hasn’t accepted the idea that violence against women is out of bounds.
Western women ought to keep this in mind during the ongoing discussion of immigration policy. Many people are uncomfortable discussing the ways in which integrating immigrants from different cultures might impact Western society, and suggest that anyone who dares to raise the question is bigoted against those of different races or religions.
Yet far more is at stake than superficial identity politics.
Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn forced Champion to step down from her shadow government position. Labour MP Naz Shah was one of Champion's severest critics. Thereis some dark comedy here:
[Bruce] Bawer reports that shortly after Champion’s downfall, Shah read the following statement on a Twitter account bearing the name of leftist journalist Owen Jones:
Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity.
Jones hadn’t actually tweeted this. The tweet came from a parody account that mocked Jones.
Shah didn’t realize this, though — understandably, given the extent to which modern identity leftism has become indistinguishable from parody. Thus, Shah clicked “like” on the tweet and shared it on her own Twitter feed.
Has the Labour Party taken any action against Shah for publicly supporting the view that rape victims need to remain silent for the good of diversity? Apparently not, says Bawer.
Meanwhile, women are not safe in Rotherham.
But it's not nice to notice.