The Oxford sex gang in court, from L to R:
Zeeshan Ahmed, Akhtar Dogar, Anjum Dogar, Kamar Jamil, Bassam Karrar,
Mohammed Karrar, Assad Hussain
By
Peter Hitchens
Commentators take what they want to
from scandals. Already this is happening to the debate about the mass
abuse of young girls in Oxford.
The
Left are blaming the law for being too weak on rape. The Right are
blaming political correctness. Each has a point. But it goes deeper than
that and both sides should admit it.
I
have lived in Oxford (with some gaps) for almost 50 years. It is, in
many ways, a paradise which has escaped much of the evil and decay which
beset this country.
I
suspect I may, all unknowing, have gone past the scenes of some of those
crimes while they were actually taking place. There’s a particular
meadow with a pretty name and a shady reputation that I often ride past
on my bicycle, which was the scene of some disgusting crimes.
I have probably rubbed shoulders in the streets, at the station and at the market with both culprits and victims.
It
is an education in how little we actually know about what is going on
around us. I am a pessimist and tend to assume the worst, but never
imagined this.
Yet
though it disgusts me, it does not much surprise me. Like everyone who
has any kind of public position, I know that an accusation of racism –
even an entirely false one – could ruin my life. I know it as I write
these words.
If Thames
Valley Police or Oxfordshire County Council and its social workers deny
that their wretched responses to these crimes were influenced by the
same fear, then I simply do not believe them. It would be good if some
of the newspapers of the Left would acknowledge this.
In return, I’ll agree with them that the law is a feeble protection for young girls exploited by older men.
Seven members of a paedophile ring were found guilty at the Old Bailey of a catalogue of child sex abuse charges
Mind you, it is bound to be. In a
free country, the law needs hard evidence to prosecute and convict, and
such evidence is not always easy to get in such matters.
So should we
relax the rules? How many wrongful convictions and wrecked innocent
lives are we prepared to permit in the battle to stop this sort of
thing? Plenty, provided of course that it does not affect us personally.
Then
there’s the issue that dare not speak its name. When we set the Oxford
case beside other recent events in Rochdale, we find that in both crimes
the men were Muslims (often mosque-going ones).
How important is it that the
convicted rapists and perverts in most cases regarded their victims as
barely-human degenerates, ‘kufr’, unbelievers who didn’t count? It
matters. But non-Muslims should not be smug about it.
It
reminds me of the assertion by Anthony Blair at the start of his Iraq
War in 2003 that our Islamic enemies ‘hate our way of life’. Because, as
he said it, I thought: ‘Yes, and I too hate our way of life.’ I loathe
the outcome of the sexual revolution, the Great Innocence Robbery that
has replaced the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure.
What
an opportunity it has given to the evil and the selfish. You don’t have
to be Muslim to take advantage of the rape of innocence, believe me.
The
thing that haunts me most about the Oxford case is that one of the six
victims was not ‘in care’, at least to begin with. I have come to expect
that children ‘in care’ are left almost completely unprotected from our
modern hell of loveless sex, binge-drinking and casual drug-taking. The
very word ‘care’ sounds to me like a yellow, sarcastic sneer.
But
one of these girls had a home and parents who thought they were in
charge. Those parents begged the police to act. They took her befouled
clothes to them and were turned away. Can you imagine their despair? The
authorities, whom they had relied on, and who are supposed to stand
between us and evil, were not interested.
In
one form or another, this despair comes to thousands of parents in this
country every year. They find out that a ‘permissive society’ means
just that. Their authority over their own children was long ago
abolished, and they can get into severe trouble for trying to exercise
it.
The law, the
schools, the town and county halls are all in on the same arrangement.
‘The kids are all right.’ We are all free now. Restraint is
‘repression’. There is no moral centre, nor any real law, and ‘equality
and diversity’ stand high above morality. Sometimes a single, diligent
individual fights against it and manages to secure a prosecution.
Mostly, this doesn’t happen.
And
so, on a filthy bed in a squalid house somewhere near you, these crimes
and others like them still go on, and in most cases nothing will ever
be done about it.
Moral
panic? I long ago gave that up. Nobody listened. Now I just hope that
these hellish things won’t come too near me, though they are already
nearer than I thought they were.
No comments:
Post a Comment