Where big government liberalism has come crashing to the ground

Remember the international outrage when Boko Haram abducted hundreds of girls into slavery? Mike McNally writes:

In the last few days we’ve learned that something of only a slightly lesser order of magnitude happened not in Africa but in Rotherham, a former steel and mill town in the north of England. The abuse continued for 16 years, and the perpetrators were not some elusive and heavily armed terrorist group who threatened to kill their victims at the first sign of a rescue attempt, but ordinary members of the local Muslim community.

Other than the starkly different locations and the fact that Boko Haram is a recognized terrorist group, the notable difference between the two episodes is that the Nigerian schoolgirls were black, and the Rotherham abuse victims were white.

The horrific details of the Rotherham “grooming” scandal were laid out in a report published by Professor Alexis Jay, a former senior social worker. Professor Jay wrote: “It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated.”

Rotherham is the most extensive case to emerge, but it’s thought the problem is even more widespread, with perhaps thousands more girls being abused by predominantly Muslim men of Pakistani extraction across Britain.

In every case the same explanation for official inaction is offered: no one wanted to look too closely into complaints against “Asian” men because they were afraid of being accused of racism, and because they were concerned about the effect of arrests and prosecutions on “community cohesion.” The fact that most media reports still describe the offenders as “Asian” rather than as Pakistani Muslims is itself a disgraceful evasion, and one which the north of England’s Chinese, Hindu and Sikh communities no doubt resent.

The scandals can also be blamed in part on the modern left’s contempt for the white working classes. Most of the time leftists do a good job of concealing it, affecting deep compassion for the “underclass” when it’s useful for demonizing conservative opponents and winning votes. Every now and then, however, the mask slips, as in 2010 when then Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown described a voter in Rochdale, scene of the 2012 abuse scandal, as a “bigoted woman” after she expressed concerns over immigration. And in Rotherham it isn’t just a case of the mask slipping; the entire facade of big state liberalism has come crashing to the ground.

The “grooming” scandals are a direct and inevitable consequence of the left’s failed experiment with multiculturalism and mass immigration, and its obsession with political correctness and “diversity.” I make no apologies for trotting out this quote again, but a former advisor to Tony Blair, whose New Labour government imposed multiculturalism and political correctness on Britain with religious zeal starting in 1997, has admitted that Labour championed mass immigration, including from Pakistan, in order to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity.”

With Islamic State terrorists on the march in Syria and Iraq, we in the West are again being told that the battle against Islamic extremism will be a “multi-generational” one. That’s true, but the West also needs to embark on another campaign that will be just as long and difficult — against the failed and dangerous forces of modern liberalism that force us to fight Islamist evil, whether in Tikrit or Rotherham, with one hand tied behind our backs, if we’re permitted to fight it at all.

It’s too much to expect that liberalism will be chastised by its latest setback, but at the very least the progressive ideas that created the conditions for the Rotherham scandal should be thoroughly discredited. More pressingly, every one of the hundreds of leftist ideologues and statist functionaries responsible for Rotherham should be named and shamed, and their careers and reputations ruined as thoroughly as the young lives of the girls they failed.

Read more here.