Comments on AOC’s tweet are worth a read…
Stephen Pollard at the JC, on Saturday’s Whitechapel march:
Given how close we are to the anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, which took place in the same area on 4 October 1936, you might think from my description that it was some sort of Blackshirt tribute gathering. And in some senses it was, not least because there is only one real difference between the 1936 marchers and those on the 2025 march: this time round the fascists are Islamofascists.
This masked mob didn’t only proclaim the supremacy of their ideology, as the Mosleyites did; they also took over the streets outside the East London mosque for prayers. And tellingly, this weekend’s mob weren’t only wearing black clothes; they had their faces covered with black masks. As some of the marchers put it: “No face, no case.”
The march – the so-called Tower Hamlets Unity Demo – was ostensibly an “anti-racist” protest, which is doubtless why the slogans chanted included “Takbir”, “Allahu akbar”, “Zionist scum, off our streets”, “We will honour all our martyrs”, “With our souls and our blood, we will redeem you, oh al-Aqsa” (translated), “The Zionist government off our streets”and – as always – “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. You get the gist. It is of course a golden rule of contemporary “anti-racist” protests that they must target Jews (I’m sorry, Zionists)….
The Tower Hamlets march was chilling as a more distilled version of the hate demonstrated on the national marches. Not just hate, but a programme and a cause: Islamist supremacy. The message was clear about Tower Hamlets: This is ours. We control the streets. We control the area. We control the people.
The Islamists, with their idiot hard-left supporters, have been emboldened by the complete lack of pushback from the authorities. For over two years now the marches in our cities, openly proclaiming Jew-hatred, have been allowed to proceed unhindered. Anyone objecting, like the Iranian man holding up the “Hamas are terrorists” sign, or the Jew showing his Star of David, has been arrested. Birmingham banned the Tel Aviv Maccabi fans largely due to Muslim pressure and threats.
They, the Islamists, could be forgiven now for believing that they’ve got the authorities running scared.
Hampstead this morning:
The indefatigable David Collier takes a look at the BBC’s latest exciting new venture, The Global Story.
The episode that took my eye was titled ‘Why Netanyahu gets what he wants from the US’.
As the title implies, the programme set out to suggest that successive US Presidents are little more than puppets of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The claim that Israel secretly controls America is a classic antisemitic trope rooted in centuries-old conspiracy theories about Jewish power and manipulation. It recycles the same false narrative once used in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion- that Jews operate behind the scenes to dominate governments, media, and finance. In modern form, it disguises traditional antisemitism in political language but serves the same purpose: to demonise Jews as a hidden, malevolent force….
Worth a read. It’s the by-now familiar story of the BBC allowing political activists to shape its coverage of Israel – in predictable ways.
Trevor Phillips on the grooming gangs inquiry, and why the particular features of the gangs – overwhelmingly ethnic Pakistani Muslim men abusing young white girls – mark them out as different to the usual cases of sexual abuse of children.
The government has latterly attempted to dilute the inquiry by expanding its scope, a route evidently favoured by Home Office ministers. But yesterday Dame Jasvinder Sanghera, who has been counselling several of the victims, came out strongly against what she described as a “watering down” of the investigation to minimise the racial element of the crime. “They were told that they were white trash, that they mean nothing and they could be targeted,” she told me. The women and girls were feeling “silenced” and “retraumatised” by the very government that had promised to deliver justice.
That’s the issue for these former victims who’ve resigned from the inquiry: the same people who ignored and patronised them at the time are now running the inquiry – and ignoring and patronising them all over again.
Those who see no harm in expanding the scope of the inquiry are simply wrong. There are five major reasons.
First, the scale of the abuse, both in the numbers of men involved and of children. This was and is a crime being carried on at an industrial scale. The true horror of what has happened to tens of thousands of children will probably never be known. As Sanghera points out, why would a woman who has escaped the torture and now has her own family ever reveal her terrible secret?
Second, much has been said about the ethnicity of the perpetrators, less about the fact most of the children are white; they are seen as unclean and “worthless” by the men’s communities, according to Sanghera. As the former home secretary Jack Straw, who for decades represented Blackburn, once said, they are regarded as “easy meat”.
Third, as I learnt 35 years ago in making my first award-winning documentary, which exposed three prolific paedophiles, the common feature of most child sexual exploitation is secrecy. Even before any abuse starts, the child is told that he or she must never tell anyone. Older children are menaced by violence; in younger children, by the threat that if anyone should find out they will be taken away from their parents — or, worse, that their parents will be jailed.
In the grooming gangs, the opposite is true. Girls especially are seduced, often by young men — “loverboys” — in flash cars who give them money, cigarettes and drugs. In our 2015 film we showed that the girls often boast about their “boyfriends”. In due course, they are handed over to older men and passed around like broken toys, frequently to dozens of men.
Crucially, none of this is truly secret, taking place in neighbourhoods where everyone knows that something is going on. It is hard to explain away the presence of a dozen men hanging around a shop or taxi firm with no apparent purpose, each one disappearing for a short while to take his turn at some wretched child.
Fourth, the vast majority of abused children know their abusers. They are relatives, teachers, religious and community leaders, even friends of their parents. By contrast, the grooming gangs’ victims do not know their rapists and may never see them more than once. Many are taken to other towns to be raped by dozens of strangers.And finally, the grooming gangs are the only group of abusers who can and do count on political protection from local authorities, from social workers, from police, often based on ethnic affinity.
This, of course, is the real reason that no one in politics wants to know. The few victims who speak out are heroines. But the villains they can identify are only part of the awful story. The worst moral stench is attached to those who know the truth and turn a blind eye. They should stink to high heaven. But identifying and exposing them will be a painstaking, detailed, filthy task that needs to be pursued without distraction or complication.
That is why the inquiry must not be expanded in scope. We will never catch those who stood by and let it happen with some bureaucratic net, however skilfully spread. We need the cold, hard steel of an investigative rapier to skewer them.
Also, we should never forget the sheer levels of violence and hatred displayed by some of these groomers, See here, for instance.
Julie Bindel wrote about this last week. Now the Times has picked up the story, with the emphasis on Sadiq Khan’s efforts to look the other way.
It is almost 15 years since Andrew Norfolk of The Times exposed the grooming of girls with drugs and alcohol for extreme and violent sex in northern towns — but Sir Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has been accused of a cover-up for publicly denying there were grooming gangs in the capital.
Asked in January how many rape gangs London had, Khan asked seven times for his inquisitor, Susan Hall, the Conservative leader in the London Assembly, to “clarify” what she meant.
The mayor said: “The situation in London in relation to young people being groomed is different to other parts of the country. What we have in London is young people being groomed — to use your word, not mine — to be used in county lines.”
He’s deflecting. Yes, county lines as well, but grooming for sex too.
Campaigners who helped to expose grooming gangs say the situation in London mirrors the “cover-up” by officialdom they faced for years in towns and cities in the north of England.
Maggie Oliver, the Manchester police officer turned Rochdale whistleblower, has said London is the “last bastion” of the rape gangs cover-up…
Chris Wild, an author and campaigner, said: “It’s not as bad as it is in Rotherham, it’s worse. We’ve got a problem in every area of London.”
During the pandemic Wild managed six children’s care homes across north London in Enfield, Tottenham and Haringey. “They were losing 50 to 75 per cent of their children every single week to prostitution,” he said.
“One [home] had six kids, and lost five to prostitution every single week. They were coming back dishevelled, having had drugs, [been] sold off to sex rings and raped by paedophiles. The police won’t get back to you for five or six days then they say, ‘Oh, she won’t give a statement’. If these girls were known to them, they’d say all sorts, ‘She’s the instigator’, ‘She’s promiscuous’.”
Wild urged Khan to “acknowledge that [the problem] exists first”, adding: “Someone in his position could put an end to it tomorrow, but they just don’t want to upset people.”
The same old story. Khan, of course, doesn’t want to upset his Muslim supporters.
More on that Whitechapel march yesterday.
It was meant to be a response to the planned UKIP march in the East End, which the Met banned anyway. Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman ludicrously compared this turn out of masked thugs to Cable Street. The thing is, Cable Street was against the Jew-hating rabble-rousers, whereas these marchers here are the Jew-hating rabble-rousers. They were chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Zionist scum off our streets’. Cable Street this was not.
Brendan O’Neill in the Spectator:
Isn’t it interesting what gets called ‘bigotry’ and what does not? Apparently Ukippers hollering about ‘Islamist invaders’ is racism, but Islamist gangs threatening to hound ‘Zionists’ off ‘our streets’ is not. In fact that’s anti-racism. What a moral mess we are in.
That the left fumes about UKIP but is more than happy to march with Zionist-hating, martyr-praising Islamists is so revealing. It reveals they could not give one damn about Britain’s Jews. They have sacrificed the safety and dignity of British Jewry at the altar of sectarianism, in order that they might preserve the unholy alliance they have made with radical Muslims who share their obsessive anti-Westernism.
When will the left learn what a colossal folly it is to link arms with religious hotheads who hate homosexuals, who think women should be draped in black, and who want to drive Jews — oh I’m sorry, ‘Zionists’ — out of society? There’s a clip doing the rounds showing a placard-waving leftie saying to one of the masked Muslims, ‘We’re on the same side, bruv’. There comes a stark reply: ‘No we’re not.’ The Islamo-left needs to wake up. The road to hell is paved with their suicidal idiocy.
A good point from the Elder of Zyon:
To me, the clearest proof of anti-Israel bias in Western media doesn’t come from what they report, but from what they choose not to report. Every major media outlet has Arabic speakers who read Al Ahram and Al Masry Al Youm daily, but I have not seen any articles about mainstream Arabic media antisemitism in many years, even though it is published literally every day in respected news outlets. It is a crime of omission, a deliberate silencing of the reality of the Middle East – that the hate of Israel isn’t based on Israeli actions but on age-old hatred of Jews that is systematic through their media, their schools and their politicians proudly spouting Jew hate in their parliaments.
MEMRI and MEMRI TV go some way to filling the gap, but yes, the idea of the BBC, say, doing a Panorama-style documentary on the blatant antisemitism in Arab media is laughable. It would be easy enough to do, god knows, but they wouldn’t touch it. Too busy looking for ways to demonise Israel.
Fiyaz Mughal in the Telegraph
Over half a decade of working with the Home Office on countering extremism, I saw it for myself, time and time again: a civil service culture that instinctively resists scrutiny of anything involving religion or ethnicity.
The moment you even suggest that the ethnicity or faith of perpetrators might be one factor among many worth examining, certain civil servants recoil.
They tell you that looking into it might “inflame community tensions”, or “increase hate crimes against Muslims” or “cause policing issues”.
These arguments become a convenient way to close down honest discussion. That’s the exact approach that now appears to be dominating the Government’s inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, and I worry it means that the state will never truly tackle the underlying issues.
It’s the same group-think that drove the response to the grooming gangs scandal: the same group think that’s now blocking any inquiry that dares to mention ethnicity or faith.
Over the years, a small circle of advisers from within Muslim communities have come to dominate this space. Many are closely aligned with the Labour Party, and they sing the same tune: that Islamophobia is the overriding issue facing Muslims, that Islamism should not be discussed, and that grooming has nothing whatsoever to do with culture or faith. I have worked for 25 years fighting anti-Muslim hatred and measuring its rise – I know the reality of that threat, but I also know that this narrow narrative has suffocated all other perspectives.
Dissenters like me, people who have challenged both the far-Right and Islamist extremism, are no longer invited in. Those who are, remain locked in a self-reinforcing cycle, telling ministers exactly what they expect to hear. And so the same mistakes are repeated, again and again.
If this inquiry is to mean anything, it must shine a light not only on the perpetrators, but on the machinery of resistance that has allowed these failures to persist for so long. Until we confront the ideological filters within the civil service itself, we will never get to the truth which the British public deserve.
Mick Hartley 