The West needs to be honest about Britain’s rape gangs

The rape gang scandal that has afflicted Britain compels us to review the assumptions that underlie multiculturalism. It’s time for us in the free world to look at human beings and their various cultures as they truly are, and not as the bien pensants wish and then so dangerously insist they must be.

A society where women can bring their talents to the table as independent, safe and respected individuals requires certain stringent psychological and social preconditions: a widely shared view of the value of women as equal, intrinsically, to men; a police and justice system with genuine integrity; as well as material and more specifically hygienic standards associated only with industrialized societies. It also requires effective birth control, and the mores that allow or even encourage its use. These conditions are prohibitively difficult to meet. Furthermore, their existence is taken for granted at our extreme peril.

None of these preconditions apply in oppressive authoritarian societies, where intercourse of any sort between men and women is severely restricted and punished, and all forms of sexual psychopathology flourish. It is nonetheless from precisely such societies that much of the mass immigration that characterizes many Western countries occurs, in consequence of the idiot presumption that these mobile and often desperate people will bring with them none of the terrible presumptions and customs they are hypothetically fleeing.

Consider, in that regard, the countries that currently make up the world. A mere twenty-four of the 167 countries examined by the Economist’s Democracy Index in 2023 were classified as “full democracies,” characterized by respect for and existence of freedom, human rights, limited government, separation of church and state and rule of law. That’s one in seven, or 14 percent.

Twenty-four genuine, full democracies. What of the remaining 145, or 86 percent of the world’s countries? Fifty-nine of them are fully authoritarian, replete with all the horrors such systems entail, or failed states. The vast majority of Muslim countries are fully and unabashedly authoritarian. None of the possible reasons look good for those who proclaim that the rewards of multiculturalism are untrammeled and certain. First, in the Islamic world, divine law (Sharia) rules, and Sharia principles don’t mesh easily with the democratic idea of man-made laws, subject to change and improvement by consensual and voluntary agreement. For Islamist supremacists, God’s law (by their interpretation, of course) is regarded as immutable and superordinate to any human legislation.

The idea that Islam should govern all aspects of life, from personal behavior to state laws, also directly conflicts with the democratic principle of pluralism and freedom to choose. Remember, as well, in keeping with all this, that the punishment for rejecting such claims (the price paid for “apostasy”) is, not infrequently, death.

There is no manner in which any of this self-evidently aligns with the western principles of freedom of thought, religion and expression.

The difference between the societies under consideration, bad as it is in general, is clearly worse for women. Traditional Islamic jurisprudence assigns very different rights and roles to men and women. A typical woman in an authoritarian Muslim country generally requires a male guardian’s permission to marry, travel or work. Their inheritance share is lesser — typically, half. Men can divorce, unilaterally, with ease, while women cannot. Polygamy is legally allowed in many of the same countries, but polyandry in none.

Women’s political participation is severely restricted, dress codes are frequently or even typically severe (as are punishments for transgression), laws against domestic violence are minimal, or absent, and in some cases marital rape is not recognized or criminalized. Access to education and employment is limited or absent, and women have limited control over their reproductive choices. The judicial systems also operate in ways severely biased against women, with their testimonies often valued at less than men’s, and their access to justice impeded.

If those who inhabit a country cannot treat their own mothers, wives and daughters equally then their track record for tolerating others — including anyone who does not share their attitudes, religious and otherwise — is unlikely to be good. The rape gangs point to this terrible fact. The testimony from the trials indicates a common and obvious disregard, to put it mildly, for the women concerned.

So what might be the way forward? There are glimmerings of genuine hope, not least within the Islamic world itself.

The Muslim countries heading the Abraham Accords — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco — may well be heading a true move to a peaceful and cooperative future. Had the shortsighted and politically expedient Biden administration been willing to grant Donald Trump the least bit of credit for this remarkable development, and continued the process, Saudi Arabia would have also been a signatory. That could still happen, given the administrative change in the US.

The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud, has stated his opposition to the Islamist extremists in a very blunt manner. He stated that he would “destroy them today,” that he wants to “co-exist with the world.” The UAE’s Sheik Abdullah bin Zayed has been even more provocative and forthright, stating that, “there will come a day that we will see far more radical extremists and terrorists coming out of Europe because of lack of decision-making, trying to be politically correct, or assuming that they know the Middle East and Islam far better than we do — an attitude of pure ignorance.”

This means there are leaders within the Islamic world, not without influence, seeking to diversify and modernize their respective states, who are already more willing than their Western counterparts both to admit to the existence of the psychopathic manipulators cloaking themselves in the guise of pure religious Islamic fundamentalism, and to exercise severe control over their machinations. Equally moderate attitudes could be fostered among the Muslim immigrants to the West.

That would mean, however, that Western leaders would have to bite the bullet (as their moderate Islamic counterparts already have) and help separate the wheat from the chaff within the Muslim immigrant communities themselves. This will be of great and true benefit not only to the moderates within those enclaves, but to those Westerners called upon to share cultural, economic and social space with them as well as to the moderate Islamic world internationally, whose leaders are endeavoring to do the same thing.

This would mean justly and courageously identifying, pursuing and incarcerating or deporting the bad actors. This would mean applying the law of the land to the presumably oppressed and victimized newcomers, precisely as it is applied to citizens of longer standing. This would mean firmly and unapologetically noting where Western traditions, legal and otherwise, clash with the axioms of authoritarian intolerance. This would mean withstanding the accusations of “Islamophobia,” “far-right affiliation” and the associated risk of reputation destruction, demolition of career and general cancellation that the leftist revolutionaries and the cowards and appeasers of the right are so happily willing to inflict.

This would also mean, finally, publicly admitting to the mass rape of thousands of British girls, the investigation of the causes of such atrocious behavior, and the meting out of severe and certain punishment not only to the perpetrators, who are truly beyond the pale and must be treated as such, but to the enablers and allies who turned a blind eye.

This is a terrible pathway forward, made palatable, perhaps, only by the even more intolerable fact of the alternative: capitulation to the worst of men, cloaking themselves in the guise of the divine, swearing enmity to the West and to free women, posing true danger to the poor and marginalized, and threatening not only the free societies of the world but those who are striving toward freedom within the many countries who remain unsustainably repressive and authoritarian.

When conscience calls upon us to speak, silence is a sin. God swore to Abraham that he would spare the evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah if only ten good men could be found. If the eternally threatened metropolis is to survive, therefore, each of us is called upon to be one of those ten. It has been said that the truth will set us free, although there is no accompanying promise that such freedom will come without cost. But the hell that the lie engenders — and this includes the lies of the complicit and silent — is more intolerable and lasting than whatever trials emerge in consequence of honest discussion, negotiation and confrontation.

We cannot make peace by pretending that it is here, already, when it is clearly not — particularly not when evil is obviously afoot. If we are going to continue the multicultural experiment — which is in part an experiment in how to make peace in the broader, international world — we will have to accept responsibility for dealing with the evil of diversity, as well as the good. This means standing up for what is right, even when the perpetrators of malevolence and crime are members of communities deemed oppressed.

We need to drop our naïve belief in the untrammeled goodness of diversity and multiculturalism. We need to respond maturely and with discernment to the true complexities of religious, racial and ethnic difference, which offer promise and danger in at least equal measure. We need to admit to the scale of the mass sadistic rape catastrophe and thoroughly examine its causes. We need to document the reality of the complicit behavior of those deemed protectors of the innocent, and to account for their appalling failure. We need a frank and unflinching discussion nationally as well as internationally about how to identify the criminals shrouding themselves in the guise of Islam, separate them from those who want harmony and peace, and stop them dead in their tracks.

We need, finally and above all, to stop raising our moral stature falsely by lying and prevaricating, while sacrificing others to our pretension.

The alternative is grim indeed. Not only for the traditional inhabitants of the UK and the West more generally, but for all those within the Muslim world who could and would move toward the enlightened freedom that makes the West the destination of choice for the truly downtrodden and dispossessed of the world.