Sex Abuse in Rotherham and Why We British Women of All Faiths Must Make a Stand against the Bigots Who Betray Islam

Daily Mail
February 7, 2015

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2943407/SARAH-VINE-Sex-abuse-Rotherham-British-women-faiths-make-stand-against-bigots-betray-Islam.html

Feminism, it is now often argued, is an idea that has had its day. In Britain, where women are equal in the eyes of the law, and where girls outperform boys in education, emancipation no longer feels like the fight of our lives.

But this week I realised that we need feminism perhaps more than ever before. We need to empower women, listen to young girls — and challenge the appalling behaviour of certain men whose belief systems would seem to legitimise the idea that women are forever second-class citizens.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the shocking case of the sexual exploitation of an estimated 1,400 girls and young women by overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistani men in Rotherham.

An inquiry revealed some 1,400 minors were sexually abused in Rotherham over a 16-year period and blamed local authorities for failing to act

The awful truth is that because of our generous and open acceptance of other cultures, we all but colluded in 16 years' worth (from 1997 to 2013) of abuse towards vulnerable young girls in Rotherham

Because if their behaviour tells us anything about the culture of certain Muslim men, it tells us how they value females. Which is to say, not very highly. Or not, at least, by the standards of modern Britain.

I am not saying, let me stress, that every Muslim man is a misogynist. Indeed there are countless numbers who are hard-working exemplary citizens, model husbands and fathers, who love their wives and daughters as more than equals.

But I am sorry to say it is an undeniable fact that hardline exponents of the religion are becoming more common in this country, and that women are suffering as a result.

This is a truth that is hard to bear, especially for someone like myself. I have always believed that people have a right to follow their religion, just as they have a right to vote for their preferred political party.

I might not agree with their beliefs, but I would never rush to judgment. However strange or alien some practices might seem on the surface, I told myself, there were generally reasons for them — ones that a tolerant society can accept.

I realise now that such thinking, while well-meaning, can be naive and even dangerous.

Because it would seem it was thanks in part to people like me, naively tolerant and carefully respectful of certain types of cultural behaviour, that so many — politicians, the media, the police and social services — were reluctant to see the truth in the scandal of the Rotherham gangs grooming and sexually exploiting of young girls.

With hindsight, it seems hard to believe that the authorities could have missed what was going on beneath their very noses. But they did. And they did so because they didn't want to believe the worst of a culture that, arguably, represents one of the oldest civilised influences on the planet.

Not only is this a sad and painful fact to admit, it makes us feel like fools. And this is a deception that goes to the heart of how we see ourselves as a nation.

The awful truth is that because of our generous and open acceptance of other cultures, we all but colluded in 16 years' worth (from 1997 to 2013) of abuse towards vulnerable young girls in Rotherham.

Abuse that were it not for the dogged persistence of a free Press — including this paper's own Sue Reid, who was the first to report the sexual abuse and was accused of racism for doing so — might never have been uncovered.

In Rotherham, non-Muslim girls were explicitly targeted and groomed to be used and abused by men who saw them as little more than objects of Western decadence to be used for their own warped pleasures

In Rotherham, ordinary British schoolgirls were duped into a life of degradation and prostitution

I'm afraid that fundamentalist Muslims can be openly and clearly anti-woman.

The culture these hardliners propagate segregates and silences its females, promotes a relentlessly patriarchal view of the world, forces its daughters into arranged marriages, and punishes women in the most brutal of ways for even daring to dream of the kind of freedoms that most British women, quite rightly, take for granted.

Even now, it feels deeply wrong to be writing these words. And I apologise from the heart to the many clever, funny, generous and wonderful Muslim men who make a huge and valued contribution to our country. But for their sakes, and ours, we need to be honest now: Islam is a feminist issue.

Would that it weren't. Would that all of Islam was still the enlightened, questing religion of the people in the 14th centure who built the magnificent Alhambra Palace in Granada in Spain, where scientists, medical experts and philosophers gathered for debate.

It was Muslim intellectuals who filled the medieval courts of Europe, who resurrected the ancient texts outlawed by the Christian Church, who helped lift Europe out of the Dark Ages and into the great flowering of the Renaissance and civilised values in subsequent centuries.

But that enlightened Islam, it would seem, is increasingly threatened by a creed that, far from drawing on the intelligence and wisdom of those great thinkers from the past to adapt to and shape the modern world, now appears to be returning to darkness through a twisted misinterpretation of its own principles.

In so many quarters today, throughout the world, Islam is a religion that preaches isolation from other faiths, and one that seems — to liberal Western sensibilities at least — to demand intolerable sacrifice from its followers.

More worrying, the moderate elements of this religion are being hijacked by the swivel-eyed within its ranks — not least those who harbour distinctly women-hating tendencies.

Just this week, the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank, published an English translation of a shocking document entitled Women In The Islamic State: Manifesto And Case Study.

Given that Islamic State already occupies an area of Syria and Iraq larger than the whole of the UK, and given that it is their stated aim to bring Sharia — or Islamic — law to our shores, it is a document all women should familiarise themselves with. Because this is what awaits us if they get their way.

According to this manifesto, girls can marry from the age of nine, and should have husbands by the age of 16 or 17. They must not be corrupted by going out to work, and any studies they engage in must focus on domestic activities.

Emancipation is a sin; equality is unnatural. Indeed, everything that is wrong with Western civilisation is because women neglect their proper place in the world — which is to exist as sedentary objects in the service of men.

If a woman resists or strays from this path, she becomes fair game. She may be punished with lashes, or even put to death, on the mere say-so of men, for dishonouring her family.

The men in the Rotherham case were not wild-eyed jihadists. While they may have been in a minority, they were ordinary Muslims, fathers, husbands, businessmen

The overwhelming majority of Muslims in Britain will find this ideology and behaviour repellent. But it is undeniable that those countries and organisations that believe in imposing the rule of Islam as a political system rather than a private faith, do, on a daily basis, oppress women.

Look at Saudi Arabia, which only last week proposed a men-only Olympics. Or Nigeria, where Boko Haram kidnaps schoolgirls and punishes them for daring to seek an education by selling them as sex slaves to jihadists.

Or Iraq, where women of the Yazidi tribe have been raped into submission by Islamic State fighters. And Somalia, where little girls have their genitals mutilated in the most barbaric way so that Muslim men can be assured of their purity on their wedding night.

And now, too, in Rotherham, where non-Muslim girls were explicitly targeted and groomed to be used and abused by men who, because of what they believe their religion allows, saw them as little more than objects of Western decadence to be used for their own warped pleasures.

Rotherham, where one girl was raped with a broken bottle, and others forced to kiss the feet of their abusers. Rotherham, where ordinary British schoolgirls were duped into a life of degradation and prostitution.

One of the reason for this was 'misplaced political correctness' — the phrase used by Louise Casey, the woman appointed to investigate the abuse.

Through fear of judging others from a different culture and being deemed racist or Islamophobic, councillors, police and social workers refused to acknowledge the evidence of appalling abuse that was being practised on an almost industrial scale — even when it was presented to them in the starkest of ways.

To understand what is going on in communities like Rotherham, we have to listen closely to the voices of those who, for many years, have been clamouring to be heard above the strident tones of the politically correct. Women such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born politician and activist and, in my view, one of the greatest feminists of my generation.

In the preface to her brilliant yet terrifying 2004 book, The Caged Virgin: A Muslim Woman's Cry For Reason, she explains the basic rules that she was taught as a child in Somalia.

'We Muslims are chosen by God,' she writes. 'They, the others, the kaffirs, the unbelievers, are antisocial, impure, barbaric, not circumcised, immoral, unscrupulous, and above all obscene … their girls and women are whores.'

This idea, of non-Muslim women being whores, is commonplace in jihadist dogma. But the men in the Rotherham case were not wild-eyed jihadists. While they may have been in a minority, they were ordinary Muslims, fathers, husbands, businessmen.

Which is why this case is so significant. It shows the flagrant disregard that a minority in these communities — often housed and educated at the expense, at least in part, of female British taxpayers such as myself — have for our rights as women.

There is another problem, too. Feminism is dominated by the Left. In fact, the Left believes it has moral ownership of the entire concept of feminism, largely because usually the struggle has been against the traditional conservative male Establishment, which in the past invariably veered to the Right of the political spectrum.

Yet it was the Left's espousal of multicultralism and their insistence that anyone who dares criticise behaviour within ethnic or cultural minorities is a racist that led to this 'misplaced political correctness'. And I'm not just talking about acute cases such as Rotherham, but chronic cultural ills such as forced marriage.

Labour has some real questions to answer here about its relationship with Muslim voters, with whom it is by far the most popular party.

The widespread fear of being branded Islamophobic among law-makers and politicians — fuelled by people like the Respect party MP for Bradford West, George Galloway, with his mantra that Islam is the religion of the oppressed — has meant that, as a nation, we have failed to have a conversation that is long overdue.

In any other circumstances, such culturally specific behaviour would have been not only noted, but widely highlighted.

More than ever, there is a need to empower those in the Muslim community who believe in liberalism and equality. People like Sara Khan, director of Inspire, which campaigns for British Muslim women, and Maajid Nawaz, the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn and chairman of Quilliam. People who really understand the situation and who want to give a voice to the vast majority of moderate Muslims.

Meanwhile, we must challenge people like Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood scholar who advocates wife beating and who numbers among his misguided supporters the former London mayor, Ken Livingstone.

Above all, though, as the beneficiaries of decades of feminism, we need to stand up not only for the victims in Rotherham, but for women who find themselves subdued by the forces of darkness and bigotry, who are too scared to speak out and who don't, like me, have the privilege of belonging to a culture that values and respects women as equals.