The Left's Moral Cowardice

What happens when a society is so steeped in the dogmas of liberal multiculturalism that they're no longer willing to hold others to the same standard of behavior as everyone else because to do so, they fear, is to impose one's values on others, or to blame the victim, or to impose a tyranny of a majority over a minority, or to tacitly claim one's own values to be superior to those of other cultures, et cetera?

What happens when the authorities in a community are so morally pusillanimous that they recoil from making any judgments, moral or legal, about the behavior of members of other races or ethnicities? Where does such cowardice lead?

John O'Sullivan's article in National Review Online shows us where progressive multiculturalism has led the British. O’Sullivan writes:

Britain has felt real shock and horror over the report that 1,400 young women in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham had been groomed, raped, prostituted, trafficked, and brutally abused in almost every possible way by a criminal gang for the last 16 years. In addition, the authorities — which in this case are the local government authority, the police, and the child-protection services — had been repeatedly informed of these crimes but had dismissed the reports as false or exaggerated and taken no action to investigate, halt, and punish them.

O'Sullivan goes on to describe some of the horrors these young girls endured. He also says, as hard as it might be to believe, that despite having almost full knowledge of what was going on the authorities did nothing to stop it. Why? The reason lies in part in these two facts:

The 1,400 girls were all white and of Christian background and English ethnicity while all but one of their exploiters were Muslims of Pakistani heritage. (The report describes the men delicately as “Asians,” but so far no Hindus, Sikhs, or Hong Kong Chinese are among their number.) As in other recent cases, the men targeted the girls in large part because they were white Christians, culturally speaking, and thus “worthless.” They actually told the girls that this was so.

There's another relevant fact:

But what explains the silence, the acquiescence, even the cooperation of the authorities? Their motives seem to derive from the rich stew of progressive absurdities that constitute official attitudes in modern Britain. The first is the fear of being suspected of racism. Again and again the police and the social workers shrank from intervening or responding to complaints because to do so would invite the accusation that they were “racist.”

Most people in the Muslim community were unaware of this criminal conspiracy (and, shocked and horrified like everyone else, they now condemn it). But when it was brought to the attention of “community leaders,” they too played the race card to suppress further investigation. To uncover such scandal would be not only racist, it would commit a sin against the ideal of multiculturalism that now actuates much official policy.

The Labour member of Parliament for Rotherham from 1994 to 2012, Dennis MacShane, admitted yesterday that as a Guardian-reading left liberal, he had shied away from looking into such topics as the oppression of women in “bits of the Muslim community.” He ought to have done something about it, but, well, you understand . . . “I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat, if I may put it like that.”

So much for the progressive's professed concern for the oppressed. You can bet that had the rapists been white and the victims young Pakistani girls the leftists would've been marching in the street proclaiming their outrage, but it takes no courage to condemn the crimes of the majority or to enforce the law against them. Leaders of the white community would not have called the politicians and police racist for arresting white rapists. For the left, the rape culture is just part of the wonderful multicultural mosaic, as long as the perpetrators are minorities and the victims are white.

O'Sullivan describes some of the crimes committed by the liberal authorities:

Some of the examples of this depraved official indifference are barely believable. In one case, a girl was found drunk in the company of her exploiters and was arrested while the men were let free. In another, a father found his daughter, tried to rescue her, complained to the police, and was himself arrested while the authorities took no action on his complaint.

It is not as if this series of crimes was hidden or unknown. No fewer than three official investigations (prior to this one) looked into these crimes. They reported the broad truth that we now know and called for further investigations and arrests. The police and child-protection services did nothing whatever about them. Indeed, they quietly pigeonholed the findings with dismissive comments. The local councilors looked the other way or, on some occasions, intervened to discourage investigations by the police. Only the general public was innocently ignorant.

This is where multiculturalism combined with liberal progressivism leads. Some people just get a pass if they're members of a minority because to enforce the law against them is to be seen as culturally chauvinist racists, or whatever.

There's much, much more to this story, and I encourage readers to go to the link to get the full effect of the left's bigotry against the class - white, middle class, and Christian - the majority of these girls came from.

Every single person in a position of authority who knew about these crimes and didn't do anything about them but instead let these girls be terrorized for years should be sent to jail. The prison yard is an environment rich in opportunities for multicultural experiences. Liberal progressives would like it there.