Thirty men have been charged with raping and trafficking five girls in West Yorkshire.
The allegations against the defendants relate to non-recent sexual offences dating back to between 2005 and 2012. They relate to five women who say they were abused as children in the Huddersfield area between the ages of 12 and 18.
One woman, Fehreen Rafiq, 38, from Huddersfield, is charged with two counts of facilitating the commission of a child sex offence.
The 31 accused will appear at Kirklees magistrates court on 5-6 September 2018. They are:
Banaras Hussain, 37, of Shipley, charged with one count of rape of a female over 16.
Banaris Hussain, 35, of Huddersfield, charged with one count of rape of a girl aged 13-15.
Mohammed Suhail Arif, 30, of Huddersfield, charged with rape of a girl aged 13-15.
Iftikar Ali, 37, of Huddersfield, charged with attempted rape of a girl aged 13-15 and three counts of rape of a girl aged 13-15.
Mohammed Sajjad, 31, of Huddersfield, charged with four counts of rape of a female aged 13-15, one rape of a girl under 13 and facilitating the commission of a child sex offence.
Fehreen Rafiq, 38, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of facilitating the commission of a child sex offence.
Umar Zaman, 30, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of rape of a female aged 13-15.
Basharat Hussain, 31, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of rape of a female aged 13-15.
Amin Ali Choli, 36, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of rape of a female over 16 years old.
Shaqeel Hussain, 35, of Dewsbury, charged with rape of a female aged 13-15 and two counts of trafficking.
Mubasher Hussain, 35, of Huddersfield, charged with rape of a female aged 13-15 and sexual assault.
Abdul Majid, 34, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of rape of a female aged 13-15.
Mohammed Dogar, 35, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of facilitating the commission of a child sex offence.
Usman Ali, 32, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of rape of a female aged 13-15.
Mohammed Waqas Anwar, 29, of Huddersfield, charged with five counts of rape of a female aged 13-15.
Gul Riaz, 42, of Huddersfield, charged with rape of a female aged 13-15.
Mohammed Akram, 41, of Huddersfield, charged with two counts of trafficking with a view to sexual exploitation of a female and rape of a female aged 14-15.
Manzoor Akhtar, 29, of Huddersfield, charged with trafficking and three counts of rape of a female aged 13-15.
Samuel Fikru, 30, of Camden, charged with two counts of rape of a female aged 13-15.
Recall that Tommy Robinson was imprisoned for reporting on another trial of another Pakistani sex-trafficking gang in England. When feminists talk about “rape culture,” “misogyny” and “violence against women,” it is always in the context of demonizing “privileged” white males. Therefore, when crimes against women are committed by those who do not fit this template — e.g., Muslim immigrants — feminists have nothing to say, except perhaps to lament the “backlash” of “Islamophobia.”
What this suggests is that feminists aren’t actually interested in improving the lives of women, in general. Rather, what feminists seek is to increase their own political power, a goal they expect to obtain as members of a broader coalition of the Left. Because the Left — in England, as in America — is organized on the basis of identity politics, appealing to the grievances of minorities, this requires feminists to avoid any criticism of their left-wing coalition partners.
Feminists expect us to believe that it is only “privileged” white men who are responsible for the oppression of women, just as white men are also to blame for the oppression of racial minorities and homosexuals. This “intersectional” analysis, based on the scapegoating of white males, is convenient for the political Left, providing a preemptive excuse to ignore any wrongdoing committed by anyone (including white men) who supports their destructive left-wing agenda. All of this is derived from a rigid ideology of “social justice” in which human beings exist only as members of collective groups (not individuals, responsible for their own lives) in a world defined by systemic oppression. This theoretical conception becomes a sort of cult religion, and any evidence that does not support this worldview is ignored or explained away as irrelevant by the cult priesthood (politicians, academics, journalists, etc.) who bombard their disciples with atrocity tales of wrongdoing by the demonized scapegoats — “privileged” white males who are, to the Cult of Social Justice, what Satan is to Christian theology.
Certainly, I do not mean to demonize Pakistani Muslims the way that feminists demonize white heterosexual males. I do not assert that all Pakistani Muslim immigrants are complicit in the crimes committed by Hussain, et al., whereas feminists habitually assert that “rape culture” is a universal phenomenon for which all men are to blame.
What I mean to illustrate, by calling attention to such cases as this, is a very simple fact — feminist ideology is wrong.
The world does not work the way feminists say it does. Their mindless adherence to a theory of “social justice” — collective privilege, collective victimhood, systemic oppression, etc. — leads feminists to propagate falsehoods, with results that are harmful to women.
Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.”
— Romans 1:18-19 (KJV)
The title of a famous work by the Presbyterian John Knox came to mind when Eternity Matters called attention to a female pastor who appears to be endorsing fornication, rejecting as “binary thinking” any notion that such a thing as sin exists. Spurred to research, I discovered that the Rev. Stacey Midge is pastor of Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati. This is part of the liberal PCUSA denomination, which is not so much a church as it is a homosexual socialist advocacy group.
The Presbyterian Church was once one of the largest denominations in America, but in the 20th century, followed the “mainline Protestant” trend, abandoning scripture in favor of liberalism: “In 1973, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) separated from the Presbyterian Church in the United States in ‘opposition to the long-developing theological liberalism which denied the deity of Jesus Christ and the inerrancy and authority of Scripture.’” Having continued down its path of apostasy, the PCUSA ordains female clergy and endorses — nay, it celebrates and advocates — abortion and homosexuality. Predictably, their membership losses have been catastrophic:
In 2016, the PCUSA declined by 89,893 active members. Since 2005 the denomination has reported losing nearly two out of five active members, declining from 2,313,662 active members in 2005 to 1,415,053 in 2017.
In just 12 years, PCUSA lost 898,609 members, a decrease of 38.8%!
A university in Glasgow has fired a Catholic chaplain for holding a prayer service at his parish “in reparation” for the city’s gay pride parade.
According to Crux, “Father Mark Morris, the pastor of Immaculate Heart of Mary parish in Glasgow, on Monday hosted a ‘rosary of reparation for the gross offense to God which is Glasgow Pride.’ The priest also served as the Catholic chaplain for Glasgow Caledonian University, a public university of over 16,000 students, although classes are not currently in session.” . . .
After hearing of Father Morris’ prayer service, the university said it was “extremely disappointed” and immediately terminated him as a result. “The views implied are antithetical to those held by the University, which is strongly inclusive,” Pamela Gillies, the university principal, said in a statement. “We actively respect and promote equality and diversity, and this has included having an official presence at the last two Pride Glasgow events.”
Considering that the Catholic Church has always held homosexual acts as sinful, it makes no sense that the university had him on the payroll in the first place. Even more nonsensical is the university’s expressed commitment to working with the archdiocese for more chaplains.
“The university will work with the Archdiocese of Glasgow to ensure the continued provision of chaplaincy support for staff and students at our Faith and Belief Centre when the new term starts,” Gillies continued. ?
Catholic students of the university have defended Morris and called on the administration “to reconsider this unfair dismissal of our chaplain.” In a statement posted on the GCU Catholic Community Facebook page, students praised Morris for his commitment to the faith.
“He is a faithful priest who has served our community with joy, dignity, and a smiling face for many years now,” read the post. “We are extremely disappointed that the university has decided to dismiss Father Morris. It is frankly abhorrent that a Catholic priest would be dismissed from his post as a Catholic chaplain for merely reaffirming the teachings of the Catholic faith.”
(Via Memeorandum.) The words “inclusive,” “equality” and “diversity” are now all synonyms for “atheist” and “gay.” This is how the Compulsory Approval Doctrine operates in practice: Everyone must celebrate homosexuality as the summum bonum. No one is allowed to criticize a gay person or express disapproval of homosexuality.
While no university has yet made homosexuality a prerequisite for graduation, it’s probably only a matter of time.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday handed a victory on narrow grounds to a Colorado Christian baker who refused for religious reasons to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, stopping short of setting a major precedent allowing people to claim exemptions from anti-discrimination laws based on religious beliefs.
The justices, in a 7-2 decision, said the Colorado Civil Rights Commission showed an impermissible hostility toward religion when it found that baker Jack Phillips violated the state’s anti-discrimination law by rebuffing gay couple David Mullins and Charlie Craig in 2012. The state law bars businesses from refusing service based on race, sex, marital status or sexual orientation.
The ruling concluded that the commission violated Phillips’ religious rights under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. . . .
Two of the court’s four liberals, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, joined the five conservative justices in the ruling authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who also was the author of the landmark 2015 decision legalizing gay marriage nationwide.
Before getting to the commentary, let me interrupt to say that (a) the “landmark 2015 decision” was wrong — see Justice Scalia’s dissent in Obergefell — and also (b) the description of the decision as “legalizing gay marriage” is misleading. What the court majority did was, in essence, to abolish the political existence, in contravention of the 10th Amendment, of the 31 states that had passed constitutional amendments defining marriage in those states. Under the doctrine of Obergefell, the states are reduced to mere administrative jurisdictions of a centralized national authority. But I digress . . .
While the decision is a victory for Phillips, it didn’t settle the question of whether others similarly situated would have the right to refuse to bake a wedding cake or participate in other expressive arts in violation of their conscience. The court merely said that Phillips was treated unfairly by the Commission. . . .
In other words, not a lot has changed with this decision, except to get Jack Phillips out from under the thumb of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which received a sharp knuckle-rapping from the justices. Far from being a monumental religious liberty decision, the narrow scope of the case means that larger issues will perhaps be left for a future Supreme Court to decide.
My friend and podcasting partner John Hoge offers commentary on this “narrow” victory, which we may liken to the Battle of Antietam. The bloodiest single day in American military history was a stalemate. McClellan’s Union army lost more than 2,000 men killed and nearly 10,000 wounded, but failed to “destroy the Rebel army,” as Lincoln had urged in his telegram before the battle. The Confederates had more than 1,500 men killed and nearly 8,000 wounded, but still held their position when the battle was over, and remained in line the whole next day, welcoming McClellan to renew the assault, which he declined to do. General Lee’s army retreated south of the Potomac without further injury. While the Confederate invasion of the North was turned back, the South was still unbeaten and, if anything, the invincible reputation of Lee’s army was enhanced. The war went on another two-and-half years.
Of course, this analogy is relevant to the issue of state’s rights, which is central to the Colorado dispute and “gay rights” generally. If states do not have the right to self-governance, so that the people through their state legislatures cannot write laws about marriage, how is it that states can empower a Civil Rights Commission which could trample the religious liberty of a Christian bakery owner like Jack Phillips?
It is the centralization of authority in Washington, and especially the Supreme Court’s effort to arrogate to itself the power to dictate law to the states in clear contradiction of the Constitution, that produced this conflict, as it has produced so many others in our history. Our nation’s Founding Fathers never intended the federal government to have the kind of power it now claims, nor could they have imagined that anyone would ever interpret the Constitution this way. More than 150 years after that bloodbath at Antietam, we are still fighting over the same issues, and this “narrow victory” for liberty portends a long struggle ahead.
Since the rise of the gay-marriage movement, it has become fashionable to decry dissenters as haters and bigots, to attempt to write them out of polite society. . . . Politicians thunder against Christian bigots. Media organizations put the words “religious liberty” in scare quotes, as if the expression of deeply held religious beliefs is a mere pretext, used to conceal darker motivations. And ideologues in state agencies give full vent to their rage, mocking faithful Christians as if they stand in the shoes of slavers and murderers.
Today, the Supreme Court said, “enough.” Today the Court breathed a bit of life back into religous-liberty jurisprudence.
French says this ruling is less “narrow” than some have claimed. And I know that some of my readers despise French as a #NeverTrump type, but on the subject of First Amendment rights, he is perfectly sound.
“Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself . . . [Truth] is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson
When news of Tommy Robinson’s arrest in England made headlines, Americans were shocked. A judge had sentenced Robinson to 13 months in prison for attempting to publicize the trial of men accused of operation a criminal sex ring that trafficked underage girls in Leeds.
The case involved one of several so-called “grooming” gangs that have been exposed in England in recent years, the most notorious of which was The Rotherham Horror. Basically, lower-class white English girls are seduced (“groomed”) by young Muslim men, mostly the sons of Pakitani immigrants, and then gang-raped and/or pimped out as prostitutes. The racial aspect of this phenomenon obviously has the potential to inflame public opinion, especially since investigations have shown officials failed to act promptly in many cases because of political correctness.
The Contempt of Court Act 1981 lays down strict limitations on what can be reported in the press regarding active criminal proceedings. This is to prevent outside influences from affecting jurors, ensuring that the defendant has a fair trial based only on the evidence put before the court.
Robinson was already serving a suspended sentence for contempt of court concerning a 2017 case in Canterbury when he was arrested by police while live-streaming on Facebook outside a grooming trial in Leeds on Friday morning.
In the broadcast, played to the court, Robinson “got into a shouting match with several men who appeared to be defendants in the case”, Buzzfeed reports. He also read out the names and charges against the men, some of them inaccurate.
“No-one could possibly conclude that it would be anything other than highly prejudicial to the defendants in the trial,” said Judge Geoffrey Marson QC, presiding. . . .
A temporary order had been imposed by the court banning media coverage of Robinson’s trial and conviction while the Leeds grooming trial was ongoing over fears it could further publicise Robinson’s prejudicial broadcast.
“If the jurors in my present trial get to know of this video I will no doubt be faced with an application to discharge the jury,” Marson told Robinson on Friday, the Hull Daily Mail reports.
“If I have to do that it will mean a re-trial, costing hundreds and hundreds and thousands of pounds.”
Apparently, either (a) English courts do not have the authority to sequester the jury in high-profile trials, or (b) the courts are deliberately attempting to suppress public knowledge of the Leeds case. As an American unfamiliar with British law, I can’t say which is true, but I do know that there is a smoldering resentment among many Britons about the role of the “respectable” media in cases like these.
One sees Robinson described in headlines as a “far-right” figure, or an “anti-Muslim” activist, but who is to blame for this situation? When you examine the facts surrounding The Rotherham Horror and other such cases, it is apparent that the media was largely complicit — along with the police and other public officials — in permitting the problem of the so-called “grooming” gangs to flourish. Class prejudice was clearly a factor in this. Most British journalists are from the college-educated upper classes, while the girls being raped and pimped out by these Muslim gangs were mostly from a class that Americans would call “white trash.”
It’s not as if the “grooming” gangs were a big secret, after all. Young Pakistani men were parking their cars in front of schools to pick up their 14- and 15-year-old “girlfriends” and, because these girls were generally from the welfare-dependent lower classes, nobody seemed to care. Police, educators and social-service agencies ignored what was going on, and as for the media, well, they wouldn’t want to be accused of “racism” or “Islamophobia” for reporting on this phenomenon.
One of the first journalists to call attention to this problem was radical feminist Julie Bindel, who wrote a 2007 column in the Sunday Times of London about two men — Zulfqar Hussain, 46, and Qaiser Naveed, 32 — who had pleaded guilty to abduction, sexual activity with a child, and the supply of a controlled drug:
Blackburn, in common with many northern towns, is experiencing a huge upsurge in pimping, and it is an unpalatable truth for the authorities — and indeed the police — that many of the newest wave of pimps come from within the Asian community. . . .
The Mall in Blackburn is popular as a meeting place for the town’s young men and women. Set on two floors, with over 100 high-street stores, it is brightly lit and usually busy. It teems with young women with pushchairs, elderly people window-shopping, and teenagers meeting up with their friends. The crackle of security guards’ radios mingles with the cheesy piped music.
Not everyone is there to shop. Well-dressed Asian teenage boys can be found on the lookout for young white girls, following them around those stores that sell cheap jewellery and perfume. Meanwhile, older men sit on the benches, watching their workers and potential recruits in action. The older men are “employing” the boys to chat up the girls and eventually hand them over.
The Mall is widely known locally as the Lap because of the way young men and girls circle around the arcade, seeking each other out. The girls, keen to hook up with a boyfriend, call it “doing the Lap”. Young men stop to chat to the giggling girls, teasing and flirting. To many, they look like any other group of teenagers. One security guard, asked if the men are pimps, said he neither knew nor cared. “It’s the girls,” he says, “they love the Pakis. We can’t get a look in.” Nearby, a young man takes two of the girls into a shop, where he buys them make-up and perfume. Later on, the groups of men move on to the Vue cinema complex near Blackburn station. The younger men are on bicycles, the older ones in expensive-looking cars, sound systems blaring out bhangra and gangster rap. Girls begin to approach them, and are soon driven away in cars by the older men. It is possible that they are taken to “slag houses”, where they will be sold for sex.
“It’s the girls. They love the Pakis.”
One might think such a sentence, reported in the Sunday Times, would have caused responsible adults to raise an eyebrow and become curious as to what was happening with young girls in Blackburn, and in other communities in rundown post-industrial northern England. Oh, but these girls were just lower-class “slags” and, like the mall security guard, the upper classes who run England’s”respectable” media were indifferent to the fact that teenagers were being whored out by Pakistani pimps.
It was this attitude of class snobbery, compounded by concerns about inflaming “Islamophobia,” that created the vacuum into which Tommy Robinson and other “far-right” figures eagerly leaped, providing coverage of a phenomenon that the respectable media had deliberately ignored.
Is Tommy Robinson racist? Is he irresponsible? Were his efforts to call attention to the Leeds trial a species of “hate speech”?
British law is different than American law, where the First Amendment guarantees our rights to free speech and a free press. In America, our devotion to liberty is such that in 1977, neo-Nazis were permitted to march in Skokie, Illinois, a notorious decision mocked in a famous scene in the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers: “I hate Illinois Nazis.”
Yeah, Jake, we all hate Illinois Nazis, too. But what happens if, in our eagerness to suppress “hate speech,” we accidentally silence the truth?
This is a question that has consequences far beyond issues of neo-Nazis and “Islamophobia.” As Jefferson said, truth “is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error,” and a free people can tolerate even free speech for Nazis, as long as we are “permitted freely to contradict” them.
What has happened, however, is that our institutions of higher education have been taken over by soi-disant “progressives” who have taught a generation of young Americans to believe that certain facts are “hate speech.” This problem has concerned me ever since I began researching radical feminism four years ago, and discovered how far academia has gone to enshrine Third Wave feminist “gender theory” as an Official Truth which no one on campus is permitted to criticize.
According to this theory, there are no natural differences between men and women. Instead, young people are now taught, all apparent male-female behavioral differences are produced by the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix, to summarize the argument of Professor Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. For many years, Professor Butler’s book has been required reading for university students in Women’s Studies courses, which may explain the increasingly bizarre arguments emerging from the feminist movement. If the leading voices of feminism in politics and journalism have been indoctrinated with a particular theory of “gender,” and if critics of this theory are effectively prohibited from speaking on university campuses, is it any surprise that common-sense talk about human sexual behavior is now routinely denounced as “misogyny,” “rape culture,” “homophobia,” etc.?
The suppression of disagreement and criticism as “hate speech” on university campuses has had consequences far beyond academia. If major corporations are hiring “the best and brightest” from our universities, should we be surprised to see the regime of political correctness being imposed in companies like Google? When it is possible to be fired from the world’s most powerful information provider for daring to raise questions about their “diversity” policies — which is what happened to James Damore — shouldn’t we be concerned that truth is being “disarmed of her natural weapons,” as Jefferson warned?
It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that Julie Bindel, who courageously reported on Pakistani “grooming” gangs more than 10 years ago, has been “no-platformed” at British universities because she is also a critic of transgender activists. Bindel is a hard-core radical lesbian, and not someone that American conservatives would agree with on most issues, but she refuses to be bullied away from the important truth that male and female are meaningful biological categories. Maybe you don’t like radical lesbians any more than Jake liked Illinois Nazis, but friends of liberty must always defend “free argument and debate,” as Jefferson said, because we are confident that “truth is great and will prevail.”
.@BenShapiro reacts to British activist Tommy Robinson after his arrest for filming outside the courthouse of a Muslim rape trial.
It encouraged me to see Ben Shapiro speak up for Tommy Robinson. Shapiro has been whipsawed between competing camps of hatred in recent years. Whenever he shows up to speak on campus, the Left throws a riot. He has been smeared as an “alt-right” fascist while, at the same time, he is a target of Jew-haters in the “alt-right” ranks, and it’s remarkable how he’s maintained his sanity amid the Trump-era madness.
Shapiro calls Robinson “kooky” and “fringe,” even while arguing in defense of Robinson’s efforts to call attention to “grooming” cases. And this is an important point: You don’t have to like Tommy Robinson, or agree with 100% of everything he says and does, to be concerned about what his arrest means for the issue of free speech. Likewise, you may consider Julie Bindel a kooky fringe feminist and still believe it is wrong for universities to “no-platform” her because of her “transphobia.”
In a world where it is considered sane to look the other way while English girls are being raped and pimped out by Pakistani gangs, people will turn to the kooky fringe to find the truth. And if the truth is silenced as “hate speech,” then only liars will be permitted to speak.
Throughout the trial, prosecutor Simon Taylor told grim details of how “every single orifice had been penetrated by the group of men, while others watched, laughed and joined in themselves”.
Mr Taylor added that the girl was pushed onto a mattress whilst men physically restrained her and stood by the door “so she knew there was no escape”.
The victim was then escorted out the premises, where she was found “sobbing”, “hysterical” and “pacing up the road crying” by a woman who found her on the street.
In May 2017, the three men — Tamin Rahmani, Rafiullah Hamidy and Shershah Muslimyar — went on trial and were convicted. This was only the most recent in a series of crimes against English girls perpetrated by Muslims, including the notorious rape gangs of Rotherham, which targeted girls as young as 11. There is a clear pattern to these crimes, including a stifling political correctness that inhibited law enforcement, allowing such exploitation to continue unchecked for years:
What has gone wrong in Rotherham, and what is wrong with its Pakistani community, are questions much asked in recent weeks: How could this small, run-down town in northern England have been the center of sexual abuse of children on such an epic and horrifying scale?
According to the official report published in August [2014], there were an estimated 1,400 victims. And they were, in the main, poor and vulnerable white girls, while the great majority of perpetrators were men, mainly young men, from the town’s Pakistani community. Shaun Wright, the police commissioner who was responsible for children’s services in Rotherham, appeared before Parliament after his refusal to resign over the scandal. The scandal has cost both the chief executive and the leader of the council their jobs, and four Labour Party town councilors have been suspended.
A popular explanation for what Home Secretary Theresa May has described as “a complete dereliction of duty” by Rotherham’s public officials is that the Labour-controlled council was, for reasons of political expediency and ideology, unwilling to confront the fact that the abusers were of Pakistani heritage. Proper investigation, it is said, was obstructed by political correctness — or, in the words of a former local M.P., a culture of “not wanting to rock the multicultural boat.”
People in England were understandably outraged by the revelation of the Rotherham horror, which was not an isolated incident. Part of the problem is that concerns about inciting “racism” and “Islamophobia” not only led to “dereliction of duty” by public officials, but also by the media, which for many years refused to report on such crimes. Anger about this situation gave rise to what might be called vigilante journalism, and when the Ramsgate rapists went on trial in May 2017, Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen showed up in the town to produce videos exposing the perpetrators. “We don’t want these dirty Muslim pedophile bastards touching our kids,” Ms. Fransen said in one of the videos.
Golding and Ms. Fransen are leaders of Britain First, which has been called a “fascist” organization, that came to widespread attention in November 2017 after President Trump retweeted one of their videos. Trump subsequently explained to Piers Morgan that he retweeted the video “because I am a big believer in fighting radical Islamic terror. [The video] was a depiction of radical Islamic terror.”
This raises disturbing questions. If there is a demonstrable pattern of serious crimes committed by people of a certain “race, religion and immigrant background,” as seems to be the case in England, why should it be illegal to “draw attention” to that pattern? While we may abhor the vigilante tactics and rude language of Golding and Ms. Fransen, would it not have sufficed to charge them with some ordinary crime — disturbing the peace, trespassing, disorderly conduct, whatever — rather than “religiously aggravated harassment”? This kind of Thought Crime prosecution gives credence to those who accuse British government officials of showing favoritism toward Muslims, a suspicion that in turn is likely to inspire still more vigilante reactions.
“Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself,” Thomas Jefferson declared. Truth “is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
We have laws against libel and slander, so that falsehood can be punished. If “hate speech” is a problem, the solution is speech against hate. What the situation in England suggests, however, is that people can be punished for “hate speech” even when they speak the truth. There actually were “dirty Muslim pedophile bastards” in Ramsgate, after all.
Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.
A Jupiter teenager said his Muslim faith led him to fatally stab a boy on his 13th birthday and injure two others at a sleepover Sunday night in BallenIsles Country Club, Palm Beach Gardens police said during a 2 p.m. news conference.
Corey Johnson, 17, was arrested Monday after he reportedly confessed to stabbing the three people while he spent the night at a friend’s home in the gated community off PGA Boulevard.
He faces one murder and two attempted-murder charges in the stabbings. The FBI also is investigating the attacks. . . .
Johnson, who police said recently withdrew from William T. Dwyer High School in Palm Beach Gardens, told authorities he woke up at about 4 a.m. Monday at his friend Kyle Bancroft’s home. He decided to kill Kyle’s mother, Elaine Simon; Kyle’s brother, Dane, 13; and Dane’s friend, Jovanni Sierra, 13, while they slept, he said. . . .
Johnson and Kyle watched violent jihadist videos Sunday night, they said. Johnson stabbed Jovanni Sierra and slit his throat with a knife he had brought with him to the house.
Johnson said he read the Quran before going to the house. He turned to the Muslim holy book “to give him courage to carry out his intentions,” according to an arrest report.
A week before Corey Johnson confessed to stabbing three people — one of them fatally — in a Palm Beach Gardens home, authorities were discussing pending federal criminal charges against the 17-year-old, according to a Jupiter police report. . . .
[E]ven as early as middle school, Johnson had been on the radar of law enforcement, the report said.
In January 2017, several local law-enforcement agencies and the FBI came together with the staff at William T. Dwyer High School in Palm Beach Gardens, where he was a student at the time. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office received information that Johnson supported the terrorist organization ISIS and had reached out to the group online, expressing his desire to join them.
A sheriff’s detective interviewed Johnson for a mental-health assessment and said the teen sympathized with terrorist organizations, the report said.
Palm Beach County School District Police said that during middle school, Johnson made anti-Semitic and anti-homosexual statements. He also said he had similar beliefs to the KKK. School police said they received information that Johnson “has violent tendencies,” “has spoken about inappropriate places to bomb” and “is a White Supremacist.” . . .
When Johnson’s mother and grandparents were interviewed by law enforcement, they said Johnson was fascinated with dictators such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Kim Jong-un. They said he had “recently began discovering religion” and had been studying the Quran.
After the meeting, the FBI told Jupiter police that a counter-intelligence agency in Europe investigated Johnson’s connection to several threats made on Instagram to McAuley Catholic High School in Doncaster, England. . . .
You can read the whole thing, which makes clear that there was abundant evidence that Johnson was dangerous, but apparently it’s no longer possible to lock up teenage psychopaths in the mental ward. So, despite law-enforcement concerns, this dangerous kook was free to commit jihad and, as Kristine Marsh reports at Newsbusters, the major network news broadcasts — ABC, NBC and CBS — have completely ignored this story. (Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) And here’s the smart take from Ace:
Could it be that Obama’s “Promise Program” — which instructed local schools not to report dangerous students to police, to keep their records clean (and, consequently, to keep them eligible to buy guns) — is responsible for further murders?
Yes, I know he used a knife, not a gun. But had he been arrested after making threats to the Catholic school, perhaps he might have been put in jail after subsequently restarting his Islamist social media habits, and an innocent boy would still be alive.
