Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a founding member of British Muslims for Secular Democracy. A native Ugandan of Indian ancestry, she came to England in 1972, shortly before the ruthless dictator Idi Amin officially expelled Uganda’s Asian population. She married a British man, Colin Brown, and is a popular author, journalist and lecturer.
Alibhai-Brown is a woman of the Left, who opposed the war in Iraq and has been called an avatar of political correctness. All that said, she is at least unwilling to tiptoe around controversy, including last week’s shocking news about the Derbyshire gang led by Abid Saddique and Mohammed Liaqat that sexually exploited dozens of girls as young as 12.
This was one of several similar cases in recent years, and a report on the case by a Derbyshire youth agency identified “culture, ethnicity and identity” as a “critical factor” in making the girls (most of whom were white) vulnerable to the predators. The report said those issues were “worthy of wider consideration, possibly on a national basis,” and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown addresses those issues in her latest column for the British Independent:
The official inquiry into the case concluded that the care agencies were ill-equipped to deal with the scale of the abuse being perpetrated by the gang. But it also concluded that there needs to be an honest national conversation about how exploitation in some places intersects with “culture, ethnicity and identity”.
Let’s begin then. Because without such an open conversation, prejudices fester and millions of Britons come to believe that serious offenders from certain ethnic and religious groups have protected status within our country.
The Cornwall and Derby villains who used girls as sex toys believed that their victims had “asked for it”, which in our permissive age is an easy excuse. Very young girls are sexualised in the social environment, so paedophiles must feel they are only helping themselves to the goodies that are on offer. But in the case of the Asian men, disgusting cultural beliefs further validate their acts and their uncontrollable lechery is, in part, a symptom of repressed sexuality and sick attitudes.
Most Asian men do not go around raping young white girls and women; many have happy and equal relationships with white partners. However, an alarming number of Asian individuals, families and communities do believe that white females have no morals, are free and available, deserving of no respect or protection.
Up in Bradford a few years back, I met Muslim pimps, some wearing mini Koran pendants on heavy, gold chains. “Not our girls,” they reassured me, “just them white girls from the estates, cheap girls. They love it man, all the money they make! What else will they do with their lives? We’re helping them make a career.”
Much laughter, until I asked them what they would do if a white pimp groomed their daughters. They would kill the pimp and the girls too, they said. They would too.
What Alibhai-Brown exposes here is not merely a sexual double-standard, but also an ethnic or religious double-standard, where Muslim men have one standard for “our girls” and another standard for white girls, who are categorically presumed to be immoral.
If Alibhai-Brown has been willing to address the vicious attitudes among (some) British Muslim men that helped foster the environment in which the Derbyshire rape-gang flourished, wouldn’t it behoove someone to examine the problems among British whites that contributed to this horror?
The pimps in Bradford who talked to Alibhai-Brown about “cheap” white girls from “the estates” — British vernacular for government low-income housing, what we Americans would call “the projects” — weren’t just making up a stereotype out of thin air. In 2008, 45% of British births were to unmarried women and, in some low-income areas, the illegitimacy rate was as high as 68%. Such figures certainly indicate that a casual attitude toward pre-marital sex is commonplace in the U.K.
It isn’t just Muslim men who regard promiscuous women as “cheap,” you know. Wouldn’t it be rather hypocritical to stigmatize as “cheap” the lower-class girls in the estates who drop their knickers for every Tom, Dick and Mohamed, when similarly immoral behavior is exhibited by those at the top of British society?
And I do mean, the top.
Prince Charles reportedly spent his 20s hopping from the bed of one mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, to another, Kanga Tryon — both of whom were married to friends of his — and kept up his extramarital affairs after he and Diana were wed in 1981. After Charles and Di divorced in 1996, Diana took up with Dodi Fayed, in whose limousine she was riding when she was killed in an accident the next year. Charles recently married Camilla. Princess Ann has been married, divorced and remarried, and let’s not even start with Andrew and Fergie, eh?
Well, what about the rising generation of royals? William recently announced his engagement to Kate Middleton, whom he’s been stringing along since 2003. The couple have been shacking up together for months. And, by all accounts, Wills is the quiet one. It’s Harry that’s the wild child — heaven knows how many notches on his belt by now. He recently split with his on-again-off-again girlfriend of six years, reportedly because of Harry’s “desire to stay a bachelor for many more years.”
Here, then, you have the spectacle of “Royals Gone Wild.” Queen Elizabeth’s four children have gone through three divorces, accumulating a total of six spouses among them, and the young scion of the House of Windsor is shacked up in Anglesey with his bride-to-be.
A fine example, don’t you think, for the poor girls in the estates?
So much, then, for the royals. What about British celebrities — pop singers, TV stars, footballers and the like? Are they less “cheap” than the girls pimped out in Bradford and Derby?
A fish rots from the head down, and if Britons aren’t concerned by the putrid odor of moral decay in their society, they should be. It’s all fine for Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to condemn the “disgusting cultural beliefs” of men like Abid Saddique and Mohammed Liaqat, but to what extent are those beliefs — “that white females have no morals,” as Alibhai-Brown says — an accurate reflection of 21-century British decadence?
And given that a quite similar decadence is evident in American culture, isn’t Bob Belvedere correct to warn that what’s happening now in the U.K. foreshadows what the future holds for us?
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers.
UPDATE II: Linked at My Pet Jawa, Lonely Conservative, James Board, Maurice Myth and “Quote of the Day” at the Hayride.
Our British friend The Aged P. suggests I should visit Ye Merry Olde and do some shoe-leather reporting, which he insists would disprove the contention that British lasses have become a lot of whorish man-traps. While I’d be glad to take him up on the offer, such a trip would require a massive input to the Shoe Leather Fund — but since it’s “Make My Wife Happy” Week, after all . . .
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