Rape is rape is rape. Or so the new generation of feminists would have us believe.
But our left-leaning news media would beg to differ. Some kinds of rape, we know from the coverage variously afforded them by organisations like the BBC and the Guardian, are definitely much, much worse than other kinds of rape.
Let me give you two recent examples from the news.
Example a)
A creepy, white cigar smoking disc jockey exploits his celebrity by imposing himself sexually on hundreds of impressionable young fans.
Example b)
Organised groups of mostly middle-aged Muslim men of Pakistani heritage predate on vulnerable, pubescent girls, first seducing them with drugs, alcohol and displays of false affection, then employing them as sex slaves to be multiply raped over a period of years.
Call me a racist Islamophobe but I’d say in terms of nauseating appallingness example b) does slightly have the edge. This is not, in any way, to play down the revoltingness of Jimmy Savile’s crimes. Clearly he was a cold-eyed, ruthless, bastard of a serial sexual predator – and the more we learn about him, the more abhorrent he becomes: raping a small boy while dressed as a Womble? Really?? His sleaziness is so hideous as to be quite beyond parody.
But on any objective level, you’d surely have to concede that b) is the more significant crime both in terms of scale and sheer brutality. More girls were abused, more frequently and more aggressively. Not only that but its socio-political implications are much more far-reaching.
From the Jimmy Savile case we learn only this: that the sexual mores of the 1970s made it much easier for celebrities to molest underage girls; that the BBC had a culture for many years in which it considered certain of its celebrities too big too fail. This stuff is all in the past; not much can be done to be remedy it now – other than perhaps exhuming by Savile’s body and sticking his skull on a spike on Tower Bridge.
From the Rotherham case, on the other hand, we learn any number of extremely depressing things: that thanks to the failed doctrine of multiculturalism, Britain’s Islamic “communities” still live in a state of self-imposed Apartheid in which they feel little loyalty to or sympathy with the broader national culture; that a significant percentage of Muslims in Britain have a moral code which precludes them from seeing anything wrong in raping little white (and Sikh) girls, whom they see as worthless kuffar prostitutes; that the authorities which ought to be preventing this happening – social services; children’s welfare charities; the police; local politicians; local “community leaders” – have instead either turned a blind eye to it or actively colluded with the perpetrators; that despite Rotherham – and similar cases across the country – there is absolutely no appetite among our political class for any concerted action to deal with the problem or to punish those on whose watch these crimes were allowed to happen.
It is this contrast, unfortunately, which explains why the voices of Britain’s liberal chattering classes find the Jimmy Savile case so much easier to discuss at such length than they do cases like Rotherham.
On BBC Radio 4 Today this morning, two of the chattering classes’ big guns – Esther Rantzen, founder of Childline and Times columnist David Aaronovitch – were wheeled out to make all the right noises about Jimmy Savile and the awfulness thereof.
You cannot, I fear, ever imagine it giving similar treatment to the Muslim rape gang phenomenon because it’s simply too big a can of worms, in which so much of the Establishment is implicated.
The Labour party is in it up to the neck because it has long turned a blind eye to these kind of shenanigans by Muslims in its northern constituencies, knowing that now the white working class vote is lost it needs the Muslim vote to shore up its power base.
The police are in it up to the neck because not only did they allow these rapes to go unchecked for decades but, in some cases, the police may actually have connived in these rapes themselves.
The city halls and social workers are in it up to the neck because they deliberately covered up the crimes and hampered investigations for reasons of political correctness.
The children’s charities are in it up to the neck because if it ever became known how poorly they did their job there’d be calls for them to be stripped of their public funding and no private person would give these scumbags a penny in further donations.
The media is in it up to the neck because for years – with one or two notable exceptions – it turned a blind eye to what ought to have been the scandal of the century.
The government is in it up to the neck for reasons explained in this superb piece by Jonathan Foreman in Commentary.
So much attention has been paid to the troubling role of political correctness and multiculturalism on one side, and bigotry, misogyny, and anti-white racism on the other that it’s easy to miss another factor in the failure to confront “grooming.” That factor is the essential but largely unspoken element of the UK’s counterterrorism strategy, which is premised on cultivating key figures in certain communities, even if that means making unsavory compromises. Put simply, in order to get information on potential jihadist terrorists, government authorities have tried to curry favor with selected Muslim community leaders by turning a blind eye to various morally abhorrent or illegal practices.
If you want to be cynical you could argue that for all their expressed outrage about Jimmy Savile and his victims our liberal opinion formers are, in their heart of hearts, desperately grateful for the distraction his vile deeds have provided.
Jimmy Savile was always a rather sinister individual with his albino colouring, his bling, his phallic cigar, his tracksuits, his hairy chest, his thousand yard stare, his bizarre vocal mannerisms and his air of almost drugged-out remoteness. Throw in the rumours of his necrophiliac tendencies and details like his rape of a 12-year old boy in a Womble outfit and you end up with the kind of villain whom, of course, tabloid newspapers and TV programmes alike cannot resist covering over and over again.
My fear is that with all this attention we’re giving him we’re in danger of turning him into a cross between a pantomime villain and a comfort blanket.
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