And, oh yeah, the women you sexually assaulted and then called “liars”? They aren’t going away. They held a press conference this week, and they want Congress to do something about your crimes–and, yes, they are crimes.
In a down-to-the-wire election, Alabama Democrat Doug Jones defeated Bible-thumping sexual predator Republican Roy Moore in a special election Tuesday to fill the Senate seat left open by Jeff Sessions when he became attorney general.
But the big winner in this election is the women of #MeToo–who broke the silence about sexual harassment and assault committed by powerful men.
But in the end, it was the women who came forward to tell their stories of being abused who turned the tables on him–including one woman who said the holier-than-thou evangelical forced himself on her when he was a district attorney, and she was just 14 years old.
Moore’s response to these calls for justice was to smear the women as liars and double down on his nauseating bigotry.
This election was about far more than vote in Alabama for a Senate seat. It was a test of support for Republican monsters like Moore, their bigoted policies and the presidency of Donald Trump.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
MOORE’S CAMPAIGN presented itself as a referendum on the Trump administration–and threatened that the Republicans’ big plans for next year would be in peril if he lost. “If they can beat [Moore], they can beat [Trump’s] agenda, because Judge Moore stands with Donald Trump and his agenda,” Moore strategist Dean Young told ABC’s This Week.
Sections of the Republican Party fled from Moore, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Alabama’s longtime senior senator Richard Shelby, who said he cast his vote for a write-in candidate instead of Moore.
But not Trump. Though the president reluctantly campaigned for the GOP establishment’s choice, Luther Strange, Moore’s opponent in the Republican primary earlier this year, Trump eagerly jumped on board when Moore became the nominee–despite the allegations of sexual harassment.
Trump recorded a robo-call for the candidate and made an appearance at a pro-Moore rally in Florida–the day before he was scheduled to visit the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, no less. Former Trump White House adviser and alt-right celebrity Steve Bannon has also been a fixture of the Moore campaign.
Trump and Moore have a lot in common. Like trying to silence women who accuse them of sexual assault.
As Alabama voters were casting their ballots, Trump went on the attack against a group of women who are calling on Congress to investigate their sexual assault claims against the president. In a sexist tweet, Trump said New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand “would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them).”
Trump’s refusal to go along with Republican Party leaders and continue promoting Moore was a calculated pushback against the #MeToo campaign and its hundreds of women stepping out of the shadows to tell their stories of abuse and, in some cases, bring down their abusers.
At first, the Republican National Committee withdrew its support for Moore’s campaign when the allegations of sexual assault emerged. But it flipped on that decision after Trump decided to continue endorsing Moore.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
BUT THAT wasn’t enough to push Moore over the top. With absentee ballots still to be counted, Jones had defeated the Republican candidate by some 20,000 votes, with about a dozen counties that voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election switching over to the Democrats in this race.
The margin of victory for Jones is about the same as the number of voters who wrote in another candidate. As FiveThirtyEight.org pointed out, of all Alabama senate races since 1990, only the 2014 race, in which Jeff Sessions ran uncontested, had a higher share of write-in votes.
But while the media will focus on this number, Jones built up his margin of victory in counties with major cities like Birmingham and Huntsville, where African Americans especially voted overwhelmingly for him. Jones also had a stronger advantage among women and younger voters, according to exit polls.
In Birmingham’s primarily Black Woodlawn neighborhood, Genesis Johnson told the Washington Post that he hadn’t voted since 2008, when he supported Barack Obama for president. He felt compelled to cast his vote for Jones this time. Read the rest of this entry »
The first rule of defending yourself against an allegation is to decide on your story and stick to it. The second rule is not to confuse matters by introducing another line of defence that, in effect, undermines your story.
Damian Green’s friends on the Tory benches have been repeating his flat denial of having used his Commons computer to access pornography. But then they go on to add that the porn was “legal”, which rather begs the question, why does that matter if he wasn’t looking at it in the first place?
The likes of Andrew “Plebgate” Mitchell, Ian Duncan Smith and David Davis have all expressed outrage at the allegations raised by former Met cops Bob Quick and Neil Lewis. Davis, a close associate and former boss of Green, has threatened to resign if his friend is forced out, thus making Green virtually unsackable and effectively tying May’s hands. What will happen if further allegations about Green’s personal conduct (making unwelcome advances towards Conservative activist Kate Maltby) are upheld by Sue Gray’s inquiry, will be fascinating to observe. But the smart money must be on Green surviving – the political price of sacking him and then losing Brexit negotiator Davis would simply be too high for May to contemplate: it could even bring down the government.
Quick and Lewis have stated that during a 2008 investigation into the theft (masterminded by Green and David Davis) of documents from the Labour Home Office, they found thousands of pornographic images on Green’s Commons computer, and also on his laptop. Lewis, who specialised in examining digital devices, said “the computer was in Mr Green’s office, on his desk, logged in, it is his account, his name, in between browsing pornography he was sending emails from his account, his personal account, reading documents, writing documents and it was just impossible, it was sort of exclusive and extensive, that it was ridiculous to suggest that anybody else could have done it.”
Green’s friends (and idiots like this) bleat on about his right to be considered innocent until/unless proven guilty, and suggest that only a court of law can properly decide the matter. Such people are either ignorant or being deliberately disingenuous: this is not a criminal matter, but a workplace matter, which civil law principles apply: ie there is no presumption of innocence and guilt does not have to be proven “beyond reasonable doubt” but on “balance probabilities.” Last I heard, the House of Commons was supposed to be a workplace; in any other workplace an employee found (on “balance of probabilities”) to have accessed any sort of porn on a work computer, would be looking at summary dismissal. And the source of the evidence would be irrelevant, so long it stood up … on “balance of probabilities.”
Let’s be clear from the outset: the death of Carl Sargeant was a tragedy and no-one should be using it to score points or make political capital.
That’s why I’ve hesitated before writing anything on the subject, and I certainly have no intention of seeking to pre-empt the findings of either the coroner or the independent inquiry ordered by Welsh first minister Carwyn Jones.
The anguish of Carl Sargeant’s family and close personal friends is entirely understandable: but that doesn’t mean we have to simply go along with what they say.
Less still do we have to go along with those who are not family or friends of Carl Sargeant, but simply people who think the whole issue of sexual harassment in politics has ‘gone too far’, and have seized upon this tragedy as – supposedly – evidence that the whole sexual harassment business is now ‘out of hand’, etc, etc, with wrongly accused men as the main victims.
From the outset of the sexual harassment in politics scandal, we were assured by Charles Moore in the Telegraph, that women were now on top and the worry is whether they will share power with men or just “crush us”. Peter Hitchens, in the Mail On Sunday, warned that the “squawking women” would end up in niqabs if they carried on. Meanwhile, David ‘Mr Somewhere’ Goodhart tweeted that it was only the women of the metropolitan elite who were bothered about sexual harassment.
As news of the Carl Sargeant suicide broke, the Daily Mail’s front page claimed he’d been “THROWN TO THE WOLVES” and denied natural justice by Carwyn Jones and the Labour party.
But what, exactly, is Carwyn Jones supposed to have done wrong? As far as I can judge, he did indeed do things (as he has said), “by the book”. Carl Sargeant was, apparently, made aware of the general nature of the allegations, but not (at the early stage of the investigation) given precise details or the names of his accusers: he would, as I understand it, have received this information in due course and then been given every opportunity to defend himself. In the meanwhile, he was dismissed from his ministerial post and suspended from the Labour party. Carl Sargeant’s family were not satisfied, which is understandable; opportunistic calls for Jones’s resignation, eminating from the Tories, sections of the press, some in Plaid and even some Labour people, are not.
It may be that the coroner and/or the independent inquiry will point to shortcomings in the way the case against Carl Sargeant was handled, and it may be that more support should be offered to all those mixed up in allegations of this sort – especially when peoples’ mental health is at risk. But it would be outrageous for anyone to seek to use this tragedy to downplay the seriousness of sexual harassment, or to deny its prevalence in politics and public life.
By Yves Coleman (first posted as a BTL comment at Tendance Coatesy):
I should add something about an argument which is actually quite often used by pro Ramadan fans on the social networks. Many of them pretend that the American producer Harvey Weinstein is less attacked than Tariq Ramadan by the media. Some even pretend that Charlie Hebdo did not do a front cover against Weinstein … which is a lie. Although I think both front pages (against Weinstein and Ramadan) were vulgar, stupid and not funny at all, this argument is based on a lie or on ignorance.
But one must go further to answer this comparison between Weinstein and Ramadan:
– Weinstein has a Jewish name but I don’t have any idea about his religion. He is not a rabbi, a Jewish theologian [and] does not represent anything [to do with the] Jewish religion
– Ramadan is certainly a theologian, a man whose books deal with Muslim ethics and morals. A man who preaches a religion every time he opens his mouth or writes an article.
So to put these two persons on the same level and compare their treatment in the media is not only absurd but reveals a covert or unconscious anti-Semitism …
Mr Tony Greenstein has seen through the right wing (and, no doubt, Zionist) conspiracy.
Sexual harassment in the Labour party? It’s all been got up by the right wing, and the “BBC’s Tory Kuenssberg” says Mr Greenstein – just like “anti-Semitism.”
He’s especially upset about poor Kelvin Hopkins – and just look at the photos of the woman making the allegations!
Here’s Mr Greenstein’s blog-post, complete with comments about Ava Etemadzadeh’s dress and appearance (written by him, not me, I should emphasise):
Sunday, 5 November 2017
The Framing of Kelvin Hopkins MP
First it was ‘anti-Semitism’ now the Labour Right (& the BBC’s Tory Kuenssberg) are weaponising Sexual Harassment
Sexual harassment is much like anti-Semitism. No one wants to be accused of it and the immediate thought when faced with the accusations made against Kelvin Hopkins is that there is no smoke without fire.
Kelvin Hopkins
The use by a man of pressure, by virtue of an economic or other relationship of dependancy, because it is nearly always a man, on a women to gain sexual favours is by definition despicable. That was why George Bernard Shaw described marriage as a legalised form of prostitution.
I know this because in my Momentum group in Brighton for the first few months a number of people thought that I must be guilty if I was suspended for ‘anti-Semitism’. It was only after people like Jackie Walker and others began to be accused of the same crime that it dawned on people that this was a cynical ploy by the Right to divide the Left. And because the Left has a conscience, because socialists as opposed to the neo-liberals of the Right don’t act like cynical automatons, people do take these things seriously. The same is true of sexual harassment.
Perhaps more so with sexual harassment because all men are, to a greater or lesser degree, guilty of possessing power in relationships and using that power. I doubt if there is any man who can honestly say they haven’t, at some point in their life been guilty of some form of sexual harassment or coercion or pressure. You live in this world and are part of it, a world framed by patriarchal relations. You can’t live outside the social relations that you are a part of.
Ava dressed up as a schoolgirl by her Telegraph minders for her interview
That is why just like anti-Semitism has been weaponised, so sexual harassment can be and it would appear is being weaponised at this moment. It is clear that the Tories epitomised by the monstrous lech Michael Fallon are clearly guilty of gross acts of abuse and worse. However there is a determined effort by the BBC and the Tory press to turn the attention on Labour. The Right are doing all they can to encourage this and the Left should stand up and ask where the proof is, because apart from Ivan Lewis MP there seems none.
It is almost certain that Kelvin Hopkins is innocent of the charges against him. I must confess that when I first saw Etemadzadeh I rubbed my eyes. Why is she dressed up as a schoolgirl? Is this to try and suggest she is young, virginal and innocent? She must be at least 23-24, what is this school girl image for? And the poppy? No socialist activist would be seen dead wearing a symbol to British military imperialism.
A very different Ava E in her Linkedin profile
I confess on Friday night, after just coming out of hospital, I had BBC News 24 on and the news goes round in cycles and Etemadzadeh seemed to be on interminably as I half listened, and got on with writing and posting a blog. Perhaps because I listened to her more than once it gradually occurred to me that she had been very carefully coached – her interview seemed incredibly staged and even forced. At the end she described an alleged conversation where Kelvin said that if he were young, he would have been proud to have her as her lover and then she said ‘and if he was young he would be happy to have her as a lover’ and then the killer punch ‘but he’s not’ made me feel that this was not spontaneous. It now appears that it was a put up job with John Pina.
More details have come about concerning Ava. She is a member of Progress and she has been working with the Telegraph, hardly a Labour paper. She seems to have been put up to it by a Progress MP (Wes Streeting?) just as the Jewish Labour Movement have constantly run to the Times and Mail when they wanted an anti-Labour story printed.
Too much of this story doesn’t hang together. The one conflict of evidence is where Etemadzadeh says that Hopkins rubbed his crotch against her when saying goodbye at Essex. If that is the case, then why the hell did she go out of her way to make further contact with him? It’s not as if she had to. There was no financial or contractual or employer-employee relationship between them.
There were 3 separate messages sent by Etemadzadeh to Kelvin Hopkins, none of which square with his alleged behaviour. And why wait 3 years if indeed all this transpired? It may well be the case that Hopkins told her that if he was young he would happily fall in love with her. That is no more than saying that he found her a nice woman. Certainly you can question his appalling sense of judgement but it hardly constitutes sexual harassment. She doesn’t allege that there was any further alleged physical or sexual contact.
She was also an intern with Michael Dugher, who was special adviser to the most right-wing of all Labour MPs, John Spellar, an old associate of the Electrical Trades Union and its anti-communist leadership. Dugher was also a special adviser to Geoff Hoon, Blair’s Defence Minister and latterly he worked as a corporate lobbyist for American multinational Electronic Data Systems (EDS), one of the government’s largest IT contractors.
Left-wing men of course feel very queasy about standing up to this and that is precisely the problem. The Labour Right, both men and especially women, are unscrupulous in using peoples’ abhorrence of sexual harassment or racism for their own devious political purposes. Taking out left-wing men is a game to these people.
I am referring to people like Jess Phillips who is quite happy to say she’d stab Jeremy Corbyn in the front rather than the back or who tells Dianne Abbot, who unlike her has a record of standing up to oppression racist bullying, to ‘fuck off’, without of course meriting any punishment from Labour Party HQ.
Phillips is the archetypal right-wing feminist, a woman who attacks left-wing men as the ‘enemy’ but seems more than happy to be friends with the backwoodsman Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man who believes that a woman who is raped should be denied an abortion. His chivalry apparently bowls the simpleton over.
No self-respecting woman could count a misogynist like Rees-Mogg, the man who never changed a nappy, as a friend. Phillips is a fraud and a fake as are most right-wing feminists, precisely because they see their liberation as taking place at the expense of the most oppressed women. That is why some of the vilest Zionists happen to be women on the Labour Right. We have a good example of that in Brighton Labour Party where the execrable racist Progress Councillor, the mad and bad ‘Poison’ Penn, willingly use scurrilous allegations against socialist men, in order to pursue a far-Right Zionist and racist politics.
I include Hattie Harman in this, a woman whose feminism didn’t prevent her cutting benefits for single parents as soon as she became a Cabinet Minister in 1997. Read the rest of this entry »
What is the relationship between open disrespect of women and rape? Let’s examine the case of Tariq Ramadan.
In 2009, the American Academy of Religion invited Tariq Ramadan, a professor at Oxford, and the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, to give a plenary address at the Annual Meeting. He spoke at the meeting in November, which was held in Montreal (and Canada permitted him to enter). The AAR fought to bring Ramadan to the US, against the opposition of the US government. They sued, along with the ACLU and another organization. In 2010, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “issued orders that appear to end the exclusion from the United States.”
A couple of years later (April 12, 2011), the Egyptian feminist Mona Eltahawy engaged in a debate on BBC Newsnight on the question of whether the burqa should be banned. Ramadan continually talked over Eltahawy to try to prevent her from speaking.
Ramadan: And we are alway trying to come with new rules and reducing the freedom of expressions of Muslims against the minarets, against the hijab, against the burka. We don’t – what does it mean? Does it mean that the only right way of being a Muslim in Europe today, a good European Muslim is an invisible Muslim, who don’t want to see them, don’t want to see them in the street, don’t….
Moderator, asking Eltahawy: Why are you shaking your head?
Eltahawy: I’m shaking my head because I disagree with just about everything that Tariq just said. It’s interesting that he used the word invisible, because that’s what the niqab does.
Ramadan, interrupting: That’s because you are working with the neocons in the States.
Eltahawy: I’m working with the who?! Can you prove that? This is libelous what you are saying. I am not working with the neocons!
Ramadan, interrupting: We know who you are working with!
Eltahawy: Did you hear what he just said? This exactly the problem that a Muslim and a feminist actually faces.
Ramadan, interrupting: You are, you are! Of course, you are working in exactly the same direction.
Eltahawy: You have to stop talking now, because it’s my turn. (Ramadan, interrupting: Yes, a feminist). This is exactly what happens when a Muslim and a feminist speaks out – she is silenced. They are trying to silence me by saying that I’m a neocon. That is absolute nonsense!
Ramadan, interrupting: I’m not trying to silence you. Don’t play the victim, don’t play the victim!
Eltahway: This is what you’re supporting. I’m not a victim, I’m no one’s victim! You are supporting the very thing you claim to be attacking. You support the invisibility of women. The niqab renders women invisible. And let’s be real here. Feminist organizations on the ground will tell you that women have no say in this.
Ramadan, interrupting: I’m all for freedom. I’m supporting women wearing whatever they want.
Eltahawy: Stop talking! I’m talking! (Ramadan guffaws). Women on the ground have no say in this, because when they start to talk, you silence them. People like you silence them. The Muslim right wing has been encroaching on women’s rights gradually, and no one has said anything!
Ramadan, interrupting: No, no, you don’t want to hear them, you don’t want to hear the women.
Eltahawy: Other groups have said nothing. The left wing has been silenced while Muslim women have been disappeared, all for the sake of fighting Islamophobia. I fight Islamophobia. I was standing outside of that mosque in New York. I wrote opinion pieces against the minaret ban.
Ramadan: Stop talking about yourself….
Eltahawy: You cannot sit there and try to libel me.
In the last few days a series of extremely nasty stories about Ramadan’s sexual abuse of women has come out. A report in the New York Times states that a French activist and author, Henda Ayari, filed a police complaint accusing him of sexually assaulting her in 2012. A second woman (unnamed) has accused him of rape and assault in 2009. (The same year that he was honored by the AAR). The assault accusations have been highlighted by Mona Eltahawy on Twitter.
The second woman, whose name has not been published by the news media, gave an account of an extremely violent assault to two French newspapers, Le Monde and Le Parisien.
A 45-year-old Muslim convert, she said she had also corresponded with Mr. Ramadan on Facebook and met him in his hotel on the sidelines of a conference to discuss religion. When she went to his room, she said, she was raped and beaten.
She said she suffered months of threats afterward to keep her silent.
Another article, in the National (published in the United Arab Emirates), shows that French officials knew about Ramadan’s violent attacks upon women, and did nothing.
A French official has admitted knowing Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan was “violent and aggressive” sexually, but denied hearing anything about rape.
Bernard Godard, who was considered the “Monsieur Islam” of the French Ministry of the Interior between 1997 and 2014, was well acquainted with Mr Ramadan, a prominent Islamic scholar and grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
When asked whether he had any knowledge of the rape and sexual assault that Mr Ramadan is now being accused of, Mr Godard insisted he had “never heard of rapes” and that he was “stunned.”
“That he had many mistresses, that he consulted sites, that girls were brought to the hotel at the end of his lectures, that he invited them to undress, that some resisted and that he could become violent and aggressive, yes, but I have never heard of rapes, I am stunned,” he told French magazine L’Obs.
“I have twice argued w/Tariq Ramadan on BBC TV.This is 1 of the times. Many of us have long known him 2b a misogynist.”
Leta Hong Fincher wrote in reply: “Jesus, Mona, I would have just been struck dumb in that situation. So chilling given what we now know about him. Bravo!”
Eltahawy replied: “Thank you @LetaHong – it was astounding then in 2011 when it happened & astounding now. He is a misogynist shit.”
So why hasn’t Oxford already suspended Ramadan? Three professors at Dartmouth (in psychology and brain sciences) have been put on paid leave while there is a criminal investigation into allegations of “sexual misconduct.” In Ramadan’s case, criminal complaints of rape have been filed against him. Shouldn’t he also be suspended while the accusations are investigated by the French legal system?
French prosecutors are investigating allegations by two women who say they were raped by Tariq Ramadan, a renowned Islamic scholar and Oxford professor.
One of them, Henda Ayari, told a French TV interviewer that Mr Ramadan had assaulted her in a Paris hotel in 2012.
“He literally pounced on me like a wild animal,” she said.
In a Facebook post Prof Ramadan denied the accusations, calling them “a campaign of lies”, and said his lawyer was suing the women for “slander”.
Just like Trump.
He is a controversial and influential figure among Muslim scholars. He challenges fundamentalist Islam, but some critics accuse him of promoting political Islam.
A Swiss national, he is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood.
Since 2009 he has been professor of contemporary Islamic studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He has also sat on a UK Foreign Office advisory group on freedom of religion.
That’s fairly typical BBC waffle. Ramadan “challenges fundamentalist Islam” only so far, and it’s not just a few eccentrics who can see that he promotes Islamism aka political Islam aka theocracy. And he’s been professor of contemporary Islamic studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford in a chair funded by Qatar.
“Men can behave in dreadful ways towards women,” Socialist Worker argues this week, in an article on how to get rid of sexual abuse and violence. Actually, it’s not a bad article, except that it comes from the SWP …
Socialist Worker:
Recent revelations about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s abuse and rape of women have exposed the sexism at the heart of society.
Many people knew about Weinstein’s behaviour, yet it continued for decades.
Several women have said they didn’t come forward because they felt Weinstein was so powerful he would destroy their lives.
The violence and harassment he is accused of are all too common for women and girls across the world. But why does it happen?
By Charlotte Zalens(this article also appears in the present issue of the AWL paper Solidarity)
On Friday 11 August the Sun newspaper published an article by Labour MP Sarah Champion under the headline ″British Pakistani men ARE raping and exploiting white girls … and it’s time we faced up to it″.
The article is incredibly confused and naive (at one point Champion suggest that despite being the director of a children′s hospice until becoming an MP in 2012, she only heard the abbreviation CSE for Child Sexual Exploitation a few months after becoming an MP). Champion talks of British Pakistani men, but also references recent events in Newcastle where most of the men convicted were not Pakistani. She seems to conflate race, ethnicity, and religion throughout. Champion′s claim that ″Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls″ is crude, inaccurate, and wrong.
Champion has tried to distance herself from the article, saying that it was edited to take the nuance out of her comments. But her choice to publish such an article with the Sun, well known for dog-whistle racism often targeted at Muslims, where her article appeared alongside an editorial which called for MPs to tackle ″the Muslim Problem″, condemns her. Champion is the MP for Rotherham where large scale child sexual exploitation, involving an estimated 1,400 children between 1997 and 2014, was exposed in 2014. That case, unlike Newcastle, did involve British-Pakistani men.
In other respects the Rotherham case bears many similarities to that of Newcastle. There were multiple factors involved there: vulnerable young women, poverty, the use of drugs and alcohol, authorities disbelieving or in some cases blaming victims as well as, the patriarchal attitudes of some men, attitudes which are prevalent in many communities, in different forms, and which make women and girls “fair game” for sexual exploitation.
At the time of the Jay Report into CSE in Rotherham we wrote: ″What happened in Rotherham is happening in other areas of the country; although there will be particular local circumstances, there will be a wide range of abusers and victims. ”
The Jay Report cites the hesitancy of social workers and practitioners over reporting the ethnicity of abusers as Pakistani, for fear or being accused of racism. This is a problem. It points to a dishonest way of dealing with racism.
″For many years Labour-led Rotherham council has relied upon tokenistic ‘multicultural events’ and communicating almost exclusively with self-appointed ‘community leaders’, often religious ones rather than engaging and building strong links with communities.
″This does not deal with racism in an open way; wrongly presumes the opinions of Muslim communities can and should be communicated by ‘community leaders’, and disenfranchises others.″
Unfortunately Corbyn’s response to these events was to flatten out all these complex issues and pose the problem as one of child sexual abuse alone. Our responses must talk about the multiple factors involved in abuse. Anything else makes it possible for “community leaders” and others in positions of power to say “nothing to do with us”. That situation makes it very difficult for women’s groups and others in Muslim communities who are pushing hard for more discussion about attitudes to sex, sexuality and respect for women.
As we said in relation to Rotherham, it also endangers Muslim girls. ″… the council and social services ignored the possibility that abuse may be happening within the Pakistani community. An image was established of Pakistani men abusing white girls. In fact such abuse usually happens to those closest to the abuser. The under-reporting of abuse from minority ethnic victims is a problem.″
It appears some lessons have been learnt from the Jay Report; police did at least actively pursue gangs in Newcastle, but other lessons have not, and many vulnerable young women continue to suffer abuse.
Sarah Champion would not have been wrong to have raised the question of the likely connection between sexual abusers’ cultural (not racial, or even religious) backgrounds and their attitudes towards women and girls. Others have done this without making any concessions to racism. What she was – unforgivably – wrong to have done, was to have written about such a sensitive matter in the Sun, a rag with a long and well-known record of taking a (shall we say) cavalier attitude to racism.
Indeed, all this could well have been a set-up by the Sun. They wrote the headline and quite possibly the line which made it specific about “white girls”. Champion’s office had the Sun‘s final version of the article before it was published, and, of course, she could have objected to this but either didn’t bother checking it or (more likely) was flattered to be published and thought it would raise her profile.
Even so the outcry, at first, was not that great. It looked like Champion was going to survive it. According to today’s Guardian, “the Labour leader’s office appeared to back Champion until yesterday lunchtime, when positive emails from her office to the Sun in the aftermath of her article’s publication were highlighted by the newspaper.” By and large Corbyn supporters online had been quiet about the issue. Even the SWP were not really kicking off about it.
What did for Champion was Trevor Kavanagh’s shamelessly racist pro-Brexit article that quoted Champion approvingly. It used language that echoed Nazi stuff about the ‘Jewish Problem’, and thanked Champion (and Trevor Phillips) for “making it acceptable to say Muslims are a specific rather than a cultural problem.”
The article closed with a sinister rhetorical question:
One day soon, if Philip Hammond and Liam Fox are right, we will be back in charge of immigration.
What will we do about The Muslim Problem then?
Not surprisingly this caused outrage and the Corbyn team, quite rightly, wanted to respond but Sarah Champion’s article was the elephant in the room, inhibiting the Labour leadership from making an immediate, outspoken response.
All the evidence (including her own record as shadow equalities minister) suggests she’s an idiot rather than a racist. But that’s no excuse. She had to go.
Seventeen men and one woman have been found guilty of involvement in a sex grooming network in Newcastle upon Tyne that plied vulnerable women and girls with drink and drugs before assaulting them.
In a series of four trials at Newcastle crown court, juries found the men guilty of a catalogue of nearly 100 offences – including rape, human trafficking, conspiracy to incite prostitution and drug supply – between 2011 and 2014.
The men befriended more than 20 victims and invited them to “sessions” at properties, mostly in the west end of the city. The girls were lured by the offer of alcohol and drugs, in particular mephedrone (“Mkat”) and cannabis, and were expected to offer sexual services in return for the substances.
The victims, all females between 13 and 25, were targeted because they were vulnerable and because they were less likely to complain because of their circumstances, the prosecution argued. The court heard accounts of young women who were drugged before waking up to find themselves undressed, having been sexually assaulted.
The police investigation that led to the trials was called Operation Shelter.
Operation Shelter has clear similarities to grooming scandals in Rotherham and Rochdale, which featured gangs of British Asian men abusing white girls. The men in operation Shelter are from a wider range of backgrounds, including Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Iraqi, Iranian and Turkish.
Geographically wider, but ideologically just as narrow.
The jury was told that the men had no respect for their victims and that they chose them because they were “easy targets”. The court heard that in April 2014, Badrul Hussain – who was found guilty of providing premises for drug supply – was caught traveling on public transport without a ticket. The female ticket inspector claimed that he shouted at her: “All white women are only good for one thing. For men like me to fuck and use like trash. That’s all women like you are worth.”
That ideology. It’s quite widespread.
In a parliamentary report published in November 2014 into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, MPs said they had reached “the alarming conclusion” that Rotherham was not an outlier and that there was a widespread problem of organised child sexual exploitation in England.
A spokesperson for the child exploitation charity Pace said: “Sadly we know that child sexual exploitation has been widespread throughout the country and it can affect any child or family. It is good that the perpetrators have finally been brought to justice. There has been immense trauma inflicted on those young people and their families. There will be lessons to be learned.”
Coatesy’s thoughts and links to other comments, here
Shiraz Socialist 
