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Returning To Rochdale

Category: EDL News Published on Wednesday, 03 October 2012 20:31 Written by Pyrus Hits: 2645

Rochdale borough safeguarding children board has released a report into how social services ‘missed opportunities’ to prevent the systematic grooming and abuse of young girls in the town.

The report, which has been accepted by Rochdale Council, found that before they took action to end the abuse the Council and the local Police Authority had received 127 warnings.

That’s a lot of missed opportunities.

The report also says that there were “deficiencies in the way social care services responded to victims' needs”. But what does that mean? Why were there these ‘deficiencies’?

Did social services not have the right expertise? Did they fail to act because they were under-staffed or over-stretched, or did they simply fail to recognise the danger that these young girls were in?

The report goes further, describing how “various agencies failed to articulate their concerns”.

They knew what was happening, but they did nothing. They said nothing.

Why?

That’s the question we should all be asking.

What could possibly have prevented these ‘various agencies’ from speaking out?

Perhaps it has something to do with the identity of the offenders. It must have been obvious to Rochdale social services and local police that the men in question were all Muslims, but, as we all know, it is impossible to point out that fact without being accused of prejudice, racism, ‘Islamophobia’, or whatever else.

Perhaps they ‘failed to articulate their concerns’ because they were terrified to admit that, in Rochdale at least, the problem was with Muslim gangs.

When we ask why everyone is so afraid to even mention the religion of these men, the press report that the situation is ‘being exploited by the far right’.

We’re hardly ‘exploiting’ the situation - we’re trying to prevent it. (Oh, and we’re not ‘far right’ either).

Former Home Secretary Jack Straw received a similar response when he claimed that there might be a ‘particular problem’ with Pakistani men.

Was he also ‘exploiting the situation’?

He is right to repeat his warning that “there is an issue of ethnicity here”, but there is also a religious link that needs to be understood.

It’s important that social services departments up and down the country are both pre-warned and pre-armed, and gaining an understanding is crucial to preventing these crimes from reoccurring in the future.

But there are still plenty of people who believe that claiming that there is religious link worth investigating is nothing more than a convenient excuse to ‘insult’ Muslims – as if finding any way to insult Islam is more important than campaigning against the various abuses that give us reason to criticise it in the first place.

The Guardian, a newspaper with plenty of experience of ignoring crimes inspired by Islam, has only managed to admit that “[d]ifferent cultures do give rise to different violent pathologies”.

The next step is to acknowledge that there’s enough evidence of Islam-inspired violent pathology for us to be confident that Islam cannot truthfully be called a ‘religion of peace’.

What that actually means for newspaper reporting, for government policy, or for social services departments isn’t clear cut. But it certainly wouldn’t mean ignoring the issue of religion when there is clearly a ‘particular problem’.

Unlike the Guardian, we have long accepted that the problem with Islamic extremism is far greater than our government or the mainstream media is generally willing to accept. For that we’ve been treated as hatemongers, as bigots, or as ‘Islamophobes’.

Sure, we don’t see many reasons to appreciate Islam, but that’s very different from being a hatemonger or from being motivated by nothing but ignorance or prejudice. It’s easy to make these sorts of accusations, but it’s far harder to sustain them when it is us – and not the likes of the Guardian – who keep being proved right.

And we keep being proved right because government, media and local authority inaction keep providing opportunities for Islam to demonstrate its numerous ‘violent pathologies’.

Violent rioters, grooming gangs, hate-preachers, terrorists, terrorist-funders – none of them unique to Islam, but each a ‘particular problem’ nonetheless. It is these actions which are responsible for people getting a negative impression of Islam – not those who are willing to talk about them.

How effective would our security services be if they ignored the religious element to Islamic terrorism, if they took their cues from the media or the politically correct order of the day?

Luckily the security services can be trusted to reach their own decisions about the nature of security threats and to not shy away from conclusions that may be ‘inconvenient’ or politically incorrect.

Evidently, that sort of culture does not exist in social services. It doesn’t exist because the government, and the media, have not allowed it to.

The publishing of Rochdale report demonstrates that things are beginning to change. It’s depressing that it had to take such hideous crimes for this sort of report to be published and that there are still those who will no doubt write off some its conclusions as ‘pandering to the far right’ or some other nonsense.

A lot still needs to be done, but the pressure we have been putting on the council and on the government does seem to be paying off.

To prevent the continued spread of Islamic extremism and the ‘particular problems’ associated with it we need to make the right criticisms. It may not always be obvious what they are, but the answer is clearly not to ignore the threat or pretend that it does not exist.

It is because we are conscious of the difficulties that the EDL continues to be one of the leading forces in the battle against Islamic extremism.

Unfortunately, the fear of being labelled a racist is preventing there from being a serious discussion about the role that Islam plays in fostering extremism. That is bad enough, but it has now got so bad that the authorities – the people we trust to safeguard us and our children – become paralysed whenever they are forced to admit that Islam might not always be a positive influence.

That is dangerous, and that is exactly what seems to have happened in Rochdale.

Last time we visited Rochdale the police were a little heavy-handed and we faced the usual nonsense from the usual suspects about our being prejudiced, bigoted, racist, fascist, Islamophobic, etc, etc, etc.  But if the price we have to pay for speaking up is to be called names by those who would prefer not to act, then so be it.

That is why we plan to return to Rochdale. We are not like Rochdale social services, we are not afraid to ‘articulate our concerns’. And we refuse to be silenced.

Details to follow