By Melanie Phillips
August 28, 2017
(Reuters)
The Times (£) reports today that a white Christian child was taken from her family and forced to live with a niqab-wearing foster carer in a home where she was allegedly encouraged to learn Arabic.
The story says that child was placed in not one but two Muslim foster homes, against the wishes of her family, by the London borough of Tower Hamlets.
“In confidential local authority reports seen by The Times, a social services supervisor describes the child sobbing and begging not to be returned to the foster carer’s home because ‘they don’t speak English’.
“The reports state that the supervisor heard the girl, who at times was ‘very distressed’, claiming that the foster carer removed her necklace, which had a Christian cross, and also suggested that she should learn Arabic.”
In 2015, Tower Hamlets council was stripped by the government of many of its powers after its former mayor, Lutfur Rahman, was found guilty of corrupt and illegal electoral practices. This year Ofsted inspectors found “widespread and serious failures” in council services provided to children who need help and protection.
In at the absence of any explanation by the council why it dealt with this case in such a way, it would appear that it has behaved with a frightening degree of cruelty, incompetence and ideological zealotry in erasing a child’s cultural identity.
The really frightening thing is that it is hardly alone in this zealotry. For decades, Britain has told itself – and taught its children – that the very notion of its own Christian culture (which, because of its indigenous population, is inescapably white) is racist, colonialist and illegitimate and should be replaced by a multicultural orthodoxy. This requires prioritising minority faiths and cultures (particularly Islam) over Christianity and western values. Anyone who objects to this doctrine is promptly tarred and feathered as a racist or Islamophobe.
This appalling fostering scandal is not the only example of such ideological zealotry to have emerged in recent weeks. Earlier this month Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham, was forced to resign from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow Cabinet after she wrote an article in The Sun warning that more must be done to stop gangs of Pakistani men targeting young girls for sex, and calling on the government to investigate why so many men who share the same cultural background are behind bars for abusing young girls.
After Corbyn demanded her resignation, Ms Champion apologised for her “extremely poor choice of words”, claiming that the headline and opening sentences” had stripped her words of “nuance”. The paper responded that her team had approved the entire column as published and said they were “thrilled” by it.
Ms Champion’s fruitless attempt to save herself should not distract from the fact that she had asked the right question. For the overwhelming majority of the pimping gangs who have been preying for years on young girls are composed of men from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds and who specifically target non-Muslim, mainly white and often underage girls. This terrible, widespread abuse has been going on for years – and despite a series of criminal prosecutions is still continuing – largely because of the blind eye turned by police and welfare authorities terrified of being accused of racism or Islamophobia.
Lo and behold: for telling such untellable truths Ms Champion was promptly scapegoated. Now another Labour politician appears to have been scapegoated in turn for coming to her defence. And here’s the kicker: this second Labour politician is herself a reformist Muslim.
Amina Lone, a Manchester Labour councillor, said on TV that Sarah Champion was “… not a racist but a brave woman speaking out about a politically awkward issue”. Later she tweeted: “I grew up in a Muslim community where these attitudes were common. ‘White girls are easy’, ‘Nobody cares about them’, ‘They are just slags’, ‘Their parents don’t look after them properly’ etc were/are still said today. I hear it regularly.”
Turns out Ms Lone was also being a brave woman. One week after making these remarks, she failed to be reselected for her council seat. The grounds the council offered as the reason for deselecting her were unusual: that she had a poor attendance and campaigning record. Anyone believe that?
We are living in culturally totalitarian times. Truth, tolerance and decency are being replaced by lies, oppression and cruelty. Such incidents are now occurring thick and fast; and there’s a lot more of this to come.
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