Believe the girls, unless it's inconvenient.

The Rotherham scandal is why a growing number of people everywhere distrust, despise, and want to be rid of public officials whose principal concern is self-preservation, i.e., most of them.

Photo by Nico Kalka on Unsplash

The Rotherham child sexual abuse scandal involving “grooming gangs” of Muslim Pakistani men drugging, torturing, raping, and trafficking poor young white girls throughout Northern England isn’t breaking news—it’s been going on now for a couple of decades. And as bad as this scandal, as reported by the BBC, The Telegraph (here and here), and others, happens to be, I’m betting that the worst is yet to come. I have vastly more experience than I’d like with the blind eye that generally gets turned when facts conflict with ideals. I guarantee that there is more to come.

But even if I’m wrong and British Prime Minister-cum-victim of mean tweets, Keir Starmer, who was director of public prosecutions during the initial inquiries into the scandal between 2008 and 2013, is right about all of this being an exaggeration, it’s still not a ringing endorsement of the public officials involved. At the minimum, thousands of little girls were systematically groomed, drugged, raped, trafficked, and, in some cases, tortured and killed while authorities turned a blind eye to preserve “community relations.”

I want to be clear about what we are talking about here. This scandal is about the horrific abuse of little girls conducted right under the noses of English authorities who were loathe to act because the abusers were Muslim men. The authorities feared accusations of Islamaphobia. If you look up “outrageous” in the dictionary, it’s spelled out on the foreheads of all of these twits waving at you. In one case, a gang of abusers showed up at a victim’s home and threatened to douse everyone with gasoline and set them on fire if they went to the police. When the police were informed, they did nothing.

Multiculturalists have been telling the rest of us for decades that if we could just provide everyone with a Coca-Cola, some cute polar bears, and a campfire under a winter moon, an angelic rendition of Kumbaya would erupt spontaneously. These same people are loathe beyond reason to recognize that in the real world, shared values are fundamental and essential to any successful community. No amount of evidence to the contrary ever seems to move them off of this point.

There is a scene in the 1942 film classic Casablanca where a couple who are leaving Casablanca for the new world practice speaking English in order to acculturate in America. This scene encapsulates what immigration was about in the past. People from troubled places emigrated for a better life, embracing their new culture and the hope for a better future that went with it.

But in Europe, and increasingly here in America, those days are gone. Many migrants, especially young people, have little interest in acculturation. These migrants want the social and economic benefits of a prosperous, stable society without investing any personal equity in it, preferring to remake the place they fled in a new postal code. Since there’s generally a pretty good reason someone emigrates to greener pastures, this superposition of the old over the new makes little rational sense. And you can see how this plays out right now in Europe, where most major cities have enclaves that native Europeans will no longer visit.

Multiculturalism in the modern world is a mixed bag. It can work, but only when there’s agreement on shared values. You simply cannot wish into existence a peaceful community composed of disparate cultures with few common values and just hope that everything works out. Everything probably isn’t going to just work out. You can preach all the tolerance that you want, but if one part of the new community decides, for instance, that women and children have no rights because they don’t in the old country, that’s going to be a problem.

When disparate values conflicted in Rotherham, the authorities chose to prioritize the fantasy of “community relations” over the very real issue of public safety, preaching tolerance for things that should simply not be tolerated. A community that prioritizes harmony over the fundamental responsibility for maintaining children's safety isn't a community; it's a collection of utopian lemmings looking for the nearest cliff.

My ancestors hail from Appalachia. As looked down upon as they were, you may rest assured that had they gotten wind of a 12-year-old girl being trafficked by a gang of men in a cabin way up hollow somewhere, the perps, when located, would have had to decide quickly if they were running from rock salt (straight line sprint for maximum distance in the shortest amount of time) or double aught (zigzag sprint for maximum avoidance) at the other end of that 12-guage. In Rotherham, authorities arrested a father for disrupting the peace when he tried to rescue his daughter. It appears that in the case of British authorities, believe the women must have been updated, for the sake of “community relations,” to believe the women unless it’s inconvenient.

The thing that really galls me about BTW 2.0 is that the evidence, which incontrovertably revealed thousands of incidents of child sexual abuse in this scandal, is abundant, compelling, and orders of magnitude better than the accusations used to hammer Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh over E. Jean Carroll and Christine Blasey Ford, respectively. You’d have to be willfully ignorant to pretend that nothing untoward was going on in Rotherham. You’d just have to not care about details like burden of proof and presumption of innocence in order to use BTW 1.0 as a cudgel.

It takes little imagination for me to see how willful ignorance played out in Rotherham. As I mentioned earlier, I have experience that I wish I did not with the tendency to ignore facts that contradict ideals.

Back in the early 2000’s, post-9/11, there was a push from the George W. Bush administration to convince Americans that the Saudis were our friends. Never mind that 15 of the 19 hijackers who turned airplanes into WMD’s on 9/11 hailed from Saudi Arabia. Bush looked into their eyes and saw their souls. He trusted them and wanted all of us on the bandwagon. So in 2005, the King Abdullah Sponsorship Program (KASP) was established by agreement between Saudi King Abdullah and President Bush, which permitted an increase in the number of Saudi Arabian students in universities in the United States (tens of thousands).

It was a misguided cultural exchange on a grand scale. We have exactly one thing in common with the Saudis: money. They love the money that we pay for the oil. We love the money that we save because they sell it to us cheaply. That’t it. Get beyond that, and you're just being plumb silly.

Nonetheless, academia embraced this program. And why not? Each KASP recipient received not only money for tuition and fees but a $2000+ per month stipend for living expenses. The monetary reward for embracing faux multiculturalism was handsome for all involved. But it didn’t quite work out. When you turn thousands of young men from one of the most repressive societies on the planet loose in small, liberal college towns across the nation, with lots of spending money, you should expect trouble. You were not disappointed if you did.

I taught physics at a university for 25 years. I didn’t need DEI to encourage me to go the extra mile for students I thought needed a leg up. Many of the young women, in particular, who found their way into my physics classes were sent off to college by their parents to snag a husband, not matriculate. But when one of these young women displayed any inclination for math or physics, I did everything in my power to persuade them to obtain a degree in science.

I had no sense of humor concerning KASP students, who were used to treating women as vassals, disrespecting my female teaching assistants. These young women were working as hard as they could to establish identities separate from the local partiarchy. I’d be damned if I was going to allow them to be harassed and disrespected.

KASP students were almost uniformly ill-prepared and rarely showed up for class. Their preferred method of advancement was through brazen acts of academic dishonesty. At one point, I was dealing with hundreds of cases of academic dishonesty per semester. The problems continued outside of class. My teaching assistants, male and female, were followed and harassed. Bribes were commonly offered for changing grades, some quite large. Off campus, KASP students trashed rental property and were routinely involved in traffic violations, theft, and sexual assault. When a KASP student was arrested, it was not unusual for them to be released on bail paid by their government and wisked out of the country by their embassy the next day.

I became a vocal advocate for demanding accountability over this mess. For my efforts, I got absolutely smoked. My dispute with the university over KASP ended up on the front page of The New York Times. Unlike England, where at least some of the press isn’t under the thrall of wokeness, the NYT, following the progressive playbook, portrayed all of us as rubes. But even embarrassment didn’t move our administration off its position one bit. KASP students were a goldmine of revenue and were staying no matter what they did. It was, in fact, better from a business standpoint if they were screwups because the longer they were around, the more revenue they generated for the university.

In the wake of the NYT story, the president of the university held a press conference where he claimed that KASP students were innocent victims of religious and cultural bias and that people like me were the real problem. In that moment, my identity was hijacked from that of an academic who’d spent a career advocating for women and minorities to an Islamaphobe. Everyone else who stood up to the madness was tarred with the same brush.

So I understand the reluctance of the authorities in Rotherham to act. The difference is that my colleagues and I told every administrator who threatened us to throw down. And in our case, a whole lot less was on the line. Our issues were mostly over the cheating and bad manners, not organized child rape. The authorities in England should be ashamed. Being right isn’t a bulletproof vest, but in the end, the truth generally prevails. All it takes is patience. Do your freaking job.

You want to know why the Brits voted for Brexit a few years ago? Well, here you go. If the authorities aren’t going to carry out the basic function of enforcing laws against rape and abuse of children, the next best thing is to stop the flow of abusers.

Right now this is, unfortunately, the way of the liberal western world. Woke double standards are everywhere and often responsible, as in the case of Rotherham, for harm beyond hurt feelings. It’s everywhere, and the hyprocrisy is stunning.

Consider the capacity of at least one liberal western government to excuse poor behavior from members of the second largest religion on the planet, Islam, as happened here, over the oppressor/oppressed narrative. Now contrast that with attitudes toward members of another religion, Judaism, that, thanks to the Holocaust, has a membership two orders of magnitude less than that of Islam. The same people who encouraged everyone to look the other way in Rotherham seldom hesitate to hold Jews responsible for everything from the plight of people unsuccessfully trying to kill them to eczema, seborrhea, and the heartbreak of psoriasis.

Now that, thanks to Elon Musk, Rotherham is back in the news, perhaps there will finally be real justice for the victims in this horrendous affair. Far too few abusers and their enablers were held accountable for this. And many of those who were charged and convicted received light sentences. Some have already been released. It’s evidently possible in Great Britain to spend more time in jail for insulting Islam than for raping a 12-year-old.

But real justice would demand that the perpetrators of these crimes have some company in prison—the authorities who looked the other way and others who encouraged them.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com