PEOPLE OF ALL FAITHS AND NONE HAVE A DUTY TO STAND UP FOR THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN

ONCE again a ruthless gang of child-rapists is exposed – 17 of them, this time in Newcastle. Again all of them were revealed as “Asians”. Then up speaks Trevor Phillips no less to point out that the common denominator was not their Asian ethnicity. And he was quite right.

Indians, Chinese, Hindus or Buddhists – none of these were involved or, so far as I can discover, ever has been. Mr Phillips, the former head of the Commission for Racial Equality, points out that the common factor was simply this: they were all Muslims, like the gang before that and the one before that.

The clear inference, he says, is that Islam alone seems to endorse and condone the brutalisation of women.

But even that is not the point. Many of the victims, apart from being from dreadful homes and deeply vulnerable, were also clearly children. There is no religious faith on earth that condones the debauching of children. So the guilty were culpable before the laws of Britain and of the Koran. Then why did it take years before the police felt able to listen to the cries for help and start a vigorous investigation?

Answer: because they were all terrified of being saddled with the worst adjective in our language – racist. Even now we have Labour’s Sarah Champion forced to resign her shadow cabinet post for daring to tell the truth about these evil gangs. This is not good enough. When a helpless child cries for help there should not be the remotest concern for ethnic origin, skin shade or religion at birth, of victim or persecutor.

Our country now has a huge Muslim “community”. It is surely up to them to clean out their own courtyard or at the least give the police unstinting help. There are some concerns that go far beyond ethnic or religious solidarity and the exploitation of children – any children – is one of them.