Monsters shielded by political correctness
PARSONS Green bomber Ahmed Hassan could not have signalled his hostility to our country more plainly if he had gone around wearing a sandwich-board proclaiming: ‘I am a terrorist.’
Yet from the moment the Iraqi arrived in Britain – unlawfully, in the back of a lorry from the notorious Calais ‘Jungle’ camp – the authorities ignored screamingly obvious signs of the threat he posed, choosing instead to lavish care and attention on him at taxpayers’ expense.
Within weeks, he told immigration officials he had been kidnapped and trained to kill by Islamic State.
At his sixth-form college in Surrey, he told a teacher it was his ‘duty to hate Britain’, while another caught him listening to jihadi songs. As if that weren’t enough, he was even caught making a donation to IS via an internet app. How much more evidence would the authorities have needed to kick him out of the UK? Instead they offered him a firstclass education and surrounded him with support workers and counsellors. They didn’t even tell his unsuspecting foster parents about his connection with IS.
Indeed, immigration officials, police and social workers appear from the outset to have put the interests of this teenage asylum seeker above those of the people they are paid to protect.
But then this has been a sobering week for illustrating just how deeply political correctness has taken root, to become a dangerous scourge of the modern age.
It began with the appalling revelation that as many as 1,000 girls – mostly white, and some as young as 11 – had been systematically abused by mainly Muslim grooming gangs in Telford, Shropshire.
As in the scandals of Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere, the authorities wilfully turned a blind eye to blatant evidence of what was going on.
Horrifyingly, one victim says she was raped so often in her early teenage years that she visited a clinic twice a week to pick up the morning-after pill.
Yet no questions were asked. Similarly, police said nothing when they stopped Asian men in their 40s with young white girls in their cars.
Indeed, as Guy Adams reports on pages 26-27, every day more victims come forward and more harrowing stories emerge.
The inescapable truth is that abuse on this industrial scale was allowed to continue because police, local government, social workers and others were too frightened of being accused of racism to blow the whistle.
Equally disturbing, meanwhile, is the way the BBC drew a veil over the Telford scandal. Its female presenters have devoted hours of airtime to lamenting the gender pay gap at the Corporation and discussing #MeToo actresses’ complaints about unwanted sexual advances.
But when the truly horrific scale of the Telford abuse came to light, they offered hardly a peep of sympathy for those hundreds of victims of rape and other vile sex crimes. Indeed, for days the BBC gave the story barely a passing mention.
This paper cannot stress too strongly that the overwhelming majority of British Muslims are decent members of our society, with strong family values, who contribute enormously to our country.
But doesn’t the Establishment – including the BBC – insult them by appearing to tolerate despicable behaviour by a minority in their community who so egregiously betray them as much as everyone else?
As for the shocking story of Hassan, we should never forget that dozens could have been killed or maimed by his vicious bomb packed with nails, drill bits and screwdrivers.
How many more like him are at large in our country, protected by the tyranny of political correctness?