Over in Britain, UKIP leader Gerard Batten has this week grasped the third rail of politics in the West, venturing where no other British or American politician has yet dared to go. According Sky News, Batten “has linked Islam to the ‘industrialised sexual exploitation’ of girls across the country.”

This connection ought to be blazingly obvious, but it isn’t, and the fact that there is even any controversy over Batten’s remarks indicates how much of a fix Britain – and the West in general – is in.

Said Batten: “The ideology of the religion does actually traditionally throughout its history make sex slaves legitimate. Their prophet had sex slaves.” This was too much for Sky News presenter Gillian Joseph, who has no doubt spent years studying the Qur’an and Sunnah. But when Joseph challenged Batten, Batten refused to back down, declaring: “It’s in the Hadith and the Koran. It’s a tradition that that’s okay to do that. People take their prophet as the model for all time and the perfect human being, so if he did something then it’s okay for other people to do it.”

To the inevitable charge that Batten is “anti-Muslim,” he responded in advance: “The problem is with the ideology, not individuals. I have never attacked individuals. I always talk about the ideology, and the ideology is the problem.”

Joseph claimed that Batten was “attacking the entire religion of Islam” (How? When? Where?), to which Batten responded: “It does allow their followers to take sex slaves who are not of the same religion. It is no good telling me and the world it doesn’t happen because everybody knows it does happen. It is predominantly people who follow that religion who are causing this problem – on a national scale – which is the industrialised sexual exploitation for money and for their own perverted purposes. That happens to be a fact.”

Determined, as are all establishment media “journalists,” to defend Islam at all costs and absolve it of all responsibility for the crimes done in its name and in accord with its teachings, Joseph brought up the Catholic Church and its pandemic and ever-growing pedophilia scandal. Batten was ready: “I am happy to condemn paedophilia and child abuse and sexual abuse wherever it occurs – it is reprehensible whoever commits it.”

Why is stating the obvious – that the rape gangs that have exploited and destroyed thousands of British girls have been overwhelmingly made up of Muslims — even remotely controversial? Because the denial and willful ignorance regarding the Muslim rape gangs’ connection to Islam is nigh universal in Britain today. But to deny this is to deny an ever-growing mountain of evidence. One survivor of a Muslim rape gang in the UK said that her rapists would quote Quran to her, and believed their actions justified by Islam.

And there is indeed an Islamic theological foundation for this behavior. The Qur’an teaches that Infidel women can be lawfully taken for sexual use (cf. its allowance for a man to take “captives of the right hand,” 4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, 33:50, 70:30). The Qur’an says: “O Prophet, tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to bring down over themselves of their outer garments. That is more suitable that they will be known and not be abused. And ever is Allah Forgiving and Merciful.” (33:59) The implication there is that if women do not cover themselves adequately with their outer garments, they may be abused, and that such abuse would be justified.

But you simply can’t say this in shattered, staggering, dhimmi Britain today. When Labour MP Sarah Champion wrote something far less politically incorrect than what Batten has now said — “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls” — Labour expelled her from the Shadow Cabinet.

Sarah Champion was axed from the Shadow Cabinet even though she repeated the politically correct fictions about the rape gangs having nothing to do with Islam, even as she dared to note that the perpetrators were Pakistani: “The real frustration is that I don’t know what motivated these gangs. Other than being of Pakistani heritage, what is the commonality? It might be that they went to the same school. People sloppily call them ‘Muslims’ but are they Muslims? I don’t know. They could be Pakistani Christians.”

No, they couldn’t be. The names of the perpetrators alone indicate that they’re Muslims. There are no Pakistani Christian rape gangs. It is a shame that Sarah Champion has now received death threats for her tepid and half-true remarks, but she is actually an indication of the terrible state Britain is in today. Everyone is willfully blind, and one person with one eye is lauded as far-seeing.

So Batten has now stated what no one else dares to say in Britain today, for fear of committing political suicide. And Britain is so far gone today that Batten’s hope of having a political future may be as dim as the prospect of Britain surviving as a free society.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His new book is The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

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