The notorious Sydney gang rapes in 2000 were committed by Lebanese Australians. Muslim men raped women and girls as young as 14. Australia, being a sensible sort of place, identified that the rapists were targeting white girls and branded these monstrous acts “racially-motivated hate crimes.”

Because that’s what they looked like: one ethnicity was specifically targeting another. The Australian girls were vulnerable, and they were abused by Middle Eastern men who considered them “trash.” Had these men been at home, they would have raped their own, but in another country, women from outside their own “community” were preferable victims.

Elsewhere in Europe, the problem has been known about for years. In the Netherlands, it’s Moroccans and Turks who have taken advantage of legalised brothels to entrap and enslave white girls. Holland has been dealing with and discussing this problem openly since 2001.

And now we have our own gang rape scandal, with chillingly similar dynamics at play. This time it’s Pakistanis, and a staggering 1,400 victims across sixteen years in the town of Rotherham. In 2012, the Times uncovered documents showing agencies were aware of extensive and co-ordinated abuse of white girls by Asian men in Rotherham for which no one had been prosecuted. Once again, a single ethnicity, targeting another.

But only a racist would believe this is a “Pakistani” problem. It isn’t. It’s a cultural phenomenon unique to Muslim communities, as suggested by the prevalence of father-son combinations in so many of the gangs, wherever in the world they appear. And here’s another clue it’s not just about brown-on-white crime: Britain’s Sikh community has been complaining for years that its young girls are being targeted by Muslim rapists.

But good luck figuring out the complicated racial and religious dimensions to these crimes if you’re getting your news from the Guardian. That newspaper, together with some parts of the BBC, is committing the same error in judgment that the police and council in Rotherham did over all those years. They are turning a blind eye to obviously pertinent facts of the case for political reasons.

There are complex religious and cultural reasons why Muslim men are drawn to rape in gangs, often in family units, with fathers, sons and uncles all raping the same women. But how will we ever know why this is so, and begin to tackle it, until we are honest about what’s happening?

I can’t vouch for the authorship of this remarkable online document, apparently produced by members of the public, but it discusses in impressive detail some of these issues – and documents a decade of cover-up and cowardice by the media, politicians and law enforcement. It shows that what has been happening on our streets is better understood by ordinary members of the public than by the people who run their cities.

Rotherham is a Labour area (well of course it is), though it’s also somewhere UKIP does strongly in elections – probably because local residents are a lot more realistic about the town’s problems than its police force. The BNP even came third in a 2010 by-election. And it’s Labour’s obsession with political correctness, multiculturalism and avoiding accusations of racism that some say contributed to this disaster.

“Now we can see the terrible harm done by so-called ‘progressive’ zealots who have made it a thought crime to identify and deal with bad behaviour by minorities, while in another part of the liberal jungle sanctioning the sexual free-for-all,” wrote Times columnist Melanie Phillips yesterday.

It is difficult to overstate how awful these crimes were, nor how completely victims were failed by the authorities. One girl was doused in petrol and told she would be set on fire if she didn’t comply. Others were forced to watch rapes and told they would be next if they spoke out. The police regarded these girls with as much contempt as the rapists.

And in perhaps the most horrific paragraph in a report published yesterday, we learned that in two cases fathers had tracked down their daughters and tried to rescue them from houses in which they were being held, only to find themselves arrested by police, while the rapists walked free.

How many council staff do you suppose are under investigation, or have been sacked? Yup, you guessed it: none. Rotherham council’s chief executive, Martin Kimber, has not only stayed in his post but he has said he doesn’t have evidence enough to prosecute or discipline a single member of the council’s staff.

“Failures of leadership,” he called it – a modern euphemism for the refusal by bosses to do the honourable thing and take responsibility. “Officers in senior positions responsible for children’s safeguarding services throughout the critical periods when services fell some way short of today’s standards do not work for the council today,” he said. How convenient for him!

If you’re wondering just how badly in denial our police and politicians were about all this, by the way, consider a BBC report from 2012 I stumbled across, which recounts that Chief Constable David Crompton was asked if “ethnic origin was a factor” in the Crown Prosecution Service charging suspects. His reply? “No, it’s not a factor at all.”

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Left-wing media appears to be in cahoots with the Establishment to cover up crime because it refuses to acknowledge that there might be such a thing as a racially or religiously inflected crime not committed by a white person.

With lies and denial at those levels, God only knows what’s happening in the rest of the country. Will we ever find out? Or are Labour politicians and the police force hell-bent on enforcing colourblindness, even if it means thousands of children being sexually abused? Because, I’m sorry to say, it’s simply not plausible that Rotherham is the only town in which this is happening.

It remains true that the majority of child abusers are older white men. But how many white men rape on the scale we’ve seen in Rotherham and Sydney – not to mention what happens back in Pakistan and the Middle East? In any case, it’s obvious why there are more white rapists: Britain is 90 per cent white. But although white child abusers tend to act alone, gangs of rapists operating on an industrial scale is is a specific cultural problem in Muslim communities. Why bother denying it?

The enquiry was told that gang rape was a “usual part of growing up” in some parts of Rotherham. For how many other cities in our country is that the case? Shouldn’t we be looking elsewhere, to places where there are similar socioeconomic, religious and ethnic mixes, to see if the same problems exist and help to prevent more young girls from being abused? Or would that be “racist”?

The political Left shrieks blue murder over the slightest indication of overbearing male behaviour when it’s a white man. The tone-deaf “Everyday Sexism” project is a weapon wielded almost exclusively at white middle-class men by white middle-class women. But it makes excuses for rapists and even child abusers when the criminals are black, or, especially, from a Muslim community.

It takes a brave politician, especially if they sit on the Labour side of the House, to speak frankly about Muslim attitudes to non-Muslims in Britain today. Remember the outcry when Jack Straw said what everyone in his constituency knew, that white girls were considered “easy meat” by Pakistani rapists? He was right, though.

How long before we admit there’s a Muslim gang rape problem in this country? And how on earth can we prevent further abuses, if we’re not honest about why these things happen and who’s involved, and we seek to better understand the dynamics of these communities and what might motivate their young men to commit these crimes?