One of the alleged victims in a Rotherham park. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Political correctness kept authorities silent and whistleblowers ignored for a decade.

It was revealed last week that between 1997 and 2013, at least 1,400 girls, as young as eleven years old, in just one relatively small English city (Rotherham, population 275,000), had been repeatedly and systematically raped by gangs of men over the past decade.

As summarized in a British government inquiry:

It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.



Why was nothing done for 16 years?

Police incompetence was a factor, but not the primary reason.

The primary reason was political correctness. It turns out that the perpetrators were all, or nearly all, of “Pakistani heritage” and the girls were all, or nearly all, white.

This explanation is not that of conservatives alone. Virtually everyone, including media and politicians on the British left, acknowledge that this is the reason. What neither they nor the American Left have acknowledged is that political correctness was created and is sustained by the Left.

It is a testament to the lack of self-awareness on the left that it experiences no cognitive dissonance. The New York Times and other left-wing media have thoroughly reported this story and the fact that political correctness is to blame for what was done to these girls. Yet they are oblivious to the fact that they are the very ones who created the moral monsters known as political correctness, multiculturalism, and “diversity” — the doctrines that forbid judging non-whites, Muslims, and others by the same moral standards by which whites and Christians are judged.

These left-wing doctrines made 16 years of gang rapes of English girls possible.



In 2002, a Labour MP from nearby Keighley, Ann Cryer, complained to the police about “young Asian lads” raping girls in her constituency. In her words, she “was shunned by elements of her party.” And note that, as is demanded by the Left in the UK, she didn’t even mention that the rapists were Pakistani, lest Muslims be blamed for this evil. They were “Asian lads.”

And, for the record, her attempts to get local imams to intervene with the men failed; she was called a racist.

National Review editor Rich Lowry reports that “in a BBC documentary, the author of a 2002 report to the Rotherham council on the scandal said her work was quashed. When she noted that the perpetrators were from the Pakistani community, a colleague told her ‘you must never refer to that again — you must never refer to Asian men.’ She was sent to diversity training and, by her account, nearly fired.”

British home secretary Theresa May told Parliament that “institutionalized political correctness” was responsible for the lack of attention given to the mass rape.


In 2011, Jack Straw, an MP and former UK home secretary, announced that “there is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men . . . who target vulnerable young white girls.” Straw was dismissed by the Left. For example, Keith Vaz, a Labour MP, told the BBC: “I disagree with Jack Straw . . . I don’t think you can stereotype an entire community.”

The immediate case that prompted Straw’s statement was the conviction of two Brits of Pakistani heritage on charges of rape. Multiculturalism and PC clearly infected the judge in that case, who “said he did not believe the crimes were ‘racially aggravated,’ adding that the race of the victims and their abusers was ‘coincidental.’”

“Coincidental.”

Lies are to political correctness, multiculturalism, and “diversity” what water is to fish.

Retired detective chief superintendent Max McLean, who led a previous police investigation into sexual exploitation involving the grooming and trafficking of young girls in Leeds, questioned whether it was a cultural problem.

(Italics added.) Perhaps the detective chief superintendent is unaware of the following from his own country (as reported last week in the New York Times):

The same [as in Rotherham] was true in recent prosecutions in Oxford, in southern England, and the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale, where nine men of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghan origin were given long prison sentences in 2012 for abusing up to 47 girls. Investigators in Scotland have reportedly uncovered a similar pattern of abuse.


So why did the judge “question whether it was a cultural problem”?

Because morally judging cultures (except Christianity, Israel, and America) is forbidden by the Left. Indeed, not judging non-Western cultures is the very definition of “multiculturalism.”

And finally, from the same report: Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of a Muslim organization called the Ramadhan Foundation, said that “to suggest that this is somehow ingrained in the community is deeply offensive.”

“Offensive?” But what, Mr. Shafiq, if it’s true?

The answer is clear and important. For the multicultural Left and the victim-status groups it defends — and for the millions of young people the Left has indoctrinated at schools and universities — whether something is true is not what matters. What matters is whether it can be deemed offensive by the Left.

Some 1,400 girls were raped by gangs of men — while one girl was being raped, “the rest of the men, all in their 20s, stood over her, cheering and jeering, and blinding her with the flash of their cameras” — thanks to Leftism’s morality-denying doctrine of multiculturalism.

This is but one more example of the most important moral truth since the beginning of the 20th century: Almost everything the Left touches is either damaged or ruined.

In this case, it was the lives of 1,400 English girls.

One would think, given the Left’s claim to feminism, that for 16 years it would have been the loudest voice calling for the apprehension and punishment of the girls’ rapists. But, as psychiatrist and commentator Theodore Dalrymple noted in a 2004 column, “Where two pieties — feminism and multiculturalism — come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.”

— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His most recent book is Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.