RUTHFULLY YOURS

An increasingly popular idea is that whenever races clash, only minorities can be victims. The notion is hardly limited to the recent riots in America. Elements of such thinking often appear in other contexts.

British women, for instance, including rape victims who drew attention to “Asian” (Pakistani and South Asian) sex grooming gangs, are also being attacked by the “woke” establishment.

Earlier this month in the UK, Sarah Champion, a Labor politician and MP for Rotherham (the epicenter of sex grooming), was accused of “fanning the flames of racial hatred” and “acting like a neo-fascist murderer.” Her crime? She had dared to assert that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.”

The same elements accusing Champion of being a “murderer” also characterized the UK’s anti-extremism program, Prevent, as being “built upon a foundation of Islamophobia and racism.”

A few weeks earlier, an article titled, “I was raped by Rotherham grooming gang—now I still face racist abuse online,” appeared. In it, a British woman (alias, “Ella”) revealed that her Muslim rapists called her “a white whore, a white b***h,” during the more than 100 times she was raped in her youth by the Pakistani grooming gang.

“We need to understand racially and religiously aggravated crime if we are going to prevent it and protect people from it and if we are going to prosecute correctly for it,” Champion said in a recent interview.

“Prevention, protection and prosecution—all of them are being hindered because we are neglecting to properly address the religious and racist aspects of grooming gang crimes…. It’s telling them that it’s OK to hate white people.”

Ella’s attempts to highlight the “religious and racist aspects” of her and many other girls’ similar abuse led only to “a lot of abuse from far-left extremists, and radical feminist academics,” she said. Such groups “go online and they try to resist anyone they consider to be a Nazi, racist, fascist or white supremacist”.

“They don’t care about anti-white racism, because they appear to believe that it doesn’t exist. They have tried to floor me and criticise me continually and this has been going on for a couple of months. They tried to shut me down, shut me up … I’ve never experienced such hate online in my life. They accuse me of ‘advocating for white paedophiles’ and being a ‘sinister demonic entity.'”

Placing the blame — or at least responsibility — on the victim is not limited to the UK. According to an August 9, 2019 report, “in the Swedish city of Uppsala … four women were raped in as many days.” Although police failed to issue descriptions of the rapists — usually a sure sign of their origins — they did issue warnings for women to “think how they behave,” to “think ahead,” and not “go out alone.”

Advice against alcohol, drugs, and reckless behavior would be more compelling if it were not made under duress.

After mobs of Muslim migrants sexually assaulted as many as a thousand women on New Year’s Eve 2016 in Cologne, Germany, the city’s mayor, Henriette Reker, called on women to “be better prepared, especially with the Cologne carnival coming up. For this, we will publish online guidelines that these young women can read through to prepare themselves.”

In Austria, after a 20-year-old woman waiting at a bus stop in Vienna was attacked, beaten and robbed by four Muslim men — including one who “started [by] putting his hands through my hair and made it clear that in his cultural background there were hardly any blonde women” — police responded by telling the victim to dye her hair.

“At first I was scared, but now I’m more angry than anything. After the attack they told me that women shouldn’t be alone on the streets after 8pm. And they also gave me other advice, telling me I should dye my hair dark and also not dress in such a provocative way. Indirectly that means I was partly to blame for what happened to me. That is a massive insult.”

In Norway, Unni Wikan, a female professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, insists that “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes,” because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. So much for the feminist claim that women are free to dress as seductively as they want — and woe to the man who misinterprets this, unless he is from a racial or religious minority group.

Professor Wikan’s conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West need to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”

Even when it comes to rape, then, if the victim is white and the rapist is not, she is no victim at all; worse, she is a “racist” and “hater” who, if anything, apparently deserves what she got and more. “Blame the victim” is back with a vengeance and gaining ground throughout the West.

Raymond Ibrahim, author of the recent book, Sword and Scimitar, Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.