“Asian” is the wrong word for what happened in #Rotherham

0,,15721391_303,00There has been rather a lot of news in the UK regarding the horrendous volume of abuse that has been discovered to have been taking place in Rotherham, by “Asian” men.

What has also been exposed is that both the police and also the social services turned a blind eye to it all. Professor Alexis Jay, author of the Rotherham abuse report, speculated that this was motivated by a fear of being labelled racist.

One other additional nugget is that pleas were raised by many over the years to various media outlets such as the BBC and they refused to investigate because once again wished to avoid the charge of being racist. None of this was helped by folks such as Nick Griffin yelling about stuff like this going on, and so nobody wished to be on side with him or to give him even more ammunition for his racist rants.

So now that it has all come out, the most common phrase that gets tossed about to describe the guilty is “Asian men”.

This term is not appropriate 

In still attempting to avoid the rather large elephant in the room, they avoid the truth and simply refer to them as “Asian men”.

Why is that wrong?

Because in this case and other similar cases …

  • The number of those within the Sikh community guilty of such behaviour is exactly zero
  • The number of those within the Hindu community guilty of such behaviour is exactly zero

… and yet the term “Asian men” includes all of them and that is why that turn of phrase is wholly inappropriate.

So what is the common pattern?

In almost every single instance the one common factor is that all the men are from the Muslim community, and yet very few are prepared to criticise an irrational belief (an idea) and much prefer to revert to generic racial labels.

What has Gone Wrong?

There are two key Islamic factors at play here.

Misogyney – The belief that women are inferior to men, and in some instances are almost akin to chattel that are owned …

  • The Quran itself says that the testimony of one man is equivalent to that of two women
  • The Insistence that women must cover up, least a man catch a glimpse of some flesh, and thus the responsibility for the lust of men is pushed on to women and men need take no responsibility at all
  • Even in the supposed afterlife, it is only the men who get 72 virgins

Pedophelia – The belief that it is just fine for old men to engage in relationships with very very young girls

  • At the age of 50 Mohammed married six year old Aisha. Due to the life of Mohammed being deemed the perfect example, many feel this justifies such relationships. The source for this is Islamic and is not some modern anti-Islamic slur.
  • The issue is not, “did Mohammed really do that?” (some variations of Islam dismiss the belief) but rather is the observation that millions believe it to be true.

Is this Universal?

Nope, but the beliefs are still quite pervasive and common and so they manifest within many Muslim men seeing western women, especially young girls, as prey and have that stance justified by their belief.

There are of course many decent honourable Muslims who are progressive and do not think or behave like this, and there rests the hope for a better world, for such progressive thinking needs to be nurtured and encouraged.

It Needs to be Open Season on bad ideas and bad beliefs that inspire such abhorrent behaviour

The bottom line is this – criticism of bad ideas matters, because without such criticism, the bad ideas get a free ride and that in turn leads to the abhorrent behaviour in Rotherham and many other places as well.

Identifying the guilty as “Asian” is a racist stance that is an unwarranted slur on a rather broad and diverse community, most of whom are honourable decent people, it also avoids nailing the actual root cause, the rather bad religious ideas, that motivate such behaviour.

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