The religion of child molesters is not the issue

by Sheila Musaji

9 men were convicted this week for their participation in a criminal ring engaging in a disgusting exploitation of vulnerable young girls for sex in England.  The men were from the Pakistani and Afghan communities in England.

They are morally deviant criminals.  They deserve to go to prison and to be punished for their crimes. 

An article in The Guardian notes that

Coverage of the phenomenon of on-street grooming has often characterised the issue as being about gangs of Asian men preying on white girls, and the case has sparked concerns about racial tensions in the north-west and the input of far-right elements.
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) carried out a study of on-street grooming that showed that of 753 offenders, nearly half were of Asian heritage. But the police say the phenomenon is not restricted to any one race – the vast majority of those on the sex offenders register in Greater Manchester are white (95%).

“Child sexual exploitation is not confined to one community, age demographic, social status or gender,” said CEOP. It found that in one case the first contact had been a white British male who groomed the girls as girlfriends, then passed them on to an Asian gang.
CEOP’s chief executive, Peter Davies, said sexual exploitation of children was child abuse and often involved rape. He said it was “premeditated, carried out systematically and with a complete lack of respect or empathy for the victims. They are often singled out for their vulnerability.”

A CEOP report published in 2011 spoke of the difficulties, with CPS solicitors “often reluctant to take up cases of child sexual exploitation because victims are often perceived as unreliable”.

Detective Chief Superintendent Mary Doyle, of Greater Manchester police, said: “As long as there are adults willing to abuse vulnerable children and other adults, it will continue.” On the issue of race, she said it was about vulnerability, not ethnicity. “I think if we start to get ourselves hung up on race and ethnicity issues, we take away the real issues,” she said.

A spokesman for the Muslim organization The Ramadhan Society welcomed the verdict.

...  Mohammed Shafiq, Chief Executive of the Ramadhan Foundation said: “I wish to pay tribute to the bravery of the young girls that have given evidence in this trial, without their contribution justice would not have been possible. Today’s guilty verdicts are to be welcomed and I hope the message goes out that if you engage in these crimes, you will be caught and brought to justice.

These criminals have brought shame on themselves, their families and our community. We reject their actions without reservation and send our thoughts to the victims and reject any attempt by the far right to tarnish the whole Pakistani community. Their actions have no place in a decent society and today we can say justice has been done.

There is a significant problem for the British Pakistani community, there is an over representation amongst recent convictions in the crime of on street grooming, there should be no silence in addressing the issue of race as this is central to the actions of these criminals. They think that white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought; it is this sort of behaviour that is bringing shame on our community. I urge the Police and the Councils not to be frightened to address this issue, there is a strong lesson that you cannot ignore race or be over sensitive.

I have been overwhelmed by the support the Ramadhan Foundation has been given by young people for our campaign on child grooming but concerned that community elders are once again burying their heads in the sand, this concerns us all and we must speak out. The community elders need to learn from the reaction of young people and reject any attempt to silence the reaction from our community. We have over the past twelve months seen tremendous progress, more Imams have spoken out in Friday sermons, workshops and activities for young people have happened in the community and there is a strong commitment to see this work through.

We encourage local authorities and schools to learn from Rochdale where over 9000 teenagers have attended a workshop on child grooming. The Ramadhan Foundation is ready to stand with anyone who wishes to protect these young teenagers. The Police will need to reflect on their failures in this case and we look forward to the IPCC report.

Finally the far right and fascist movements are not welcome to Rochdale, we reject their division and hatred and it has no place in a tolerant and diverse society. We will learn lessons from this case but not allow outsiders to divide us.

When the men were arrested Pamela Geller wrote an article calling them a “Muslim gang” and saying they were representative of “Islam’s war on women.” and their crimes were part of a “critical strategy of this grotesque ideology that demands/commands global domination.”

Now that they have been convicted, Geller takes offence to the statement of condemnation by the Ramadhan Foundation.  She says:

Shafiq is urging police not to be afraid, and yet he is lying about the motive and obfuscating the ideology that asserts that Muslims are superior to non-Muslims. “They think that white [sic: non-Muslim] teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought.” Yes, because that is the sharia. Islam is not a race, and framing the issue this way is just another accommodation to Islam. This reinforces the special status that Muslims have under the sharia, which denies non-Muslims basic human rights.  Of course, the requisite ‘backlashophobia” is a main concern of the Muslim community in the UK, which does nothing about the sexploitation of young non-Muslim girls.  The monstrous crimes of these Muslims are exacerbated by a police force that refused to help the schoolgirls who came begging for help. Again, accommodating Islam for fear of offending, inciting or insulting the Muslim community, law enforcement abandoned little girls. That is shocking. The dhimmitude, appeasement and capitulation to the most brutal and oppressive ideology on the face of the earth.

Geller and Spencer’s rants are yet another example of individuals who are so filled with hatred toward Islam and Muslims that they are unable to see reality.  The disgusting behavior of these moral degenerates is not due to Islam or the Sharia.  Within the Muslim community we have wonderful people who are a credit to their communities, and we also have crazy people, deviants, criminals, gangs, etc. — just like every other community.

Geller’s rant also distorts some important details of the story.  When one of the girls originally came to the local police to report her abuse, she was ignored because of her social background.  According to a local news report

The trial has been controversial in more than one respect. One of the victims first spoke to police in August 2008, supplying underwear with DNA evidence implicating one of the suspects, but a Crown Prosecution Service lawyer failed to press charges after concerns that the jury might have questioned the girl’s credibility.  ...  “The details of the offenses that we have heard in this trial in the last few weeks have shocked and appalled us all,” said Nazi Afzal, chief crown prosecutor for the North West Area.  ...  Both the Crown Prosecution Service and police apologized for not taking the first victim’s case to trial earlier.  It was Afzal who overturned the initial decision and decided to file charges against the men that girl had accused.  “The witness was entirely credible,” he said. “To put it bluntly, the original decision was wrong.”

So a case of adults preying on vulnerable young girls was ignored until a Muslim prosecutor overturned the original decision and filed charges against these criminals.  It was ignored because these girls came from a disadvantaged community and were not seen as credible or worth protecting by the larger society.  We have far too many “throw away” children that are vulnerable to all sorts of predators.

Islamophobes like Geller who attempt to blame Islam for every crime committed by an individual who happens to be a Muslim or even to have been born into a Muslim family are not only defaming Muslims, but also doing a disservice to the victims.  The young girls who are being preyed on by perverts of whatever religion are who need to be defended and protected by all of us. 

It is also a dangerous activity because at some point even the gullible who are taken in by such propaganda may come to realize that it is just that, propaganda. 

Here are just a few cases of similar crimes that I found on the internet in 5 minutes:

— A rabbi was arrested outside his synagogue in Gilbert, Arizona, over his alleged involvement in the rape of a 7 year old child in New York.  ***
— Passaic County sheriff’s detectives arrested 50-year-old Rabbi Gabriel Toledo at a kosher food distribution company in Moonachie on charges of child pornography.  ***
— Rabbi Uzi Rivlin who teaches at Congregation Beth Abraham in Tarrytown has been arrested for sexually abusing two 13 year-old scholarship students who had stayed in his home in Teaneck, N.J.  ***
— A Russian Jewish family ran a high class prostitution ring in NY.  Mikhail Yampolsky and his wife, Bronislava, were among 17 people indicted. Also charged were Yampolsky’s son, Alexander, stepson Jonathan, two investors, Efim Gorelik and Yakov Maystrovich, and 11 employees.  ***
— In Chicago, a former synagogue cantor and his wife were arrested in connection with running a prostitution ring.  ***
— Rabbi Moishe Turner arrested on child sex abuse charges in Spring Valley, NY.  ***
— Rabbi Nechemya Weberman was arrested for rape of a girl from the age of 12 to 16.  He is affiliated, police said, with Brooklyn’s United Talmudic Community, a yeshiva.  ***
— Rabbi Yehuda Kolko was charged with sexual abuse in 2006, accused of molesting students at Yeshiva Torah Temimah in Brooklyn, where he was a teacher. He pleaded guilty to child endangerment.  ***
— A former Antiochian Orthodox priest is in jail, accused of having child pornography. He was still in his leadership position when the illegal images were found on a computer at the St. Anthony the Great Orthodox Church in Houston.  ***
—Police have arrested in Europe more than a hundred people in what they are calling the largest online child-sex ring ever discovered.
At least 230 children, some as young as 7 years old, were rescued from child sexual abuse, officials said. The child sex ring had 70,000 members and was likely the largest online pedophile network in the world. ***
— A Sacramento mother and four daughters pleaded guilty Thursday to various charges stemming from a years-long operation involving the prostitution of underage girls.***
— Kenneth Brandt, 39, of Troy and Patrick Rieder, 31, of Dayton were indicted in Ohio for running a child sex ring.
— Child sex trafficking is a growing threat in the D.C. region because gangs are increasingly getting into the business and pimps’ use of online tools has made it easier to recruit and sell teenage girls, according to local law enforcement officials. ***
— James “Red” Mozie, 35, was convicted of eight counts of child sex trafficking, one count of conspiring to commit child sex trafficking and one count of producing child pornography by taking cell phone photos of an under-age girl.  ***
— Melvin Douglas, a/k/a Melvin Longwood, age 31, of Washington, D.C., indicted for transporting a minor across state lines to engage in prostitution.  ***

The Jewish Women’s Archive has an extensive article on the history of prostitution rings, white slavery gangs, etc. in the various Jewish ethnic communities over the years.  Wikipedia has an entry on Jewish-American organized crime.  Jewish-American organized crime has reappeared in the forms of both Israeli and Russian mafia criminal groups. The Soviet and Russian émigré community in New York’s Brighton Beach contains a large Jewish presence, as does its criminal element.  The Abergil crime family (Hebrew: משפחת הפשע אברג’יל‎) is a crime organization based in Israel, and located around the world. 

Geller’s partner, Robert Spencer posted an article on the convictions titled UK: Muslim forced prostitution gang found guilty.  One of his comments in that article was: ...  if you really don’t want this to happen again, you should be warning the Muslim community that they must take action against the beliefs that lead to it, or non-Muslims will make sure that this is done.  Exactly what would he say to all of the thousands of perverts in other communities.  How should the Catholic, or Jewish, or any other community “take action against the beliefs that lead” to this criminal behavior?

Everyone has heard about the hundreds of cases of child molestation by Catholic priests.  Obviously, Jewish rabbi’s also have had problems.

In addition, there are thousands of such cases that no one would ever know the religion of the perpetrator because it is not mentioned in news items about such crimes unless the perpetrator happens to be a clergyperson.  It is never mentioned, that is, unless the criminal is a Muslim. 

Here are typical headlines when the criminal is not a Muslim:

— CEO Arrested in Child Prostitution Ring
—Child prostitution ring uncovered in Missoula; two men arrested
—14 Indicted In Child Prostitution, Human-Trafficking Ring in Colorado
—3 arrested over child prostitution ring in Wisconsin.

And, if the criminal were a Muslim the headline would read “Muslim” arrested, “Muslim” convicted, “Islamic” criminals, etc.  Unless every criminal is going to be identified by their religious affiliation, then this shows prejudice and bias.  It also gives a false impression that more Muslims are involved in criminal activities than members of other religious groups, and this is simply not the case.

Wasting our time on manufactured side issues takes away our focus on what really matters.  Sexual exploitation of vulnerable young people is a societal problem that needs to be addressed by all of us.  We need to try to understand what we might be able to do to protect young people, and to identify and prosecute those who prey on them much earlier than is often the case.  We also need to focus clearly on helping the victims.

UPDATE 6/23/2012

Sadly, the ability of some adults to take advantage of vulnerable children continues to be in the news.  USA Today reports that this week, Jerry Sandusky was convicted of more than 40 counts of raping and molesting children over a 10 year period.  “The Sandusky verdict came on the same day that a Philadelphia jury convicted a monsignor in the Roman Catholic church of endangering children when he helped the archdiocese keep predatory priests in the ministry and kept it silent.”  Monsignor William Lynn was convicted. 

And, yesterday AFP reported

Four men have been indicted for trying to bribe and threaten a victim into dropping a case against a rabbi accused of sexually molesting her in a close-knit Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn.

The alleged victim, now 17, filed a complaint against Rabbi Nechemya Weberman, 53, for molesting her for three years from 2007 to 2010, when he acted as her therapist. She was 12 when the alleged assaults started.

One of the four men indicted, Abraham Rubin, 48, is accused of trying to buy the victim’s silence by offering her $500,000 if she refused to cooperate with authorities and testify against Weberman, and advising her to flee the country with her boyfriend, according to prosecutors.

The four men pleaded not guilty at a Brooklyn criminal court.

Also yesterday according to the New York Post “Andrew Goodman pleaded guilty to 48 felonies - including criminal sex acts with a minor, sex abuse and sexual misconduct - after Justice Martin Murphy dangled a 2-year sentence in front of him.

SEE ALSO:

Child prostitution a growing problem in the U.S.  http://www.darylwhicker.com/child-prostitution-growing-in-the-u-s-a/
Child-prostitution cases reveal cruel underworld in U.S.  http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-26-prostitution-crackdown_x.htm
Child prostitution in a city near you http://www.abusewatch.net/child_Traf.php
Child trafficking statistics http://sctnow.org/contentpages.aspx?parentnavigationid=5827&viewcontentpageguid=29d295d1-5818-4e7a-bde1-f61690fa44a8
Children of the Night: Child Prostitution is America’s Dirty Little Secret, John W. Whitehead http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/children-of-the-night-chi_b_115348.html
The Danger in Referring to ‘Asian’ Sex Gangs, Myriam Francois-Cerrah http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/myriam-francois/the-danger-in-referring-to-asian-sex-gangs_b_1502331.html?ref=uk
Grooming and race - what do we know?, Alexis Akwagyiram http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18004153
Human trafficking http://www.polarisproject.org/human-trafficking/overview
Sex trafficking in the United States http://www.crisisaid.org/ICAPDF/Trafficking/traffickstats.pdf