The terrible story of the Oxford child sex ring has brought shame not only on the city of dreaming spires, but also on the local Muslim community.

It is a sense of repulsion and outrage that I feel particularly strongly, working as a Muslim leader and Imam in this neighbourhood and trying to promote genuine cultural integration.

There is no doubt that the evil deeds of these men have badly set back the cause of cross-community harmony.

In its harrowing details, this grim saga of exploitation, misogyny, perversion and cruelty fills me not only with desperate sorrow for those girls and their families, but also with dread and despair.

If I were the judge in this case, I would hand out the harshest possible jail sentences to these monstrous predators, both to see that justice is done for their victims and to send out a message to other exploiters.

And when I say harsh, I mean it: none of this fashionable nonsense about prisoners being released only a quarter of the way through their sentences. There is no pattern of good conduct these men could follow behind bars that could possibly make up for all the terrible suffering they have inflicted on others.

Depravity

But apart from its sheer depravity, what also depresses me about this case is the widespread refusal to face up to its hard realities.

The fact is that the vicious activities of the Oxford ring are bound up with religion and race: religion, because all the perpetrators, though they had different nationalities, were Muslim; and race, because they deliberately targeted vulnerable white girls, whom they appeared to regard as ‘easy meat’, to use one of their revealing, racist phrases.

Indeed, one of the victims who bravely gave evidence in court told a newspaper afterwards that ‘the men exclusively wanted white girls to abuse’.

But as so often in fearful, politically correct modern Britain, there is a craven unwillingness to face up to this reality.

Commentators and poli-ticians tip-toe around it, hiding behind weasel words.

We are told that child sex abuse happens ‘in all communities’, that white men are really far more likely to be abusers, as has been shown by the fall-out from the Jimmy Savile case.

One particularly misguided commentary argued that the predators’ religion was an irrelevance, for what really mattered was that most of them worked in the night-time economy as taxi drivers, just as in the Rochdale child sex scandal many of the abusers worked in kebab houses, so they had far more opportunities to target vulnerable girls.

But all this is deluded nonsense. While it is, of course, true that abuse happens in all communities, no amount of obfuscation can hide the pattern that has been exposed in a series of recent chilling scandals, from Rochdale to Oxford, and Telford to Derby.

In all these incidents, the abusers were Muslim men, and their targets were under-age white girls.

Moreover, reputable studies show that around 26?per cent of those involved in grooming and exploitation rings are Muslims, which is around five times higher than the proportion of Muslims in the adult male population.

To pretend that this is not an issue for the Islamic community is to fall into a state of ideological denial.

But then part of the reason this scandal happened at all is precisely because of such politically correct thinking. All the agencies of the state, including the police, the social services and the care system, seemed eager to ignore the sickening exploitation that was happening before their eyes.

Terrified of accusations of racism, desperate not to undermine the official creed of cultural diversity, they took no action against obvious abuse.

Amazingly, the predators seem to have been allowed by local authority managers to come and go from care homes, picking their targets to ply them with drink and drugs before abusing them. You can be sure that if the situation had been reversed, with gangs of tough, young white men preying on vulnerable Muslim girls, the state’s agencies would have acted with greater alacrity.

Another sign of the cowardly approach to these horrors is the constant reference to the criminals as ‘Asians’ rather than as ‘Muslims’.

In this context, Asian is a completely meaningless term. The men were not from China, or India or Sri Lanka or even Bangladesh. They were all from either Pakistan or Eritrea, which is, in fact, in East Africa rather than Asia.

What united them in their outlook was their twisted, corrupt mindset, which bred their misogyny and racism.

If they had been real, genuine followers of Islam, they would not have dreamt of indulging in such vile crimes, for true Islam preaches respect for women and warns against all forms of sexual licence, including adultery and exploitation.

Contempt

By all accounts, this was not the version that these men heard in their mosques. On the contrary, they would have been drip-fed for years a far less uplifting doctrine, one that denigrates all women, but treats whites with particular contempt.

In the misguided orthodoxy that now prevails in many mosques, including several of those in Oxford, men are unfortunately taught that women are second-class citizens, little more than chattels or possessions over whom they have absolute authority.

That is why we see this growing, reprehensible fashion for segregation at Islamic events on university campuses, with female Muslim students pushed to the back of lecture halls.

There was a telling incident in the trial when it was revealed that one of the thugs heated up some metal to brand a girl, as if she were a cow. ‘Now, if you have sex with someone else, he’ll know that you belong to me,’ said this criminal, highlighting an attitude where women are seen as nothing more than personal property.

The view of some Islamic preachers towards white women can be appalling. They encourage their followers to believe that these women are habitually promiscuous, decadent and sleazy — sins which are made all the worse by the fact that they are kaffurs or non-believers.

Their dress code, from mini-skirts to sleeveless tops, is deemed to reflect their impure and immoral outlook. According to this mentality, these white women deserve to be punished for their behaviour by being exploited and degraded.

Brutish

On one level, most imams in the UK are simply using their puritanical sermons to promote the wearing of the hijab and even the burka among their female adherents. But the dire result can be the brutish misogyny we see in the Oxford sex ring.

For those of us who support effective and meaningful integration, it is dispiriting to see how little these criminals, several of them second-generation Britons, have been integrated into our society.

If they were possessed by the slightest sense of belonging or shared citizenship, they would have had some respect for the welfare of these girls.

Instead, they saw only people from an alien world with which they felt no connection. For them, there was no sense of kinship or solidarity for people in their neighbourhood who were not Muslims.

It is telling, though, that they never dared to target Muslim girls from the Oxford area. They knew that they would be sought out by the girls’ families and ostracised by their community. But preying on vulnerable white girls had no such consequences — once again revealing how intimately race and religion are bound up with this case.

We will build a secure society only when we are all taught to have respect for one another, regardless of creed or colour.

Horror over this latest scandal should serve as a catalyst for a new approach, but change can take place only if we abandon the dangerous blinkers of political correctness and antiquated multiculturalism.

By Dr Taj Hargey
http://www.dailymail.co.uk

A number of lawmakers have forwarded a draft law to the speaker of Iraqi Parliament regarding the Kurdish language in education system.

A lack of teachers specializing in the Kurdish language to fill positions in more than 21,000 schools is the main obstacle to implementing the law.

The draft law, which stipulates that the Kurdish language be studied from the fourth grade through college in all of Iraq, has been signed by 30 MPs.

Burhan Faraj, a member of the education committee in Iraqi Parliament, said, “We have been working on this project for a while. Our committee asked Iraq’s Ministry of Education to implement this law, but we believe they will not.”

Faraj added, “The draft law has been prepared and forwarded to the speaker of parliament to get in order legally.”

Alla Maki, deputy chair of the education committee, told Rudaw, “The idea is that Arab students will learn the basics of Kurdish starting in primary school, just as Arabic is currently studied in Kurdistan Region schools.”

Maki believes the project is significant as language can create a strategic relationship between Iraqi children, along with the more general benefits of learning another language.

He added, “The project is constitutional. It is based on the constitution that everybody has agreed to.”

The Kurdish language is currently taught in Iraqi high schools. According to the constitution, it must be taught at all levels of education as it is an official language of Iraq, alongside Arabic.

Hussein Jaff, the general director of Kurdish studies in Iraq’s Ministry of Education, reported that the language is already being taught in over 100 schools in Baghdad. “Currently, 90 schools from the Rusafa neighborhood and 20 schools from Karkh are studying Kurdish experimentally,” he said.

He added, “In the beginning, it was just for the Kurdish students, but later a number of Arab families wanted their children to learn Kurdish as well.”

Jaff said that, if the project passes this phase of testing, it will become a standard subject that students are obligated to study across Iraq.

According to the data, 1,554 schools are studying Kurdish outside Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) administrative areas. A large number are in Kirkuk.

Jaff said that over 1,000 graduate students can teach Kurdish, but a shortage of capable teachers in the south and middle of Iraq has been the main barrier in implementing the law.

Maki said that, once the draft law is approved, this will be sorted out in planning. “We can exchange teachers. We will send Kurdish teachers to the south to teach Kurdish and send Arab teachers to Kurdistan to teach Arabic,” he said.

Faraj added, “We have asked the KRG and Baghdad to cooperate in this regard. We will also ask the Ministry of Higher Education to consider this so we can prepare good experts in the field.”

By Adnan Hussein
www.rudaw.net