Sarah Champion’s resignation over Muslim comments bodes ill for state of debate in Labour

The newspaper The Sun has been in hot water twice this week over opinion pieces by a senior columnist and a Labour MP on the problem of the Muslim rape gangs.

Ooh – I have said it as well. PROBLEM and MUSLIMS. Quick, sack her from her job… You can’t – Jack Straw threw me on the scrap heap 9 years ago. I say what I like now, please or offend. Historically I am not a fan of the Sun but on this problem Trevor Kavanagh is spot on.

He writes again this morning, but has had to include the usual weasle words about “the vast majority of Muslims in Britain are decent, generous, hospitable and law-abiding men and women who add to the fabric of this nation.” And the MP Sarah Champion has had to resign from the Shadow cabinet. But public opinion won’t be silenced. I hear it more and more now. A growing confidence to call the problem what it is. A corrupt ruling elite who have imported millions of Muslims, who follow Islam, an ideology completely at odds with all other civilised society. I won’t say western society as Islam has spent 1400 years also attacking Hindus, Buddhists, the Chinese and you can see them now trying to chip tiny inroads into Japan. Good luck with that one. 

From the Sun, the Spectator and others. 

SOME Sun readers may have missed the concocted explosion of Labour and Islamic hysteria over a column I wrote on Monday about Muslim sex gangs. This fake fury was largely confined to a small circulation, mostly-online newspaper and a letter from Labour lefties dragooned by the Muslim Council of Britain.

My offence was to write about the attitude of predatory Muslim men towards white women – what I called “the Muslim Problem”.

I was instantly denounced for fomenting a Nazi-style “Final Solution” comparable only with the Jewish Holocaust. It was a ludicrous, offensive and perverse distortion of the truth.

A letter calling for my dismissal signed by 105 cross-party MPs was led by Labour’s Naz Shah, the Bradford MP suspended last year for anti-Semitism. In a series of social media posts in 2014 she shared a graphic with the headline “Solution for Israel-Palestine conflict – relocate Israel into United States” adding the message “problem solved” – and urged friends to back a poll criticising Israel saying “the Jews are rallying”.

Jeremy Corbyn accepted her reinstatement after a few weeks, sparking criticism over his own alleged anti-Semitism along with that of his pal Red Ken Livingstone.

Fake claims of Islamophobia are the price journalists risk today if we dare question the conduct of a minority hostile to the host community. So, as ever when writing about Islam this week, I was treading on eggshells as I described the very specific problem of “some” Muslim men and their attitude to white Western women.

The article followed the trial and imprisonment of 17 mainly British-born men from the Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Iraqi, Iranian and Turkish communities who groomed, raped and abused scores of vulnerable young, mainly white, girls over many years.

I cited Rotherham Labour MP Sarah Champion who bravely broke ranks and identified the problem everyone else on the Left had shied away from.

She told Radio 4’s Today programme: “We’ve got now hundreds of men, Pakistani men, who have been convicted of this crime. Why are we not commissioning research to see what’s going on and how we need to change what’s going on so it never happens again?”

She added: “The far right will attack me for not doing enough, the floppy left will have a go at me for being a racist. But this isn’t racist, this is child protection and we need to be grown up about this and deal with it.”

The Sun asked Ms Champion if she would write an op-ed piece for the following day’s paper, expanding on her comments. She happily agreed and filed an article that was approved by her office. Sarah was delighted. Her only request was for us to use a more flattering picture in future.

Presumably got at by Corbynistas, she has subsequently sought to distance herself from her own article and has now resigned for her “poor choice of words”.

The abuse of women by Muslims, says Trevor Phillips, is “on an industrial scale. . . What the perpetrators have in common is their proclaimed faith. They are Muslims, and many of them would claim to be practising. It is not Islamophobic to point this out.”

My mistake, apparently, was to describe this as “the Muslim Problem”.

I can honestly say it never occurred to me that this could be interpreted as a play on “the Jewish Problem” and I will happily apologise to anyone who is thus offended. Perhaps this is because I have never believed there was a Jewish Problem. There certainly was a Nazi problem with the Jews. And there was the nightmare of “the Final Solution”.

But the Jews have never been a problem as far as I am aware.

Having visited many countries in the Middle East, I can vouch for the fact that Israel alone stands out as the only beacon of true democracy and I am a huge admirer of the Jewish state and its citizens.

This fake outrage is more than simply a personal attack on me or upon the Sun newspaper. It is a pernicious attempt to stifle and smother free speech. The letter from the MPs fails to pinpoint a single mistake or error of fact in my article. It even concedes there are no grounds at all for referring this to Ipso for adjudication. It infringes none of the Editors’ Rules of Conduct. The letter is nothing less than an attempt to gag not just me but anyone else who dares to venture an opinion which contradicts their narrow point of view.

Tom Goodenough in the Spectator

Sarah Champion has stepped down as the shadow women and equalities minister as a result of an authored piece which appeared in the Sun last week, following the conviction of a grooming gang in Newcastle. The passage which appears to have landed Champion in hot water came right at the start of the article: 

Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls. There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?

The Labour MP spent today trying to row back from her comments, saying that her piece should ‘not have gone out in my name’. This seemed like an unlikely excuse: a national newspaper wouldn’t publish an authored piece without the person’s say-so. It’s also likely that the article – if not the headline – would have been approved by Champion or someone in her office before it was published (Guido Fawkes have published an email suggesting this was the case, and a spokesman for the Sun is saying the same).

Now, Champion is gone from the shadow cabinet.

Readers may recall that Miss Champion was elected as MP to Rotherham, the northern town where the crimes of Muslim men against English schoolgirls first came to wide public attention, after the trial of crimes and exposure of the cover-up. Her predecessor, Denis MacShane admitted after retirement that as a

“Guardian reading liberal leftie” he shied away from the issue of the oppression of women in the Muslim community…I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat if I may put it like that.”

Given that the article appeared almost a week ago, it is somewhat surprising that it has taken so long for the backlash to blow up. One likely reason is that Champion appears to have become a target following the publication of a Sun piece by Trevor Kavanagh, in which he spoke of a ‘Muslim problem’ in Britain. This piece generated widespread condemnation on Twitter and also resulted in a number of complaints to the press regulator.

…other Labour MPs are now unlikely to make a similar point again.

I- news (not a huge circulation) condems Kavanagh for defending, not apologising, here. 

The ultra left  Independent publishes its letters page under the headline We don’t have a ‘Muslim problem’, we have a problem of Islamophobia. That is their problem, not ours. 

and of course the Mirror wades in with their support for all things Corbyn.

The Mirror fund Hope not Hate; I would love some true investigative journalist with forensic accounting skills to expose how much the Mirror funds the Labour party, how much the Labour Party funds the Mirror and where the money originates from in the first place. Soros? Saudi? But this country does not train such men and women any more. The Telegraph exposure of MPs expenses 10 years ago was the last blast of that tradition. This next generation is going to have to reinvent the skill.