Welcome to Douglas Murray’s column “Things Worth Remembering,” in which he presents great speeches we should commit to heart. Scroll down to listen to Douglas reflect on the words of Mark Steyn, a man who dared to challenge the UK’s doctrine of multiculturalism.
The world has finally woken up this week to one of the biggest crimes in twenty-first century Britain: the organized gang rape of thousands of white working-class girls, mainly at the hands of Muslim men of Pakistani origin.
Even writing the sentence above would have got me into far more trouble 20 years ago than it will now. Sure, there are still plenty of people trying to police this story, to claim that race and religion have nothing to do with these crimes, or that it is wrong to bring them up. But the stories of the atrocities in towns like Rochdale, Rotherham, Telford, and Oxford are now out, and there is little likelihood that they will be reined back. Public anger is too great in the UK, and international attention is too focused, to allow that to happen.
Having written about these cases for many years now, I spent part of the last week being asked, “How did it happen? How could such a crime have gone on?” And the answer is: Because there are some terrible things that society wants to deal with, and there are some it refuses to deal with, and the things it refuses to deal with tend to be those crimes that go against some deep narrative of the age.
