TWO-tier justice in favour of Muslim immigrant criminals is an American problem, not just a British problem. The reasons are just the same.
For four decades, British authorities have rebuffed complaints about the trafficking, kidnapping, abuse and rape (mistermed ‘grooming’ in normative British discourse) of children by gangs of Muslim men, mostly immigrants or second-generation immigrants from Pakistan (collectively mistermed ‘Asians’).
In the United States, it has emerged that state and local authorities in Minnesota similarly danced around fraud of the federally funded child-care assistance programmes (CCAP) by Somali refugees and descendants in the largest Somali community (more than 100,000) outside the native country.
Such examples of large-scale criminality have common traits. Criminals organised themselves by religion and ethnicity, and victimised their opposites. Official authorities were reluctant to investigate crimes by offenders of that religion and ethnicity, and doubted the accusers.
Why? Again, the similarities are unmistakeable. The ethnicity and religion of the criminal gangs became over-represented in local politics as supposedly non-partisan institutions were captured by a destructive ideology of multiculturalism.
The UK groomers’ mode was to target non-Muslim girls (mostly white, sometimes Indian-heritage) from troubled backgrounds. Some abusers were quite open with their victims that their rape was justifiable on race and religious grounds. In Rotherham, South Yorkshire, an inquiry found that the abusers viewed white girls as culturally inferior. Arshid Hussain, for example, forced a 14-year-old to her knees to perform a sex act while he called her a ‘white bitch and trash’. He stated that ‘Asian women didn’t perform oral sex as it was against their religion’.
This we know from the judge’s sentencing remarks in 2016, although the transcript was not released in full until this month.
One victim has testified (under the pseudonym Sammy Woodhouse) that her abusers ‘made it clear that because I was a non-Muslim, and not a virgin, and because I didn’t dress modestly, that they believed I deserved to be “punished”.’
Some girls were plied with alcohol and drugs, trafficked between towns, held in houses or offices for days at a time and abused by relatives and friends from other areas. The abuse included rape, beatings, threats to kill family members, dousing with petrol, branding and ultimately murder.
In Minnesota, on the other hand, the main victims of fraud are taxpayers and legitimate low-income families, some Somali, but mostly white. This followed the number of Somali-owned day-care centres for children rocketing in the decade since the first was registered in 2000.
Starting in 2016, former employees and competing day-care owners reported that many day-care operators were billing CCAP for fake children, children in Somalia, and exaggerated hours. By 2018, Fox 9 News Minneapolis estimated up to $100million (£75million) in fraud per year. Minnesota spent roughly $1billion annually on CCAP from 2014 to 2019. In some zip codes, state payments to Somali day-care providers exceeded reported household income by five to ten times.
In 2022, the FBI and IRS revealed charges against 47 people (later rising to more than 70) who allegedly defrauded federal child nutrition programmes, such as the Child and Adult Care Food Program, through an initiative called Feeding Our Future. The Center of the American Experiment specifies nearly $662million (£497million) was lost through Feeding Our Future and the organisations it sponsored.
Allegedly, money was laundered and used to purchase property and luxury vehicles. Suitcases of cash were flown to Somalia to finance relatives, al-Shabab terrorists, and other organised criminals (according to FBI affidavits in the unrelated but contemporaneous ‘Operation Limelight’).
In Britain, authorities routinely dismissed victims as ‘child prostitutes’ or girls who were simply ‘making lifestyle choices’. Even statutory rape (which applies even if the child is ‘making lifestyle choices’) was not prosecuted. Physical evidence, such as insemination and wounds, went unrecorded. Distraught parents were dismissed as racists.
In 2014, an independent inquiry by Professor Alexis Jay found that at least 1,400 children were exploited in Rotherham from 1997 to 2013. The Home Office consulted police and council officials in 2001. Yet officials expressed the fear that pursuing Pakistani perpetrators would ‘cause unrest in the community’. Police were ordered not to enter houses occupied by Pakistanis. Some frustrated fathers tried to rescue their daughters, only to be arrested for breach of the peace, while the abusers stayed free.
Criminal investigations were rare and late. Most did not end in convictions. Sentences were light. Courts routinely issue longer prison sentences for a politically-incorrect tweet than a rape.
Figures for other towns and cities were similar: Rochdale, thousands of victims, but only nine men convicted; Oxford, hundreds of victims, but only seven men jailed, for abusing six girls; Telford, more than 1,000 victims, only about 35 convicted; Oldham (2022), hundreds of victims, around 20 convicted, including a welfare officer; Manchester, thousands of victims, more than 1,000 suspects, but only about 20 convicted.
Together, these reports suggest that 84 to 100 per cent of the abusers per locality were Muslims, despite representing 5 per cent of the local population. Yet in 2020, the Home Office claimed the data too ‘bias[ed]’ or ‘poor’ to confirm that Muslims, Pakistanis or immigrants are over-represented in the rape gangs. The Home Office wilfully preferred to report the offending rate in the national population, in which whites are the majority. The Guardian reported gleefully that the Home Office ‘dispels myth of “Asian grooming gangs” popularised by far right’.
In a similar sleight of hand, Minnesota’s Department of Human Services (DHS) repeatedly found ‘no widespread fraud’. It cancelled a few licences to operate, but did not systematically investigate the reports. DHS cited privacy concerns in opposition to lawsuits to obtain data on payouts, even though the data are supposed to be public.
DHS officials, state legislators (particularly from Somali districts), US Representative Ilhan Omar, and Islamic Center leaders routinely dismissed the reporting of fraud as ‘anti-immigrant’ or ‘Islamophobic’. The Star Tribune framed it as ‘right-wing fearmongering’.
The federal investigations into Feeding Our Future, which had started in 2019, were hampered by accusations of racism.
To this day, almost none of the major day-care fraud allegations reported since 2016 have resulted in criminal charges.
So why the industrial scale neglect and obfuscation?
First, Minnesota is run by Democrats, from governor to legislature to courts. Democrats rely on Somali votes in Minneapolis, the state’s largest city, which swings the state as a whole. Their attention to Somali-led fraud, however belated, is one explanation for the decline in Somali support in the election of 2024.
In Britain, the Labour Party ran the areas worst-afflicted by grooming gangs. Councillors (and, allegedly, welfare officers and police) were among the abusers and often blocked efforts to investigate.
Sir Keir Starmer’s government, elected in July 2024 thanks partly to Labour’s Muslim base, for a long time resisted inquiries into ‘grooming’. In January, after more journalistic and private reporting, it U-turned and ordered an ‘audit’ of ‘group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse’.
To some surprise, Baroness Casey’s report identified the abusers as disproportionately Pakistani Muslim immigrants, most of the victims as white girls, and some police and councillors as aware if not involved.
Casey’s report made it impossible for Starmer to refuse a national inquiry. But in October, it emerged that that the Home Office has wasted months by pressuring victims on the panel to accept mission creep beyond Muslim gangs, and to consider senior roles for former police and social workers (in spite of victims objecting specifically to involvement of such complicit professions). Consequently, half the victims have quit and remaining candidates for the chair have withdrawn. The Home Office says it will take months to find a replacement.
Is this just an accident or evidence of wider institutional misdirection? The victims appointed to the panel blame Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips but she reports to Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who is two-faced. Mahmood has belatedly conceded that the inquiry will focus on the gangs, but like Phillips, she refuses to recognise Muslims or immigrants as the principal abusers. Mahmood is Islamocentric, a woman who claims Islamophobia is ‘out of control’, citing only subjective experience while ignoring rising anti-Semitism and the two-tier persecution of Christians.
Another problem is that the inquiry must be conducted in the aftermath of ideological capture of almost all of the key institution. Social workers are recruited and trained to smash white patriarchy. British police were trained in ‘cultural sensitivity’, and against ‘stereotyping’ of ‘Asian’ men.
Similarly, Minnesota DHS staff are trained in DEI. They responded to the reports of fraud by demanding funds to hire an ‘equity co-ordinator’ and to develop ‘culturally competent practices in our investigation process’ to avoid ‘stigmatising’ immigrant communities during audits.
British victims of grooming gangs remain far from justice even though the Labour MP Ann Cryer raised the alarm publicly as early as 2003. In 2004 Channel 4 censored a documentary called Edge of the City about the grooming of girls in Bradford after police warned that it could incite race riots.
The journalists who also chose not to initially report included Andrew Norfolk of the Times, whose investigations into the Rotherham scandal were eventually acclaimed. He waited until 2011 to expose the enormity of the crimes, when he explained his reticence by not wanting to feed a far-right narrative.
The Times ran a series of articles by Norfolk, detailing a ‘pattern’ of grooming by Pakistani-heritage men in northern towns, but the BBC shelved an investigation into the phenomenon by Newsnight in 2011.
British mainstream media continued to largely ignore grooming until the scandal became too great – when the whole world knew about it thanks to Elon Musk using X to denounce the cover-ups.
Similarly, Minnesota’s mainstream outlets largely ignored the day-care fraud scandal until the federal government revealed indictments against Feeding Our Future in 2022.
The rape gangs and Somali fraud are returning to the headlines this month as Open Justice releases transcripts that courts redacted at the time, and as President Donald Trump blames Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota, and vice presidential candidate, for ‘billions’ of lost dollars. Trump has suspended the Temporary Protected Status for Somalis in Minnesota while the federal government investigates the alleged fraud’s links with al-Shabab.
If only Britain had a government as determined to reveal organised crime and the politicians who enabled it, and to act decisively to snuff it out.
