I've been meaning to tackle the tree Girls trilogy, its ramifications and the publicity surrounding it. Fortunately for you and me Melanie Phillips has done it for me. (£)
The media were almost universal in their praise for the BBC’s courage in tackling such a delicate topic. Did they mean the courage in the sense of daring to defy the culture of political correctness (much of which was of the BBC’s own making) that led to the suppression of the truth for years?
Or perhaps they meant the courage of possibly inciting multiple backlashes. Threats from angry Muslims or threats against Muslims from the ‘far right’, or threats to that fragile construct, social cohesion.
Of course the film included the obligatory moral equivalence in the shape of scenes of a BNP (or an EDL) demonstration outside the court, but the script didn’t shy away from mentioning the ethnicity of the perpetrators; they were explicitly named as ‘of Pakistani heritage’ or ‘Asian’, but conspicuous by its absence was the theory that Islam itself regards the unbeliever as of little or no value, and sees immoral white girls as easy meat.
Last week’s Sunday Programme included an interview with Nazir Afzal, the Muslim prosecutor who finally allowed the CPS to accept the testimony of the girl victims and bring the case, belatedly, before the law.
Afzal said he had received abuse from the far right ‘because he had damaged their narrative’ due to the fact that he was himself a Muslim. The interview then veered away from the very crux of the Three Girls drama into a vehicle of damage limitation on behalf of the Muslim community. 'More white men are guilty of underage and child sexual abuse than Asians, and by the way, Asian girls are abused too.' That’s the Sunday Programme for you.
Nazir Afzal popped up again on the Question Time panel. Not sure if he strikes me as the sharpest tool in the box.
Melanie Phillips’s article (linked to above) outlines the Three Girls programme and raises some vital issues.
“The second insight is scarcely less disturbing. In the dock, the leader of the pimping gang exclaims: “Where are your white people? They train them [the girls] in sex. They train them in drinking from very young age [sic]. And when they come to us, by that time they’re fully trained. Look at yourself first! Look at your community!”
His words are disgustingly self-serving, but the sting is that they can’t be denied. There’s an unspeakable symbiosis between these predators and the society that fashions children into their potential victims.”
‘Society’ is not something that arises out of a vacuum. The BBC has a part to play in the dumbing down of culture and the sexualisation of pre-teenagers by pandering to the ‘get-famous-quick’ fantasies of the lazy and poorly educated viewer. I think the BBC performs a type of grooming without the help of Pakistani gangs. Some of the superficial crap they air in their pointless ratings war with the commercial broadcasters is a contributory factor. In my humble opinion.
