Why? Because girls from Pakistan don't go out at night! Stupid!

5 years old and still good as new!

Read the stuff and tell me if the date on top has any relevance...

Betraying the rape victims
November 30, 2003
The Sun-Herald


When Crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen and Superintendent Kim McKay addressed a conference on the prevention of violence against women earlier this year, they didn't expect a hostile response from any of the feminists present.

After all, they had successfully prosecuted a series of gang rape trials in which the young female victims were degraded like animals. Bilal Skaf's historic 55-year jail sentence last year was their doing. McKay was commander of the gang rape task force Sayda and her nurturing of the victims was crucial. On Thursday, in Cunneen's latest prosecution, a jury found two more men, Pakistan-born Muslims whose names have been suppressed by the court, guilty of the violent gang rapes of two teenage girls in Ashfield last year. Through five such trials, Cunneen has cheerfully endured abuse and death threats from the rapists and their families and she has been the rock and warrior for the victims.

So when Cunneen and McKay addressed the legal conference in February they were happy to report the good news about rape prosecutions: that the shame has now shifted to where it ought to be - onto the perpetrator, not the victim. It was a theme that should have been welcome but, instead, a "small but vocal group" in the audience angrily asserted that the gang rape cases were "nothing but racist prosecutions", that Skaf would not have received such a long sentence if he hadn't been Lebanese.

This is how an influential part of Sydney's legal and media circles thinks; many, to their eternal shame, are women, for whom a politically correct stance on multiculturalism is more precious than feminist principles or the safety of young women and girls. It makes them uncomfortable to acknowledge the fact that young Muslim men have been roaming around Sydney gang raping non-Muslim women, or as the rapists like to say, "Aussie pigs" and "sluts" who ask for it. Despite the evidence, they refuse to acknowledge it, and that this same pattern has been occurring in other Western countries, notably France.

There have been attempts to smear as racist, journalists or media outlets which present these facts to the public. In March, the Anti-Discrimination Board published a carefully concocted 123-page smear pamphlet Race For The Headlines, about "moral panic" and "anti-Arab, anti-Muslim" bigotry in the media. It was just one of many attempts by ideologues to diminish the real and lasting suffering of the brave young women who testified in court and ensured that at least some rapists were locked away.

But the social problem behind the rapes hasn't gone away. Whatever makes a subsection of immigrant families in Sydney bring up their sons with such disregard for "Australian" or non-Muslim females remains. In a speech recently, former detective sergeant Tim Priest, the Cabramatta whistleblower, said he saw a pattern of denial about "Middle Eastern crime" similar to that which he experienced about drug crime in Cabramatta. He told of many instances of police "backing down to Middle Eastern thugs" in confrontations in what he calls the "Muslim-dominated areas" of south-western Sydney.

He cited a case in Auburn in 2001 when two uniformed police officers stopped a suspect car and found stolen property. The three occupants of the car threatened to kill the officers, and "f---" their girlfriends. When the police called for backup, so, too, did the thugs on their mobile phones, summoning 60 associates for battle. The response by police chiefs was to order the officers to retreat. And then, later, when the offenders drove to the police station, intimidating staff, damaging property and "virtually holding a suburban police station hostage," again the police did nothing. "By avoiding all confrontations with these thugs the police gave away the streets in many areas of south-western Sydney," Priest said.

In another speech last week for Opposition police spokesman Peter Debnam at Parliament House, Priest proposed a solution to the growing mayhem: zero-tolerance policing, which transformed New York in 1994. He spoke scathingly of academics and criminologists who oppose the model because it conflicts with their "root cause" theory of crime. Priest gets a lot of speaking engagements these days and his book with anthropologist Richard Basham, To Protect And To Serve, is a bestseller. But to the liberal establishment, he is a pariah and they take every opportunity to belittle him.

Of course, shooting the messenger is of no service to the vast bulk of decent, law-abiding Muslims in Sydney, whose own leaders have been vocal in support of harsh sentences for gang rapists.

What is really needed is some way of combating the sorts of twisted attitudes towards women which were neatly summed up by the father of the five brothers convicted most recently for the Ashfield rapes.

A doctor, who gave alibi evidence disregarded by the jury, as good as told a reporter last week the victims asked for it. "What do they expect to happen to them? Girls from Pakistan don't go out at night."