The Hypocrisy of Harriet Harman

Daring to bang on about child abuse to the Question Time audience.

To get it out of the way, few, if any, of the Police Officers, the Crown Prosecution Service staff or the social workers involved in the Rochdale case were Muslims, any more than that teacher from Sussex who has eloped with one of his pupils is a Muslim. Their attitudes came, and come, from somewhere else entirely. As some of us have been saying for years, and even putting into print. Along with our no-holds-barred criticisms of Islam, in fact. But fair’s fair.

Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt ran the National Council for Civil Liberties when it was passing resolutions in support of the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation, and when it was publishing calls to legalise and destigmatise sex between adults and children. Hewitt went on to have overall responsibility for every social worker in England, while Harman’s pro-pederast past was explored in detail by Martin Beckford in the 9th March 2009 edition of the Daily Telegraph, but that newspaper was too spineless or too compromised to put it on the front page where it belonged, so the story was allowed to die, at least for the time being. Neither Harriet Harman nor Patricia Hewitt is a Muslim. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a Muslim on the editorial staff of the Daily Telegraph.

Peter Tatchell, who would lower the age of consent to 14 and thus legalise almost every act of which any Catholic priest has ever been so much as accused, wrote in The Guardian (26th June 1997) that:

“The positive nature of some child-adult relations is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of 9 to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy. While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.” 

The Guardian printed that. In 2010, David Cameron offered Tatchell a peerage. Neither Peter Tatchell nor David Cameron is a Muslim. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a Muslim on the editorial staff of The Guardian. I very much doubt that there was one as long ago as 1997.

For many years, the recommended reading for postgraduate students of Criminology at the University of Cambridge included the 1980 book Paedophilia: The Radical Case, by Tom O’Carroll, chairman of the Paedophile Information Exchange, whose 1981 conviction for conspiracy to corrupt public morals through the contacts section of that organisation’s magazine was attacked a year later in the journal of the National Council for Civil Liberties by O’Carroll’s barrister, Peter Thornton, who is now a Queen’s Counsel and a senior circuit judge. The University of Cambridge is not exactly run by Muslims, and His Honour Judge Peter Thornton QC is not a Muslim. Tom O’Carroll is not a Muslim, either.

Stephen Fry’s books, The Liar and The Hippopotamus, glorify sex between men and teenage boys, exactly the acts that have brought scandal on the Catholic Church. Stephen Fry is not a Muslim. In its dramatic output, Channel 4 has been and remains a relentless, publicly owned campaigner in favour of such acts. No Muslim has ever been the Chairman or the Controller of Channel 4.

Germaine Greer’s The Boy is a celebration of the sexual fetishisation of the adolescent male both by men and by women. Germaine Greer is not a Muslim. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins describes having been sexually abused as a child as “an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience”. Richard Dawkins is not a Muslim.

Philip Pullman’s famous trilogy concludes with sexual intercourse between two children aged about 12, and he has repeatedly denounced the absence of sexual content in the Narnia novels. Philip Pullman is not a Muslim. Geoffrey Robertson QC made his name defending the Schoolkids’ Edition of Oz, while his wife, Katthy Lette, made hers writing explicit depictions of teenage sex. Geoffrey Robertson QC and Kathy Lette are not Muslims.

Few, if any, Muslims have rushed to defend and to laud Roman Polanski. Muslims can hardly be said to control Internet pornography, which is the principal, and highly commercial, sexual abuse of teenage boys in the world today.

The war in Afghanistan is a war in defence of the endemic abuse of boys, an abuse to which, whatever else may be said of “the Taliban”, they were very actively opposed and not without success in seeking to eradicate, whereas the regime that we have installed in their place actively colludes in it as surely as in the heroin trade. The people who took us to war in Afghanistan were not Muslims. The people who keep us at war in Afghanistan are not Muslims. The child molesters whom we are fighting that war in order to defend are significantly less Muslim than the people from whom we are fighting that war in order to defend them. Not least, they are significantly less Muslim in that they practice pederasty.

And then there are the numerous Social Services Departments that ran homes where at the same time as the Church was hushing up sex between men and teenage boys on the part of a small number of priests – and thus, however imperfectly, indicating disapproval of it – such behaviour was absolutely endemic, with major figures in that world publishing academic studies, used for many years in the training of social workers, which presented it as positively beneficial to both parties and therefore actively to be encouraged. Clearly, that became the same view of girls. We now see the consequences.

Plus the police, who long ago stopped enforcing the age of consent from 13 upwards; as with their non-enforcement of the drugs laws, one really does have to ask for whose benefit that is.

Among many, many, many others.

What’s that you say? They do not purport to be moral authorities? Really? Yes, they do. Harriet Harman, for one, is doing so in my ear as I write.

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