Unknown artist, 19th-century lithograph, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
On June 16, Rupert Lowe’s Rape Gang Inquiry was released. The grotesque details of this 219-page report can only be read in sections. The systematic trafficking of British girls by Muslim slavers who often called them slurs like “kuffar”—infidels—as they were gang-raped and subjected to tortures better left undescribed and the decades-long cover-up are rage-inducing. Right-wing figures from Geert Wilders to Tommy Robinson have highlighted the context for these crimes—the historical hostility of Islam to the Christian West. This vile enmity can be found on almost every page.
“Evidence in grooming gang trials has repeatedly shown…victims [some as young as 11] described as ‘white slags,’ ‘white trash,’ ‘kuffar b**ches,’” the report notes on page 140:
Perpetrators shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and boasted of racial supremacy. Yet as far as available public records are concerned, racial aggravations have never once been invoked against anti-white rape gangs, either by prosecutors or judges. This is in stark contrast to what tends to happen whenever white criminals are held to account for interracial crimes.
The grooming gang horror may seem like a uniquely modern phenomenon, the screaming bastard child of mass migration and Western self-loathing. It is more than that. It is a continuation in the grim story of the Muslim slave trade of Europeans in general and Christians in particular, a subject that is rarely mentioned in the ongoing self-flagellation about the centuries-old crimes of the Middle Passage, which were banned by the British over two centuries ago by Christian abolitionists. Slavery lasted well into the 20th century in the Muslim world; Mauritania only banned it in 1981.
The Ottomans kidnapped over a million Christian boys from their homes, forcibly converted them to Islam, and trained them as elite shock troops (‘janissaries’) to fight the empire’s battles under the official policy of the ‘Devshirme System,’ or blood tax. This was part of the broader dhimmi system, which relegated non-Muslims like Christians and Jews to second-class subjects. Muslim boys could not be enslaved under Islamic law, so about 20% of Christian boys were seized instead.
Some Christian parents tried to hide their boys in the forests or mountains to prevent the kidnappings; the forced conversion of their children to Islam gave rise to trauma-driven folklore about ‘taken boys.’ Most never saw their sons again. This lasted for over three centuries. At the same time, as historian Leslie Peirce noted in The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford University Press, 1993), Christian girls were seized from their communities to serve as domestic slaves or concubines.
Ottoman armies and Muslim pirates also kidnapped hundreds of thousands of Christian women and girls from across Europe, selling them in slave markets across the Islamic world. The most beautiful girls were often forced into sex slavery for high-ranking Ottoman officials or imprisoned in the Sultan’s harem; forced conversion to Islam was also routine. In his seminal work Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800, Robert C. Davies estimates that about 1.2 million Europeans were enslaved by Muslims; between a third and a half of those were women.
One of the most chilling accounts of the trafficking in European slaves is Giles Milton’s White Gold, which I highly recommend. He details the auctions of Christian slaves in Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, in which “thousands of captives were put through their paces before being sold to the highest bidder. These wretched men, women, and children came from right across Europe—from as far afield as Iceland and Greece, Sweden and Spain. Many had been seized at sea by the infamous Barbary corsairs. Many more had been snatched from their homes in surprise raids.”
The historical echoes in Lowe’s Rape Gang Inquiry are unavoidably clear. Page 155:
The gangs operated under an honour- and shame-based clan code that treated non-Muslims, especially white working-class girls, as property available for sexual use. They transported victims between towns, shared them among brothers and friends, forced conversions to Islam followed by unregistered religious marriages, and justified the abuse by describing the girls as ‘easy meat,’ ‘white trash; or morally inferior.
The pirates don’t raid European towns now; they live there. Their crimes were covered up for decades by a system filled with people who thought that being called racist or ‘Islamophobic’ was worse than what was happening to thousands of European girls. The press argued strenuously against citing the religion of the ‘Asian’ grooming gangs. As Lowe’s report notes, Dr. Taj Harbey, an imam with the Oxford Islamic Congregation, believes the proportion of gang members who are Muslim to be around 95%. Many felt that the doctrines of Islam condoned their actions. Considering the history of Islamic slavers and European slaves, this should be no surprise.
Another anecdote to highlight this point. In 2016, I attended a speech by Amanda Lindhout at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall. Lindhout was kidnapped with her boyfriend in Somalia in 2008 and spent 460 days in captivity by Islamists being raped, starved, tortured, and hogtied. She escaped once, fled to a local mosque, and begged the hundreds of men inside for help; they watched passively as she was dragged out by her ankles. Her captors had said that their sexual abuse of her was sanctioned by Islamic law, as the Qu’ran permitted Muslim men to use “those whom your right hand possesses” as they saw fit.
When she was ransomed and returned to Canada, Lindhout visited two Calgary mosques to ask if that interpretation was correct. “At both mosques, they told me that what had happened to me was unfortunate, but that it was in fact permissible under Islamic law,” she said. The Toronto audience was stunned into total silence. There was no coverage of her comments in the press, despite the fact that Lindhout’s story attracted major attention and her memoir A House in the Sky was a bestseller.
In Europe, a new chapter has been written in the grim history of Islamist abuse of European women—and the story of Europe’s historical enmity with Islam. The establishment has done everything to pretend that this story is not unfolding, despite riots, no-go zones, infidel-free ghettos, and growing civil unrest. Rupert Lowe’s Rape Gang Inquiry has blown that story wide open, and it can no longer be ignored.