For many weeks the press in Britain have been obsessed with the Jimmy Savile sex scandal, and it has many months to run. Savile, who died in 2011, aged 84, was a superstar entertainer for the BBC, and his programs attracted millions of viewers. The BBC needed Savile and his huge audiences to justify the high compulsory license fee paid in Britain by anyone who owns a television set, most of whose owners do not care for the tedious leftist exhortations that are its most characteristic product. But during his long career with the BBC Savile was also a prolific sexual predator who raped or assaulted hundreds of women and underage girls, some as young as ten years old.
After Savile died, the BBC rushed to broadcast no fewer than three laudatory programs as a tribute to him, a celebration of his life and career. But some of its keen young journalists had by now investigated Savile’s seamy past and were preparing to put their findings out on Newsnight, a hard-hitting BBC news program, in a broadcast that would have included interviews with women whom Savile had assaulted. Needless to say their item was canceled, and the BBC was made to look exceedingly foolish and insensitive when a rival independent television company broadcast Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile.
Critics declared that the notoriously biased BBC, which nonetheless boasts of its objectivity and integrity, in fact utterly lacked these very qualities. The leftists within the BBC mounted a counterattack. They put out a program heavily hinting that Lord McAlpine, who had been treasurer of the Conservative Party under Mrs. Thatcher, had been involved in a pedophile ring operating in the Bryn Estyn home for boys in the 1970’s and 80’s. Leading left-wing journalists and publicists rushed to name him on Twitter. There was no truth whatsoever in the allegations. Lord McAlpine had never been to Bryn Estyn, and he sued the BBC for libel, obtaining a quarter of a million dollars in damages and a truly groveling apology. He is now proposing also to sue the Twitterati who had maligned him.
By now a witch hunt had begun. The socialistic MP for West Bromwich East bemoaned the alleged existence of a conservative pedophile ring responsible for “extreme cases of abuse in the highest place.” When Mr. Cameron, the Conservative British prime minister, was interviewed on television, he was presented with a “fantasy list” of conservative pedophiles and asked what he proposed to do about it. This incident has led to heavy damages for libel.
The attempt to divert attention away from the BBC’s problems failed. Indeed, the mishandling of the canceled documentary about Savile and the attempt to smear McAlpine have led to the resignation of leading BBC officials. However, what is curious is that no attempt has been made to investigate the decades-long cover-up by the BBC of Savile’s sexual predations, some of which took place on BBC premises. Staff, including senior staff, certainly knew of those activities, and it is even alleged that some of them procured girls for him. Savile used to boast, “I’m much too valuable to the BBC for them to do anything to me.” No one is properly investigating how the decades of abuse got covered up, and if anything gets out, it will likely be blamed on a couple of unfortunate scapegoats, leaving the institutional culture without criticism.
This silence and inaction may be contrasted with the frenzy over similar accusations regarding the Catholic Church, where bishops and archbishops have repeatedly been accused of protecting pedophile priests, and where confidential files have been seized. In Australia the hysteria has now got to the point where leading politicians are demanding that priests who have failed to reveal to the police details of confessions made by pedophiles be prosecuted. Any priest who, when interrogated by Australia’s new Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse, refuses to answer questions about what was confessed to him will be sent to jail for six months. No such draconian approach will be taken with regard to the BBC, for it is an icon of the British left, prized for its unvarying political correctness and unrelenting hostility to conservative institutions.
Rather than daring to go after the powerful ones in the BBC, the great untouchables, the police have been arresting people in show business who either knew Savile or moved in the same circles: agents, presenters, comedians. Police have been arresting them early in the morning without warning or at the airport as they return from abroad. They have been kicking doors down and searching homes, even though the alleged offenses took place many decades ago. The names, details, and photographs of these men, mostly now in their 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, have been all over the press and on the internet. They have little chance of getting a fair trial and have already been tried by the media. Mud sticks to the innocent, and even if they are acquitted or not sent to trial, their lives are ruined. Many of the allegations against them are false, made by women seeking vengeance or publicity—and, most of all, money.
For many years numerous gangs of British Muslims have been molesting, raping, and pimping vulnerable, underage white working-class girls from care homes. Police forces in the Manchester area and in South Yorkshire and the local social-work agencies were warned of the Muslims’ activities as early as 2000, but they deliberately took no notice. The police and social workers took action only against the victims, who were treated as deviant and promiscuous. The Muslim men who had exploited them were never questioned or investigated.
When, a decade later, numerous scandals broke and awkward questions were asked, the police and social workers admitted that they had put the “ethnic sensitivities” of their “diverse” communities above their duty to protect children. Indeed, when one of the girls was murdered for telling the family of one of her Muslim assailants what he had done to her, social workers tried to conceal the documents that showed they knew she felt threatened by the Muslims. They still see nothing wrong in this. There have been no proper apologies, and no one has been sacked.
The British people have become painfully aware that Muslims have a special propensity for committing sex crimes. Yet the most recent official government report attempts to obfuscate this fact, blandly informing us that “the great majority of child molesters are white males.” This should come as no surprise, given that most molesters are male and that 85 percent of the population is white. By contrast, when the cardinal–archbishop of Westminster said that the great majority of molesters were married men with children, he was treated with derision. In Australia in 2012 Cardinal Pell made a similar point and was immediately and savagely denounced. One law for the Muslims, another for the Catholics. Likewise, the liberals have repressed any suggestion that the Muslims’ predatory behavior is a consequence of their religion, even though among its central tenets are that women are inferior and should not be given any autonomy, and that non-Muslims have fewer rights. These are the same liberals who screamed that the scandals involving priests were a product of clerical celibacy and claimed that celibacy was mandated by Catholic doctrine. One law for the mosque, one for the Church.
The liberals so keen to attack the innocent Lord McAlpine have conveniently forgotten the elaborate cover-up of the sex offenses of that linchpin leftist Sir Cyril Smith, the Liberal and then Liberal-Democrat MP for Rochdale (1972-92) and a leading Unitarian. The police now admit that they knew all along that he was guilty of abusing young boys over many years in a children’s home and in a school where he was a governor. The victims spoke of being forced to engage in oral sex with the “Fat Man,” and he was indeed the fattest man ever to be a member of the British Parliament. What saved him from prosecution was that the extremely left-wing Labour government elected in 1974 had become dependent on the votes of Liberal-Democrat members of Parliament to stay in power. Cyril Smith was his party’s chief whip, whose job it was to cajole and coerce MPs to vote in support of the Labour government. In order to protect him, someone in that government instructed a Special Branch officer (the section of the police dealing with internal security) to go to Rochdale, collect the dossier on Cyril Smith, and bring it to London where it could be concealed.
The biggest contrast with the relentless persecution of the Catholic Church, though, may be seen in the case of Trevor Huddleston, a very left-wing, child-molesting Church of England cleric, who, when bishop of Stepney, escaped prosecution and publicity. In April 1974 the police questioned Huddleston in the presence of his solicitor because a mother had complained that he had behaved improperly with her two schoolboy sons, who played regularly at his house in Stepney. A report was sent to the director of public prosecutions, at which point the guilt-stricken Huddleston had a complete mental breakdown and for months was hardly able to feed or dress himself.
A reporter from Britain’s respected Sunday Express contacted the mother, and the paper’s editor, the late John Junor, later said he was sure that Huddleston was guilty. The Sunday Express prepared to publish the story, and it was approved by its legal advisor. But pressure was applied from on high, and the story never appeared. A nervous head prosecutor, quite unnecessarily, referred the case to the Labour Government’s left-wing attorney general, Sam Silkin, for him to decide whether or not that icon of the left, Huddleston, should be prosecuted. Five years later Silkin said on the radio about the incident, “I found that I was in difficulty as the man was very well known. If he had been prosecuted at all it would have ruined his career.”
The worst villain in the piece is Sam Silkin, a man whose interfering with the law in another case garnered jeers in Parliament and a severe rebuke by Lord Denning, a senior and revered judge. Silkin illicitly protected Huddleston for his agitating against apartheid when working in South Africa. No equal justice on the left. No due process. Silkin must have felt guilty about his decision, or he would not have blurted about it on the radio five years later.
In 1995, when it became clear that Huddleston had probably been a pedophile in London, and even earlier when he was a bishop in Tanzania, his South African friend and colleague Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote, “I, like many of his so-called creatures, sat on his lap. He was wearing a cassock at the time. . . . There was just no opportunity for any untoward conduct, but even more importantly, I can swear categorically that he never fondled me below the belt. I would have remembered it.”
No doubt Huddleston did not grope Tutu. Yet Tutu’s defense is rather like that of the legendary lawyer who said, “The prosecution say they can produce three witnesses who saw my client commit the crime. I can produce twelve who did not.”
After the Stepney incident, Huddleston was quietly transferred to be the Anglican bishop of Mauritius, where he would most likely continue to work with young boys. No one has ever commented adversely on this decision, not even the kind of liberals who forced the resignation of the governor-general of Australia, a conservative appointee, because it was said that, when archbishop of Brisbane, he had allowed a known pedophile to go on working as a priest. No one has ever asked who it was who allowed Huddleston to go on working as a bishop, and then transferred him to a distant country to hush matters up.
Left-handed justice, indeed.
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