If only Britain took rape gangs as seriously as Israel took October 7

New report exposes complacency by U.K. police when country's women and girls experienced sexual violence by migrants

Rupert Lowe, a U.K. Member of Parliament representing the upstart nationalist political party Restore Britain, released his 219-page Rape Gang Inquiry report on June 16. Most of it is detailed witness testimony, by (mostly) women survivors from working-class, Muslim-dense jurisdictions, of long-term sexual victimization by organized criminals in their teenage years. Many of the details are quite nauseating.

By coincidence, there’s a late-June video clip, making the rounds on X, whose disturbing message pairs well with the revelations of the Lowe report. The clip shows Ilana Gritzewsky, an October 7 hostage survivor, confronting Reem Alsalem, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, in a June hearing of the UN Human Rights Council.

Alsalem’s role ostensibly confers objectivity, but her reluctance, to put it mildly, to acknowledge Hamas’s well-documented October 7 sexual crimes has attracted condemnation and calls for removal by Jewish leaders and women’s rights groups.

After summarizing the gross sexual crimes that dominated her hostage tenure, Gritzewsky states, “And you, Special Rapporteur, chose silence and denial.” Then, as a tight-lipped Alsalem refuses to engage, “Please look at me. Do you believe us now? Will you apologize?” Alsalem responds with insolent silence, a flinty stare and what appears to some viewers (including me) as a slight, but irrepressible smirk.

If sympathy for Jewish women under such wretched circumstances is denied here — a denial endorsed by the UN, it is fair to assume — then the world is invited to conclude that Alsalem has legitimate grounds for her dismissal, for there is no higher international “court” that will rebuke her.

But Gritzewsky can take comfort in one important fact: namely, that although her abduction can fairly be blamed on failures by Israel’s security apparatus, once it happened, Gritzewsky’s fellow Israelis — men and women, civilians and military — devoted every resource at their disposal to publicizing hostages’ plight, advocating for their redemption and punishing the villains in the plot. In short, the hostages’ entire national community, by no means unified on most internal issues (indeed, quite the opposite), had their backs.

Which is a lot more than the U.K. rape gang victims can say. Accumulated reports have chronicled depraved acts of gang-related violence beyond “mere” rape that emanate more than a whiff of October 7-level misogyny linked to race hatred: broken bottles shoved into vaginas, gasoline dousings, stabbings, forced abortions and threats to family members for seeking help, targeted primarily at white British women and girls. Yet all too often, victims and the family members desperate to save them were on their own. Hostages in all but official designation to groomers and their kinsmen, some victims mentioned in the report endured multiple rapes every single day for years.

In stark contrast to the Israeli hostages, U.K. hostages’ society at large did not “have their back.” Accounts of rape gang survivors showed they were thrown under the bus by police, social services, teachers, high-ranking politicians and much of the media for reasons directly linked to the ruinous ideology of multiculturalism, which proscribes judgmentalism of immigrant behaviours that are based in western standards of morality.

The rape perpetrators were overwhelmingly Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims according to the report. Fear of being labelled racist or Islamophobic plus concern over voting banks froze the hearts and stayed the hands of those who, in a healthy society, would have been the victims’ natural protectors and rescuers.

As a result, the Lowe report notes, even courts could not be counted on for justice. Judges in rape gang trials entertained defence arguments such as, in the case of one Somali defendant, that forced sex was part of his “culture and tradition,” justifying a “cultural sensitivity” discount in sentencing to avoid “empowering the far right” or damaging “community cohesion.”

Fish rot from the head down. In 2012, the Crown Prosecution Service, then under the leadership of Keir Starmer who is now the outgoing prime minister, dropped a case against a rape gang in spite of copious evidence against them. This led the Greater Manchester Police to drop a wider investigation into regional rape gangs, effectively extending a licence for operational freedom.

The June 2022 review of the rape gang scandal, “Operation Linden,” updated in January 2025, by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, “tiptoed around the heritage and religion of offenders,” according to a 2025 article by Dominic Adler, a 25-year veteran of the Met’s anticorruption command, tasked with “sensitive investigations into police wrongdoing.”

Adler cites two root problems for police inaction: “austerity-ravaged services (that) are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale disorder,” and “the politicisation of policing, and its role in supporting the state-mandated policy of multiculturalism.” He calls the scandal “the quintessence of two-tier policing.”

The Conservatives have not always covered themselves in glory on this file, but they did call for a national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs in January 2025. Labour voted en masse against it, defeating it 364-111. Starmer dismissed public concern as “far-right” agitation. Only sustained pressure forced the government to commit to a parliamentary inquiry to be completed by March 2029.

For advocacy and support, rape gang victims could only depend on courageous, but few-and-far-between police whistleblowers and bold political dissenters who were attacked as “racists” or worse for their pains. Charismatic citizen warriors supported them as well, resisting creeping Islamization in general and the gangs in particular: notably the infamous Tommy Robinson, who for all his flaws, kept public concern over the gangs on a lit front burner despite draconian state efforts to shut it off.

Beholden to nobody, the Lowe report does not, in its analysis and recommendations, kowtow to the crippling ideological shibboleths that created this lamentable blot on Britain’s social history. It calls for maximal sentencing, deportations and even a referendum on the re-introduction of the death penalty for the worst crimes.

Much like Ilana Gritzewsky, the Lowe report is a voice of accountability confronting the U.K. Parliament with the words, “And you, our nation’s social, cultural and political elites, chose silence and denial. Please look at me. Do you believe us now? Will you apologize?”

Reem Alsalem will never interrogate her double standards on sexual violence against Jewish girls and women, much less apologize to the women she has scorned. Why should she? The UN has neither “citizens” to answer to, nor “honour” of the kind ethnic Britons understand or admire. The U.K. does have citizens to answer to. And as for honour…?

National Post