FLASHBACK: Left still thinks Skaf rapes weren’t racist, by Miranda Devine.
THEY were hate crimes, racist crimes. The Lebanese Muslim gang rapists who rampaged through Sydney on the eve of the 2000 Olympics chose their young victims on the basis of religious and ethnic identity.
“You deserve it because you’re an Australian” they told one victim. “Suck on it, Aussie pig” another victim was told while being raped 25 times by fourteen men in a degrading six-hour ordeal. …
Police investigated as many as 70 similar gang rapes which occurred in August and September 2000.
Women and girls as young as 14 snatched off trains and from shopping malls and driven to southwest Sydney to be assaulted by groups of men summoned by mobile phone: “I’ve got a slut with me bro, come to Punchbowl.” …
In the end, 14 youths, including ringleader Bilal Skaf and his brother Mohammed, were convicted of raping seven women, and sentenced to jail terms of between 11 and 55 years (reduced on appeal). Justice was done, thanks to the courage of the victims submitting themselves to trials and retrials, and the competence of investigating police and Crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen.
But a sinister pall hung over the case. A stifling political correctness sought to suppress the truth of those gang rapes, pretending they were just like any other crime, with no religious or racial motivations, and that racists were lying to create a “moral panic”.
The cover-up by the politically correct in Australia:
It was the beginning of an Orwellian push by the social engineers of the Left to demean and damage anyone who spoke honestly about the cultural and religious faultlines that would soon lead to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and endless social disruption since.
As one of the journalists involved from the beginning in the story of Sydney’s gang rapes, which broke in July, 2001, I was staggered, naively, by the pressure to sanitise the victims’ accounts.
Careers were made by twisting second-hand facts to prove a conspiracy against Muslims in the Australian media and criminal justice system. Police, prosecutors and journalists involved first-hand in the case were accused of being Islamophobes — the launch of that now well-worn slur. Whole books and PhD theses were written about “Islamophobia in Australia”. …
To its eternal shame, the leftist establishment has never acknowledged that young Muslim men singled out non-Muslim women to rape on the basis that they were “Aussie pigs” and “sluts” who asked for it. A PC stance on multiculturalism is more important than the safety of women.
What really happened in Sydney? It seems to have disappeared down the memory hole, because it is never mentioned in the media even while vaguely similar events are occasionally reported from overseas — such as Rotherham (study: 100,000 to 1 million girls in Britain).
