On Sunday (3 July) the Muslim “religious scholar” Bilal Philips will probably be demonising gays at a “Journey of Faith” Conference in Toronto while a few blocks away the jolly and colourful Gay Pride procession will be snaking its way through the downtown core.

I read that Philips, a 63 year old Jamaican Canadian, believes gay men should be put to death and lesbians lashed – but these punishments should be meted out only in Islamic countries.

Not here in Canada. Hmmm.

Why doesn’t Philips do everyone a favour and go back to Qatar where he now lives?

He must feel very comfortable in a country where discrimination against women and sexual violence against domestic workers is, apparently, commonplace. And sentences of flogging are also frequently imposed.

Sounds like heaven on earth for Philips.

The Toronto imam, Saed Rageah, defends Philips’ right to express his views. Freedom of speech and all that.

Rageah explains that Philips will not be speaking about homosexuality and, in any event, will not be on stage long, adding unconvincingly:

“We need to learn how to respect one another and live in peace.”

Does he realise how ridiculous this statement makes him look? This preposterous imam could start the peace and respect ball rolling by refusing to invite “religious scholars” with medieval mindsets to address his gatherings.

Update: Oops! Rageah got it wrong. Philips sticks to his view that gays should die because it is what "Islamic law says".

Sexual predators

My old friend Jack Straw created quite a stir when he told BBC Newsnight in January that young white girls are seen as easy meat by some Pakistani heritage men.

Jack said there was a specific problem that involves Pakistani heritage men… who target vulnerable young white girls.

At the time, I refused to rush to judgement, preferring to see the hard statistics.

Now as then, I don’t want British Pakistani men to be viewed as sexual predators, with a predisposition towards street grooming of young white girls.

So what do the hard statistics say?

A report out this week from the Child Exploitation and On-line Protection Centre which surveyed the extent of the problem (attached below) shows the nationality of the offenders most commonly implicated are (1) British (2) Pakistani and (3) Iraqi – but there are a thousand qualifications and caveats.

The report states:

“The data (on ethnicity) was often recorded to a particularly poor standard at the point of capture.

Ethnicity was often conflated with “nationality” and neither factor captured according to a conventional or standard classification scheme.”

They go on to warn that the data on “localised grooming” is often of poor quality and the response from front line agencies such as Children’s Services and Local Safeguarding Children Boards was limited.

The highest response was from police forces but, even here, a significant number of forces reported a nil return.

“We do not draw national conclusions about ethnicity from the data available at this time because it is too inconsistent.”

Some British Pakistani men are involved in street grooming. We know that because they are now behind bars.

Jack says street grooming is an issue for the “community” to address. But I’m not entirely sure how this would work out in practice. For a start, the word “community” must be one of the most degraded in the English language.

What exactly does Jack have in mind? Does he want to hear Imams speaking out on Fridays or British Pakistani women’s groups (insofar as they exist) making their voices heard?

Now that the CEOP report is published perhaps he will tell us.

In the meantime, I think it best for the police to go hell for leather after the criminals and for the rest of us to steer clear of stigmatising the ethnic groups from which they are drawn.

Toronto laid bare

Visit www.toronto.ca/wellbeing and you will be able to compare 140 neighbourhoods in great detail.

It’s (almost) all there. Average family income, education level and age of the population as well as detailed information on the demography of an area and how it is changing over time.

Then there is information on the location of sports and leisure facilities, libraries, food banks and so on.

This gets me thinking what the impact of a similar map would be in Pendle. For years I witnessed suffocating parochialism – largely, but not exclusively, from the Lib Dems – where one town (insert name) allegedly benefited at the expense of another (insert name).

I am left wondering what the political impact would be if the Toronto map (and others like it) really takes off and if additional “sensitive” information is superimposed in layers.

A lot of this stuff is already out there – much of it radioactive. We can already find benefit claimants by neighbourhood and JSA claimants by ethnicity and so on.

But what if details of, say, the tax take by neighbourhood were included? Or the number of people with a criminal record?

We would look at where we live in an entirely different way.

Attachments:

Neighbourhood Wellbeing Indices PRESENTATION LHINS.pdf	[Toronto. Neighbourhood wellbeing]	2315 Kb
Thematic Assessment 280611c.pdf	[Child Exploitation and Protection]	6805 Kb