Trevor Hockin

It is shameful that we even have to do this. That a report this shallow, this lazy, this nakedly bigoted can land and be swallowed whole, while the journalists whose job is to take it apart simply look away. So we will do their work for them. Lowe's "Rape Gang Inquiry" takes a real and painful truth and bends it into something else. The abuse in towns like Rotherham and Rochdale happened. Children were failed for years by police and councils too frightened to act, and in some of those places men of Pakistani heritage were genuinely over-represented. Baroness Casey's official audit said so plainly. We will not insult the survivors by pretending any of that away. But that truth is exactly what is being hijacked. Here is the sleight of hand. Every serious source- Casey, the Home Office, the Jay Inquiry- treats this as a Pakistani-heritage problem rooted in clan, kinship and cover-up. Lowe quietly swaps the word "Pakistani" for "Muslim" and then puts Islam itself in the dock. That one switch is the whole trick, and nothing in his 219 pages earns it. Pull on his evidence, and it comes apart in your hands. The headline "87% had Muslim names" is not a government figure. It is a list one anti-Islam author drew up himself, guessing men's religion from their names and counting only those convicted, in a category he had already decided was Asian. The "250,000 victims" was never a count. It started as a throwaway line from a former UKIP peer who multiplied Rotherham's numbers across the entire country. He then drapes these numbers in phrases like "forced Islamic conversion" so the whole thing reads as a holy war. He even blames immigration for rising rape by pointing at Poland, ignoring that crime figures between countries measure how willing victims are to come forward, not how much actually happens. And here is what they never tell you. The overwhelming majority of child sexual abuse in this country is committed by white men, inside families and online, and most of it never surfaces at all. The government's own 2020 research found group offenders are most commonly white. By aiming his torch at one narrow corner and leaving the rest in darkness, Lowe makes a sliver of cases look like the face of the whole crime, and makes child abuse look like something foreigners carried in. The religious claim is almost too crude to dignify. Islam forbids fornication, rape, alcohol, harming children and forcing anyone into faith. A man who spits "kuffar" while doing what his religion condemns is no more acting on Islam than the countless abusers exposed inside the Church were acting on Christianity. Nobody put Christianity on trial for them. That double standard is the entire game. Read to the last page and the real purpose is impossible to miss. A report about protecting children does not end in deporting millions, stripping citizenship and reviving the death penalty. Lowe says migrants have "colonised" Britain and that he will "remove millions," and his followers cheered it as proof of a "great replacement." This was never a safeguarding document. It is an anti-immigration manifesto wearing the suffering of abused girls as a costume. And it does not stay on the page. This is the rhetoric that thickens the air before the violence comes. Anti-Muslim hate is already at record levels, with more than 6,300 cases logged in 2024, up 165 per cent in two years. We watched where it leads after Southport, when a single lie about the killer sent mobs to set mosques alight. Days after Lowe's report, five men were attacked across Edinburgh, and a man was arrested as counter-terror officers moved in. The Prime Minister himself said the suspect appeared driven by anti-Muslim hatred. The Muslim Council of Britain called it the direct consequence of rhetoric that demonises whole communities. No, you cannot pin one attacker on one report, and we will not pretend to. But you do not get to pour petrol across a country for years and then act shocked at the fire. That is why we have no choice but to answer this. Not because it has earned a response, but because too many people with far louder platforms refuse to give one.