Local newspapers’ portal, This is Local London, reports that the planned protest by the English National Resistance against the NWK Muslim Association in Crayford has been cancelled.

The ENR had planned a protest on May 18^th against what it considered ‘gender apartheid’, taking exception to the mosque’s use of separate entrances for men and women.

Local residents wrote to their local paper on announcement of the protest raising concerns about its ‘sinister’ motives and inviting residents to visit the mosque and witness its work for themselves.

Leader of the ENR, former BNP councillor Paul Golding, told the local paper:

“The big demonstration was probably not the best way to go about it. We’re a big organisation and have a lot of demos all over the place.

“We’ve decided on a more sustained campaign rather than one big demo, and that’s it.

“We will be leafleting the whole area and staging a series of smaller demonstrations outside their front door.”

The newspapers’ favourite ‘rent-a-gob’ features in the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Daily Express and Daily Star today, following an article in The Sun on Sunday about Anjem Choudary and his haranguing his small group of misfits.

The Sun, which filmed Choudary espousing his usual provocative tripe, makes hay of his comments on a ‘jihad seekers’ allowance’ and mockery of the modern work ethic as ‘slavery’.

The newspapers also engage in the usual Eurabia scaremongering, giving space to Choudary’s fantasy claims of a Muslim ‘tsunami’ taking over Europe. Choudary is filmed saying:

“We are going to take England — the Muslims are coming. Brussels is 30 per cent, 40 per cent Muslim and Amsterdam. Bradford is 17 per cent Muslim.”

The most significant element of the coverage is the size of the audience Choudary is said to have addressed – “a 30-strong crowd,” according to The Sun. And yet, this warranted coverage in five national dailies.

The significance of that is not lost if you read the 1200+ comments posted on the most widely read website in the world, Mail Online.

Paul Vallely in The Independent today covers the Oxford sex grooming trial which concluded yesterday. The trial has raised issues similar to those which surfaced during the trial of nine men convicted of sexual grooming and exploitation of young girls in Rochdale namely, race, religion and sex crimes.

Vallely notes the changes that have been introduced in Rochdale since the scandal shone a light on welfare services in the town. Changes such as training workshops for staff employed in social services and schools and Criminal Bureau Checks of local taxi drivers.

But Vallely notes that for all the attention devoted to the religion and culture of the men involved “Greater Manchester Police, in whose area the Rochdale offences took place, says 95 per cent of the men on its sex offenders register are white. Just five per cent are Asian.”

Vikram Dodd in the Guardian today also attempts to put matters in perspective drawing on statistics, where available, on the ethnicity of offenders.

Dodd notes:

“A 2011 study by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre looked at the 2,379 potential offenders caught grooming girls since 2008. Of 940 suspects whose race could be identified, 26% were Asian, 38% were white and 32% were recorded as unknown. Asians are roughly 7% of the population.

“A report for the children's commissioner in 2012 found there were 1,514 perpetrators. Of these, 545 were white, 415 were Asian and 244 were black. The ethnicity of 21% of perpetrators was not recorded. Attempts to analyse the Asian figure further runs into problems. Just 35 of the 415 Asians are recorded as having Pakistani heritage and thus highly likely to be Muslim, and only five are recorded as being from a Bangladeshi background. The heritage of 366 of the Asian group is not stated in those figures.”

Dodd also cites a source involved in bringing those involved in such heinous crimes to justice, who claims that an individual’s profession is a more reliable indicator than race or religion:

"Young vulnerable girls migrate to the night-time economy, where they come across taxi drivers and people working in takeaways, who are more likely to be Asian. It is better to focus on the professions of offenders, not their race or religion."

The Deputy Children’s Commissioner, Sue Berelowitz, in evidence to the Home Affairs select committee inquiry into Child Exploitation rebuked the tendency of certain newspapers to exploit the ‘race’ or ‘religion’ angle, referring in her testimony to articles in The Times newspaper.

Berelowitz in her foreword to a report into ‘Child Sexual Exploitation in Gangs and Groups’, wrote that perpetrators “come from all ethnic groups and so do their victims – contrary to what some may wish to believe. The failure of agencies to recognise this means that too many child victims are not getting the protection and support they so desperately need.”

Quite aside from the serious issue of failing victims is the problem of cementing anti-Muslim attitudes by portraying sex crimes as occurring disproportionately in British Muslim communities.

Aida Edemariam in The Guardian’s G2 today interviews David Ward, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East.

Ward, who attracted criticism for his remarks on the treatment of Palestinians when he used the phrase ‘the Jews’, talks about his solid anti-racism stance and his commitment to raising human rights abuses of Palestinians by Israelis.

He tells Edemariam:

"There is a huge operation out there, a machine almost, which is designed to protect the state of Israel from criticism. And that comes into play very, very quickly and focuses intensely on anyone who's seen to criticise the state of Israel. And so I end up looking at what happened to me, whether I should use this word, whether I should use that word – and that is winning, for them. Because what I want to talk about is the fundamental question of how can they do this, and how can they be allowed to do this."

You can read the full feature article here.