Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail today mimics a blog post by Rod Liddle in the Spectator in 2009, railing, in similar vein, about the ‘benefits of a multicultural Britain’.

Littlejohn writes, “While we are all being urged to ‘celebrate diversity’, we shouldn’t try to kid ourselves that multiculturalism hasn’t brought with it some serious downsides — such as home-grown Islamist terrorists and gangs of Pakistani child rapists.”

Much like Liddle’s claims of a multiculturalism trade off of “rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us” in return for “street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London [carried] out by young men from the African-Caribbean community,” Littlejohn treats the cases of the nine men convicted of sexual grooming in Rochdale this week as an indictment against multiculturalism.

Apart from the obvious argument that the crimes of the few, terrorists or pimps, is hardly a fair brush with which to tar the majority of law-abiding Muslims and tarnish the concept of multiculturalism, the more serious suggestion, that terrorism and sex grooming are crimes largely committed by the UK’s non-indigenous minorities, ignores the facts of the matter.

According to Europol’s Terrorism Situation and Trends reports of 2010 and 2011, the greatest threat of ‘homegrown terrorism’ was less of the religiously motivated variety, and more of the ethno-national and sectarian variety. As for Littlejohn’s claim that a downside of multiculturalism has been “Pakistani child rapists,” one can only assume Littlejohn, disregarding more sensible and reasoned commentary and evidence on the matter, has instead taken his cue from fellow Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips.