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So Griffin is a hero for risking prison to alert the nation to this horrific pattern of abuse? Wrong. According to The Telegraph, when you stop and think about it, the decade’s delay was mostly Griffin’s fault:

No doubt Griffin feels vindicated today: for telling the truth before anyone else. And yet, paradoxically, it was his thuggish intervention that gave society another excuse to ignore the scandal. And thus the abuse continued.

Strikingly, the Pakistani pimps and johns seem astonished that anybody would object to their behavior. If the girls’ parents cared about protecting their daughters, in their view, they would keep them locked up at home like good Muslims do.

The pimps seemed convinced that since their victims’ families haven’t organized lethal vendettas against them like any honorable Pakistani family would, they must not have cared.

Moreover, since the English people hadn’t carried out mass communal violence, such as burning down Pakistani neighborhoods in the time-honored South Asian manner, clearly they didn’t mind.

And if the English government didn’t want Pakistanis to act Pakistani, they wouldn’t let them into England, now would they?

You have to admit the defendants have a point.

It’s difficult for Americans to grasp precisely why European elites are so terrified of populist organizations such as the BNP or the ascendant English Defence League that they instinctively cover up the crimes of barbaric foreigners.

A major difference between the US and Europe is that almost every European country has a rudimentary set of localist/nationalist organizations for young men already in place due to the more organic nature of sports over there.

The English Defence League, for example, emerged in part out of soccer hooligan firms.

Note that in the World Cup quadrennial soccer tournament, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all compete separately: This gives the newer English Defence League an advantage in striving against the older British National Party for the loyalties of young English soccer fans. The appeal of Britain is in decline with the winding down of the conflict in Northern Ireland, so England is increasingly the locus of natural loyalties.

In the US, however, spectator sports were organized from the top of society down, which has largely kept them from being a vehicle for mass populism. For example, American football evolved among rivalries between universities with national pretensions: Harvard v. Yale, Army v. Navy, and Notre Dame v. USC.

Similarly, professional sports in the US always had a strongly corporate, upper-middle-class air. For instance, the most celebrated game in professional football history, Broadway Joe Namath’s New York Jets’ victory over the Baltimore Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl, was a victory for the national media’s home team.

In the 1890s, baseball’s sole major league, the National League, was being taken over by Irish brawlers such as the crafty John McGraw of the Baltimore Orioles. Thus, ballparks attracted a lower class of fan. In 1901 entrepreneur Ban Johnson founded the rival American League to provide a more honest and gentlemanly version of the game that would appeal to WASP and German-American families. Johnson’s league has remained dominant for most of the last eleven decades.

In contrast, European soccer clubs mostly emerged from their indigenous communities. European soccer teams sponsored local youth leagues that served as feeder systems for talent. American college basketball coaches, though, are lauded not for their training, but for scouring distant slums to recruit genetically gifted one-and-done stars.

In recent decades, European soccer has been corporatized, with importation of South American superstars and fairly successful efforts to suppress hooliganism by making the spectator experience more genteel, like that of American football. Still, unlike American sports, soccer furnishes the skeleton of a system by which nationalist loyalties could potentially be organized.

This scares European elites. To them, Pakistanis are no challenge. Sure, they’re good at gang-raping little girls, but they’re hardly a threat to the establishment. It’s European men”€”with their talent for self-organization”€”who frighten Europe’s ruling class.