Saleema

We begin with a story from a Christian website. The story is undated, but the events described began in 1997. Here is Saleema!, by Tom White:

Saleema grew up in a Christian family in Pakistan. To her, faith in Jesus Christ is a part of everyday life and often comes with great costs. Saleema knows the dangers of sharing her faith in the Muslim stronghold of Pakistan, but like thousands of other Christians, that does not prevent her from being a living witness of her Lord and Savior.

Last year, Saleema gave a bible to a friend of hers who was also a Muslim. This Muslim friend was so impressed by what she read that she immediately fell in love with Christ. She longed to know more about Jesus, and on Good Friday, she found the courage to attend a Chritsian church.

It was on this day that Saleema's friend heard, for the first time, of the crucifixion, the atonement, and the resurrection of Jesus. She had read about Jesus in the Koran, but the Islamic Holy Book failed to mention his crucifixion and atonement for sin. That morning before returning home she gave her life to Jesus Christ.

Her parents were very disturbed by the news. According to Islamic law, their daughter was guilty of blasphemy against the prophet Mohammed. Saleema's friend was beaten, kicked and tortured by her parents. However, she would not deny Christ. In fact, the more she suffered for Jesus, the more she loved Him.

Her parents continued the persecution and decided it would be best to give their daughter in marriage to a Muslim man. It was at this time that Saleema's friend had no choice but to leave her home and go into hiding.

When the girl's parents discovered that she was missing, they immediately went to Saleema's home believing that she was guilty of hiding their daughter. They demanded to know her whereabouts. Saleema told them that she did not know where their daughter was and that her family had nothing to do with her disappearance.

Saleema, along with her parents, was picked by the Islamic authorities and interrogated for three days. They were beaten, starved, and continually questioned. As part of the torture, Saleema was forced to stand on the tips of her toes for over twelve hours. Each time she came down from this excruciating position, a stick came across her back. Saleema was eventually handed over to the police.

Saleema's pastor was also arrested and placed in the cell with her. The guards removed the prisoner's clothing and attempted to force Saleema and her pastor to commit adultery. When they refused, they were again beaten. The pastor's son was also arrested, hung upside down in a tree, and nearly beaten to death.

Every day and every night Saleema was tortured. Her tormentors inflicted unspeakable wounds both physically and emotionally. Saleema is an attractive young woman, and she was repeatedly violated.

Three weeks after Saleema was handed over to the police, the young Muslim girl who had turned her life over to Jesus, was discovered hiding in a woman's shelter. Her Muslim parents brought her back to her village where she was publicly executed. She was only a Christian for a few months when she learned the meaning of being "faithful unto death."

Saleema has since been charged with the girl's death. The judge found her guilty on two counts, 1> for proselytizing a Muslim girl, and 2> causing the events leading up to the girl's execution. Saleema now faces murder charges, and if found guilty under blasphemy law 295c, will herself be executed.

This tragic story is all too common in Muslim nations like Pakistan, where our family in Christ, our brothers and sisters, are beaten, tortured and even killed for their faith. It is for Saleema and so many others like her, that The Voice of the Martyrs exist. Your brothers and sisters need your prayers. They need your encouragement. They need to know that they are not forgotten, and that we will do everything in our power to help them.

More on the story can be found in a March, 1999, piece entitled Pakistani Teen Still in Legal Trouble:

28 March 1999 (Newsroom)--A Pakistani teenager arrested for helping to convert her Muslim friend to Christianity remains in legal jeopardy but is not dead or about to be executed, as some reports spread via the Internet assert. She and her pastor both were tortured while in police custody, however, Pakistani human rights groups claim, and her friend is dead.

Saleema (likely a pseudonym to protect her security) is accused of the crime of "converting a Muslim." According to International Christian Concern (ICC), a Washington, D.C.-based rights group, Saleema has not appeared at several scheduled court hearings. ICC President Steven Snyder believes that is either out of concern for her safety or because her advocates want to draw more attention to the case.

"We feel her case could be resolved," Snyder says. "Our concern is that there may be some Christians manipulating Saleema to maintain this as a high profile case in order to keep attention on the persecution of Christians in Pakistan."

The events leading to Saleema's arrest began in 1997 in the city of Sheikhupura in Punjab province when the then-17-year-old gave her friend, Raheela Khanam, a Bible. Saleema apparently had a part in the 18-year-old Muslim girl's conversion to Christianity. Under Islamic law, or Shari'a, converting from Islam to another faith--called apostasy--is punishable by death. Though the Pakistani civil code does not apply the death penalty to apostasy, Shari'a is often enforced by private citizens, who consider it their duty as a Muslim. On July 8, 1997, the local newspaper reported that Raheela was shot to death by her brother Altaf Khanam, who then turned himself in to police.

Sources in Pakistan connected to Advocates International, a Virginia-based Christian legal agency, say that shortly before her death Raheela had sought refuge at the home of her pastor, Arthur Salim, but was turned away. The pastor, according to ICC, is from Wandalla Junction, a community in the Shadara section of Lahore. ICC sources say that Altaf Khanam illegally detained Salim for two days, accusing him and his son Robin of kidnapping Raheela. On June 23, 1997, Khanam turned over the pastor to police. A day later, police jailed Robin as well.

Salim reportedly made a written compromise with the Khanam family that allowed him to be released with his son on July 4, 1997. While in custody, Salim told members of two Lahore-based human rights groups that he had been tortured by police. In response, the Center for Legal Aid, Assistance, and Settlement (CLAAS) filed a petition in Lahore High Court on June 17, 1999. CLAAS and the group Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) reported that when they visited Salim in jail he could not stand up due to the severity of the torture. But the pastor denied the charge when called before the court on June 30, 1997 and the case was dismissed. A few days after Salim's release, Raheela was murdered.

According to some accounts, the Khanam family pressed murder charges against Saleema because of her role in the conversion. ICC's Snyder questions that. "We have not seen any evidence that there was a murder charge brought by the family," he says.

Nevertheless, authorities took Saleema into custody at Sheikhupura jail shortly after Raheela's murder. On July 14, 1997, members of CLAAS visited Saleema at the jail. She told the rights group that police severely beat her with her clothes off, using a leather belt and hose pipes. She accused police of raping her and burning sensitive parts of her body with a hot iron rod and cigarette butts.

In its 1997 report on human rights in Pakistan, the U.S. State Department reported similar cases. A study of Lahore newspapers from January to July 1997 by the Commission of Inquiry for Women found 52 cases of violence or torture of women while in police custody, the State Department said.

Saleema was released on bail Aug. 7, 1997, facing the charge of converting a Muslim. According to Snyder, a guilty verdict would be punishable by no more than two years in prison.

Though Saleema did not make a required February 15 court appearance, sources say that negotiations are under way to drop charges against her. Legally, her prospects are good, according to a spokesman for an agency involved in the case that requests anonymity due its sensitive nature. "The way the case is going it doesn't look like the court will convict her," the spokesman said. "We are encouraging people not to call Pakistani authorities (on Saleema's behalf). There have been literally thousands of calls to Pakistani embassies, which has created bumps in the road."

Advocates International confirmed in a statement that Saleema so far has not been convicted of any crime and therefore is not in imminent danger of execution. The agency says it got involved because of queries from a number of Christians who had heard various versions of the story through the Internet. "We went to our own sources in Pakistan," says Wallace Cheney, Advocates director of international programs. "Our biggest concern is that if somebody is about to be executed we want to know and help, but we also are concerned about people embellishing a story."

Several sources point out, however, that in Pakistan people who have been acquitted of religion-related crimes have been killed by private citizens after leaving the court.

A couple months later, a short update at a Christian website appeared informing us that Saleema was acquitted:

In June 1997 the young Pakistani girl Raheela came to Christ through the influence of her 17-year-old friend, Saleema. Saleema and her pastor, Salim, were detained and beaten.

When Raheela's brother, Altaf, murdered her on 8 July 1997 for apostasy and for refusing to marry a Muslim man, Saleema was blamed and arrested again. In jail she was beaten, burned, raped, and received permanent and disfiguring injuries.

On 7 August 1997 Saleema was released on bail. In late April of this year the court acquitted Saleema. But Saleema's life and the lives of all those who have nurtured her are still in danger from Muslim extremists who won't accept the court's verdict. Pastor Salim and his family have already fled their homeland.

Of course, that is not the end of the line for one accused of converting a Muslim.

From Pakistani women unite against victimisation, Wednesday, April 6, 2005:

In a landmark move for human rights, Pakistani women protested peacefully on the streets of Karachi, Quetta and Peshawar against the victimization of Christian women on International Women's Day (March 8). According to Christian human rights activist Shahbaz Bhatti, "Subjugation of Christian and minority women is common in the Muslim social strata; they are harassed, tortured, raped and forcefully converted to Islam.

In a landmark move for human rights, Pakistani women protested peacefully on the streets of Karachi, Quetta and Peshawar against the victimization of Christian women on International Women's Day (March 8). According to Christian human rights activist Shahbaz Bhatti, "Subjugation of Christian and minority women is common in the Muslim social strata; they are harassed, tortured, raped and forcefully converted to Islam.

"Since the enforcement of sharia laws, thousands of women have been unjustly involved with the criminal justice system and subjected to sexual assault, torture and illegal confinement. Social attitudes, cultural practices and religious precepts in Pakistan have allowed violence against women, and the law has failed to provide safeguard against violence or to promote attitude conducive to the women's enjoyment of their fundamental rights.

"Minority women are victimized, harassed, tortured, raped, abducted and forcefully converted to Islam, due to their Christian faith. Those who commit these crimes (extremist elements and perpetrators) consider it to be part of jihad (Holy War) and give a cover of religion to their crimes."

"No compulsion in religion" - brought to you by the Religion of Peace.

Lionheart: Urgent

There is an immediacy to Lionheart's situation that I was alerted to by a comment on my previous post. Here is a post from God Help Britain entitled Lionheart Needs Your Help, the substance of which I reproduce with comments:

Hello,

Please note that this is urgent and potentially life saving...

Please look at http://lionheartuk.blogspot.com/

Lionheart, a valiant young British Christian, has been issued with an arrest warrant for breaking British Incitement to Racial and Religious Hatred laws on his blog while discussing his life in Luton, a town with a high proportion of muslims. He has discussed pimps and their drug-addiction to prostitution entrapment methods used on young non-muslim girls, terrorists and extremists from his neighbourhood or connected to it, and drug dealers who control the drug rings in the area with mafia style domination and intimidation.

In a previous post, I quoted the following from another source:

Trafficking of women from Albania is one of the main ways to establish a "War chest" for the organized crime, in order to invest that wealth into the drugs trade. In essence, the first stage for every growth-oriented organized crime unit is to establish a prostitution ring, make large amounts of cash by slaving unsuspecting women and then invest the cash in the drugs trade by constructing the expensive logistics bases, fake companies, and pay corrupted officials. So when looking into the different aspects of organized criminal activity, it is important to look for the interconnectivity of all aspects of criminal activity because each one leads into another. The interconnectivity between drug activities is what makes the differences between organized crime and a spooky wanton criminality.

Getting girls hooked on drugs helps make them submissive to prostitution. They turn tricks to pay for their habit.

Getting girls to turn tricks generates money needed to invest in buying shipments of drugs.

Opiates are especially addictive; after a few hits, one is essentially hooked. As I have been documenting in a still-unfinished series -- Pak Sex Slave Ring in UK, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 -- there is a rise in organized prostitution rings in the UK, the criminal members of which are ethnic Pakistanis. Opiates are what these ethnic Pakistani gangs can most readily get via ties they have to South Asia, where 90% of opiate production now occurs in Afghanstan.

The girls are groomed while they are still 12 or younger. It is often that victims are raped as part of the grooming process to steer them into prostitution, since being raped helps desensitize them to being used by men for sex. In the UK Pakistani prostitution ring MO, the victims are raped on or immediately after their 13th birthday. By not actually raping them until they turn 13, the victims have to complain for a law enforcement investigation to be initiated, whereas if the victim were raped before her 13th birthday, police investigation would be automatic under existing UK laws.

Also in the UK Pakistani prostitution ring MO, the drugs seem to be introduced after the girls are already turning tricks for their "boyfriends", who by that time are giving their attention to other girls, grooming them as fresh recruits.

Consequently, the situation described in the first paragraph of that post has been documented in the UK's mainstream media.

Continuing now with the post from God Help Britain:

His neighbourhood has been dhimmified by its relatively new, yet rapidly mushrooming and highly organised muslim warlords who live like kings with dripping wealth. His story has highlighted the glaringly obvious possibility of the importation of cheap drugs from Pakistan by 'ordinary' muslims due to its ability to generate vast amounts of capital needed to fund the cycle of crime; drugs into the young girls, money generated from prostitution and dealing, money into the warlords pockets and those of their families, money out to the terrorists at home and abroad. We MUST stop this NOW as keeping our heads in the sand will be the death of all of us!

Again, this situation and cycle are well-documented, and are not particular to Islamic mafias in the UK. Albanian organized crime groups got their start in a similar manner, and now are the scourge of Europe.

He is currently in the US but his flight back is in about four days....and counting! He has very little money as his life has been turned upside down and I am very sad to say very few people have put their hands in their pockets to help when he needed their help the most. People who know his plight and sympathise with his views have, on the whole, let him down catastrophically. If something like a book offer, speaking position or similar is not offered to him in the next four days, he will get on that flight and return to the UK and be arrested on arrival. He will most likely be bailed after being charged and returned to his neighbourhood where he will have to live very secretively or be murdered. This is a very real possibility.

Lionheart may wish to simply miss that return flight and consider himself a political refugee, even if the US government will not recognize him as such. If he returns to the UK, Pakistani criminal gangs will likely murder him, and even if they don't, as they say -- there's no going home. By remaining free, even if he has to live in the US underground, illegally, he can promote a counterjihad message.

Let me clarify one point.

I do not advocate breaking US laws. But, if an innocent person must drive down the highway greatly in excess of the speed limit in order to escape criminals who are trying to murder him, then the speed limit pales into insignificance.

Similarly, in this situation, US immigration laws pale into insignificance.

He helped the police imprison one of the drug dealers in his area and muslims in his area may well desire retribution, but more than just an eye for an eye. Even if he is released without charge, he will be in grave danger. If he goes to prison, his companions will be pimps, drug dealers and terrorists, many of whom will be muslim who will know who he is and the man he helped imprison. He has told me he would refuse to be put into protective areas as he would not want to be in the company of sex offenders. He has pictured what could and most likely would happen to him and has accepted that fate as a consequence of speaking the truth but I have not and neither should you!

We must not accept this as an unavoidable consequence. We need to do what we can to give Lionheart options.

I do not want him to go back to the UK as, I believe, he will not live for long and his death would do more damage to the fight against tyranny and Islamification than you could imagine. Blogs would vanish voluntarily as people will look at just how dangerous it is to speak out. We will put ourselves in Lionheart's shoes and admit that we are simply not as brave as he and not as prepared to lose what he have.

Blogs (and bloggers) are going to start vanishing. This is only the very beginning of a big wave of oppression that is about to wash over the blogosphere.

In this next passage, I have modified the email address somewhat to make it less recognizable by robots surfing for addresses.

Please get in contact with him via his blog or via me at [godhelpbritain --at-- hotmail --dot-- com]. Please don't leave it too long. He is a nice young man who has done what he felt was right for his country and men of such character are few and far between and we should protect them with the same gusto which he has mustered all along. He speaks well on live radio and has already done two radio interviews in the US in the last week. Atlas Shrugs was one and it was a really good show.

Lionheart is to Britain what Brigitte Gabriel was to Lebanon. The US provided sanctuary and a platform to Brigitte. Lionheart could now do what Brigitte has been doing for years; raising awareness and speaking the truth as a grave warning to the US. He could be an invaluable asset to you while remaining free to help his country from afar.

Missing his hour of need will force Lionheart back into the lion's den. Please do whatever you can to ensure that does not happen.

Please, please, please help!

Either we hang together, and do what we can, or rest assured we will hang separately.

1) Considering the legal assault on Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld in regards to her work exposing the financing of terrorism (see the posts in the widget on my sidebar);
2) considering the Bush Administration's efforts to gag Sibel Edmonds and other whistleblowers who have sought to expose criminal conduct which coincidentally furthers the goals of Islamic terrorists;
3) considering the persecution of bloggers, journalists and others in such "enlightened" countries as Israel, Finland, Canada, and so on;
bloggers now need to consider themselves targets of the international jihad and likely victims of government repression.

It is important to keep in mind that we in the English-speaking world have centuries of history and tradition -- replete with legal precedents -- on our side in the battle to stay free. Consequently, our fight is a peaceful one; we shall prevail by refusing to be silenced.

In addition to being illegal and wrong, any other approach to this situation would merely play into the hands of those who seek to enslave us and destroy our society.

I now link to God Help Britain in the sidebar.

With this post, I begin a new label: Persecuted.

I conclude by reposting the text of a previous post, entitled Secret Blogger Man. It's a little cheesy, but it gets the point across.

There's a man who leads a life of danger
To everyone he meets he stays a stranger
With every post he makes
Another chance he takes
Odds are he won't live to blog tomorrow

Secret blogger man, secret blogger man
They've given you a login and taken away your name

Beware of friendly comments you may find
A friendly word can hide an evil mind
Ah, be careful what you post
Or you'll be givin' up the ghost
Odds are you won't live to blog tomorrow

Secret blogger man, secret blogger man
They've given you a login and taken away your name

[Lead guitar]

Secret blogger man, secret blogger man
They've given you a login and taken away your name

Swingin' in cyberspace one day
And then ridin' in the medevac next day
Oh no, you let the wrong word out
While posting with a shout
The odds are you won't live to blog tomorrow

Secret blogger man, secret blogger man
They've given you a login and taken away your name

Secret blogger man

(This post is dedicated to all the bloggers out there, posting to preserve our God-given rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. The Mujahideen can't compete with the truth, so they will have to shut us up, and the Religion of Peace won't be able to do that peacefully. God bless you all, and practice safe blogging!)

I now dedicate this post to Lionheart, and to all those who will similarly be persecuted.

Pak Sex Slave Ring in UK, Part 5

We continue from Part 4, concluding our review of Mothers of prevention:

A number of families affected by Pakistani pimping gangs have said that police inaction and the refusal of white liberals to acknowledge the problem has resulted in more girls being at risk than ever before. "We are still battling to get recognition that what we are dealing with is organised crime against children," says Kosaraju.

It is not just a refusal of liberals (who are not just white).

Sunny Hundal, editor of the online magazine Asians in Media, has followed the phenomenon of Asian pimping gangs. "Although it's obvious that it's young, lawless Pakistani boys,” says Hundal, “it’s tricky to make this an issue about race or religion when neither are contributing factors." However, he does believe some young Asian men "hold very disparaging attitudes towards white girls, thinking they're 'easy'".

There are various types of Asian organized crime. These pimping gangs are not just "Asian", they are Pakistani. Anyone who tries to speak politically-correct newspeak at the expense of accuracy is part of the problem

Jean is a lively woman in her forties, living with two of her three children in a neat terraced house in the east side of Blackburn. Her daughter Sally, coming up to her 16th birthday, is now estranged from her as a result of being brainwashed and abused by men from the Asian pimping gangs. "Sally was a shy girl before this happened," says Jean, "and dressed fairly demurely, but all of a sudden she was wearing heavy make-up and dressed like a prostitute. At that stage I had no idea what was going on."

Jean’s eldest daughter, Sally, was targeted at school at 13 by slightly older Asian boys. They were on the payroll of older men who run pimping operations in the town. The modus operandi of the gangs is that pimps employ school-aged boys to make the initial connection with suitable girls and befriend them. The girls are then introduced to men they are told are older relatives of the boys. The older men take them out in flash cars and buy them gifts. Soon, however, it is payback time, and the girls are sold to men from private flats, hotels and cars.

"All of a sudden Sally was only interested in hanging out with Pakistani boys," says Jean. "She started saying I was racist, and that is why I objected to her hanging out with them."

Another big part of the problem is the vicious way in which the PC elite (and others) attack as racist those who dare to question what is going on.

Consequently, people should not allow the name-calling to deter them.

Jean was soon to find out just how indoctrinated her daughter had become when she discovered Sally's photographs and profile were posted on a website. She was posing with the flag of Pakistan. There were 97 names of Asian men posted on it who had made contact with her. She was asking for Asian men to "date". She said she hated white people. There were other girls' photographs on the site, one of whom Sally had recruited, as were other girls who were being pimped. Jean's boyfriend went online, pretending to be a girl. One of the men asked: "Are you better than Sally?"

The real racists are those who taught a white girl to hate white people. Of course, in the false world of political correctness, where up is down, day is night and wrong is right, this will never be acknowledged.

Preying on her shyness and vulnerability, the pimps told Sally she was beautiful and would be treated like a princess if she showed them loyalty. They also convinced her that her family did not care about her, saying her parents would think she was a "slag" for having Pakistani boyfriends. "We parents are doing more to investigate these criminals than the police," says Jean. "My husband and I have sat for hours outside hot spots, taking down car-registration numbers. I have given the police dozens of names from my daughter's mobile phone, but they have done nothing."

The pimps are adept at trading on teenage rebellion and use similar methods, according to Crop, of convincing the girls all white people are racist. This is part of the controlling process, to instil guilt in the girls. "Like most teenagers, I was going through a phase of arguing with my mum," says Gemma. "Amir told me they didn't understand me and were racist and ignorant. I believed him." Gemma was given an Asian name by Amir, and told she had to read the Koran, a story support workers tell me is not uncommon. "They erode the girls' identities," says Kosaraju, "to make them more compliant and needy."

And the PC elite is every bit as naive as these girls being targeted -- assuming, of course, that the PC elite is not as evil as the criminals pimping the girls.

Few of the girls know, or are willing to acknowledge, they are being pimped. Because they claim to love the men, and think of them as their boyfriends, police often see that as an admission from the girls of consent. "As far as I was concerned, Amir was my boyfriend," says Gemma. "When he told me I had to sleep with his friends, I had no idea he was being paid for it. I was on a lot of drugs and he said I had to pay for them."

It is not just the girls who will not acknowledge the problem.

Where there is pimping, there are other forms of serious and organised crime. Some Asian pimps in Rotherham are also involved in drug dealing and gun crime. Although shootings in the town are rare, the girls caught up with the pimps have disclosed that many of them carry guns. Pimps traffic the girls between towns and cities. The United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre (UKHTC) has appointed Amanda Palmer, a detective sergeant, to investigate trafficking within the UK. "There is no doubt that, according to current law, these girls have been trafficked,” says Palmer, “but to date, there has not been a conviction under this legislation."

Funny how the different kinds of crimes are related. When you're running drugs or women, you're running cash, and when you're running cash, you're running guns -- if for no other reason to protect yourself, your cash, your drugs and your women.

One of the many tragedies resulting from this phenomenon is how it is fuelling racism and mistrust of whites towards Pakistanis where little existed previously. Although racism can be rife in towns such as Blackburn, Jean claims that before her daughter's life was ruined she bore no animosity towards the Asian community. Things have changed. When ordering a taxi, Jean spends several minutes looking through the telephone directory, explaining she is looking for a "white-run firm". "If an Asian man came to my door, I might have a flashback, and go mad," says Jean.

A key point: refusing to acknowledge the problem, but rather calling "racist" those who point it out, is itself racism and is fueling racism where it has not existed.

In the meantime, organisations such as Crop continue battling with the police to act on the intelligence they have built up. Progress may be round the corner in the shape of the legal action the parents have started – and many parents I spoke to are feeling cautiously optimistic after the convictions of Hussain and Naveed. "This is just the beginning," says Maureen, "but I think it will have sent a message to other abusers that the net is closing in on them and they can no longer get away it."

Gemma's pimp tired of her when she turned 16, but she still has a drug habit and is irrevocably damaged from the sexual torture and degradation she endured. Although many young women do escape the clutches of these predators and go on to repair their lives, some will be drawn into street prostitution, violent relationships and self-harming lifestyles.

Why keep your 16-year-old, when you can trade her in on a newer (13-year-old) model? Consumerism at its best.

Of course, that is no doubt the West's fault, too, for contaminating these noble young Pakistani men with our shallow morals.

Jean’s daughter Sally is in foster care, but is still being picked up regularly by pimps and raped by men who do not even know her name. She is now totally estranged from her mother, whom she recently threatened to stab. "I keep having nightmares about what they have done to her," says Jean, "and about what her life has become. I want to kill them. I have told police to go and do something, or I might lose control and do something myself."

In all of these cities, victims such as Sally are facing an explosive mix of brutality and denial – from the authorities and the Pakistani community. It seems easier for many people to pretend it is not happening. The girls involved just don’t have that choice.

All of the names of victims and their relatives have been changed to protect identities.

Pak Sex Slave Ring in UK, Part 4

We continue with our look at the Pakistani sex slave ring that was discovered in the UK. In Part 1 we began reviewing the article Mothers of prevention; in Part 2 we looked at some other articles to get some more background information. Here in Part 4 we continue from where we left off in Part 3, reviewing Mothers of prevention:

Taxi drivers, shop owners and security guards who work in the shopping arcades where the girls are recruited are also involved, one police officer (who asked not to be named) told me.

Other sources have reported that many taxi drivers belong to the same Pakistani Muslim groups who are involved in drug trafficking. If so, it would make sense that there may also be Pakistani Muslim taxi drivers who are also involved in this illegal activity.

It should be noted that at the end of Part 3 we found out that, while no one ethnic group in the UK has held a monopoly on criminal activity, and in particular prostitution, the organized nature of the Pakistani Muslim participation in prostitution is characteristic of that community.

"Police seem to be very cautious about this. They fear being branded racist," says Mohammed Shafiq, the press spokesman for the Ramadhan Foundation, a Muslim youth education charity based in Rochdale. Shafiq recently tried to address some imams and community leaders, but did not get very far. "They all had a 'no comment' policy," says Shafiq, "but our organisation is clear that it is going on, and that it is linked to drug dealing. We can't simply blame the BNP."

Interesting paragraph for a number of reasons....

First, it strikes a particular note with me, as a commentator to my previous post in this series basically called me a racist, islamophobic Neanderthal for posting about this. That certainly seems to reinforce the idea that one will be branded a racist for discussing crime.

Second, it is the Islamic community here that is speaking out not only against the criminal activity, but also against the name-calling which targets those who try to address the criminal activity. (I wonder if my commentator will notice this?)

At the end of Part 3, I asked the question: "How can you rule out cultural factors without an investigation?"

Is this activity somehow related to Islam? The implication could be that there is something fundamentally wrong with Islam, but not necessarily. There are in the US cults who characterize themselves as "Christian", yet which obviously pervert Christian teachings and use their perverted understanding as justification for organized criminal activity. Is this what is happening among the Pakistani Muslims in this case?

Or, are these people involved in this simply not practicing Muslims? Is it a situation where the Muslims who attend the mosques not only do not participate in this criminal activity, but actively denounce it and try to stop it, while the criminal element are simply not very religious?

Is it possible the Pakistanis involved in this are not Muslims? Pakistan has a sizeable Christian community; in the sidebar, I have a link to a Pakistani Christian newspaper's website. Might the people involved in this be of a Christian background? This is doubtful, since the Muslim community has decided to specifically speak out about this case.

Third, the Ramadhan Foundation spokesman, Mohammed Shafiq, has pointed out that this is linked to drug dealing. This makes sense, as the pimps pry the girls with drugs to get them to submit to the sexual activity (drug-assisted statutory date-rape, basically). It also connects to the other sources I have encountered that paint a picture of Pakistani Muslim gangs that are involved in the taxi industry, which assists with their control of the local drug trade. (As an aside, the connection in those sources is to the heroin trade, a topic about which I have written extensively in recent months.)

As well as simple opportunism, pimping of white females by black and ethnic-minority men can be a type of revenge against whites. "My parents ran a grocery shop," says Hussein, who admits to being part of the pimping gangs in the late 1990s. "They had hardly any money, even though they worked their backsides off. White people treated them like shit, like they were their servants." Hussein says he took "great pleasure" in having young white girls at his beck and call, knowing their parents would be out of their minds with worry. Although Hussein was reported to the police, he was never arrested for any crime, and is now working in Leeds.

While I do not appreciate what Hussein did, I do appreciate Hussein's candid admission of a racial motivation behind targeting white females for pimping.

The issue of black and Asian men being labelled "pimps" is deeply contentious, but not, say parents, a reason for police to turn a blind eye. It can, and does, however, fuel racism. Black men and pimping are linked through popular culture – from the African American Iceberg Slim's classic autobiographical novel, Pimp, to the glamorised depictions of pimping by hip hop and rap artists.

Again, there is a great deal of selectivity in who gets called racist for what reasons.

In 2004, a controversial documentary on the topic of Asian pimps, Edge of the City, focused on the mothers of two girls being pimped by Pakistani gangs in Bradford, West Yorkshire.

But before it could be screened, a number of black and Asian groups, media such as the newspaper Eastern Eye, and websites including Blink (Black Information Link) organised an e-mail petition to pressurise Channel 4 into pulling the programme, arguing that its makers' sole purpose was to perpetuate racism against Asian communities. The channel received over 500 e-mails in protest. The BNP capitalised on the row by hinting that all Asian men were a sexual threat to white girls.

When the truth gets stifled by name-calling and other forms of pressure, resentment builds; if one cannot let off steam peacefully, then the risk of a violent eruption only increases. If decent people cannot openly discuss issues, then the stage will ultimately be left to not-so-decent people, and soon only the racists will be speaking out -- and when they do, there will be an eager audience for them!

The BNP is mentioned in the article twice now, in a negative context. If we assume that everything bad that we have heard about the BNP is true, the blame for it all goes to the oppressive culture of political correctness: just as terrorism is a "natural" and "legitimate" reaction to American and British "imperialism", so then is racism a "natural" reaction to the mental imperialism of political correctness. The PC movement creates the very demons that they claim to protect us from.

Originally due to be screened in May 2004, three years after the Bradford race riots, the documentary was pulled from the schedule at the request of the West Yorkshire Police. A spokesman at the time said police had found no evidence of the alleged systematic exploitation, and the chief constable of West Yorkshire Police warned Channel 4 that he felt the timing of the programme could contribute to community unrest in Bradford and possibly even provoke public disorder in the city.

And so, the media cannot speak out for fear of who will be offended. The police, under threat of "community unrest", censors the media.

Why does the police not, instead, go after the criminals who are being exposed in the documentary? If community unrest results, why don't they go after those who cause it?

Again, some groups can get away with a broad range of crimes, while other groups are oppressed merely for pointing out the existence of the crimes being committed. That sets the stage for violence; the oppressed people who are victims not only of the criminal groups in their midst, but even of police intimidation, may soon feel that extralegal violent means are their only way to protest.

The BNP...?

Two centuries and some decades ago, such oppression at the hands of Crown authorities resulted in a revolution among the Crown's American colonies.

Pak Sex Slave Ring in UK, Part 3

We continue with our look at the Pakistani sex slave ring that was discovered in the UK. In Part 1 we began reviewing the article Mothers of prevention; in Part 2 we looked at some other articles to get some more background information. Here in Part 3 we continue with Mothers of prevention:

Gemma had been introduced to Amir by a 15-year-old boy at her Blackburn school. A shy girl with little confidence, she was extremely flattered when she was charmed and actively pursued by the boy, who was thought of by many of the girls at her school as a "dish". When Gemma became enamoured of her new boyfriend, he introduced her to his 24-year-old "cousin", who began plying her with cannabis and alcohol. She initially enjoyed feeling "grown-up" and rebelling against her parents. Soon, Anni noticed dramatic changes in Gemma's behaviour and appearance.

The date Gemma was raped was important – Amir, a seasoned pimp, was well aware of the law. If anyone has sex with a girl under 13, there is a strong risk of being arrested for having sex with a minor. Once they reach 13, however, unless the victim makes a complaint to the police, nothing will happen. Recommendations following the Soham murders clearly state that police should arrest in cases where older males have sex with a child under the age of 16. However, police rarely take action unless the victim complains, thereby allowing the pimps and their customers to act with impunity.

The criminals who did this know what they are doing -- they know the law.

From Gemma, and other girls in her situation, there will be no complaint to the authorities. They are afraid to give evidence, or refuse to.

"That is why I am so proud of Jo," says Maureen, talking immediately after Hussain and Naveed were sentenced. "Although she had been through the most horrendous physical and mental torture at the hands of those two, she somehow found the courage to go to the police."

The pimps are, of course, highly manipulative. Ensnaring vulnerable and unconfident girls, they make them dependent by giving expensive gifts and constant compliments. After embarking on a sexual relationship with them, the abusers begin to control them with threats and brutality, before selling them to other men for sex. There are obvious signs for parents to look out for, experts say. Girls transforming from childish and naive to angry, hardened and overtly sexualised, and coming home drunk, smelling of smoke, truanting from school and going missing from home.

"The abuse these girls suffer is horrendous," says Aravinda Kosaraju, a researcher at Crop, which has in the past been funded by the Home Office and has recently received a large lottery grant in order to develop its work. "The pimps even use pregnancy as a form of punishment," says Kosaraju. "We worked with two girls who were made pregnant by customers and then forced to have backstreet abortions." Crop was founded by the late Irene Ivison, a mother of three who died during a routine operation. Her daughter Fiona, a bright girl from a happy home in Sheffield, was lured by a pimp masquerading as her boyfriend when she was 14. Having been successfully groomed, by the time she was 17 she was dead, murdered by a customer.

It is important to remember here that prostitution is a victimless crime.

Crop researchers have been tracking the pimping gangs for over a decade, and have built up a valuable database of knowledge about the pimping gangs, based on hundreds of stories from parents and victims. However, the pimps are largely able to operate with impunity. "If we had not pushed and pushed about this issue," says Anni, "I believe that Hussain and Naveed would still be out there, just like my child’s abusers are."

Anni, along with other affected mothers, has put pressure on the police to respond by using the local press to back their campaign for justice.

Blackburn is Jack Straw's constituency, and both Anni and Maureen have visited him to beg for help. "I have had two cases at my constituency surgery over the past two years," Straw said, "and have discussed this with the police, council, community leaders and the Lancashire Telegraph." The paper launched the Keep Them Safe campaign last year, following an investigation of several cases of Asian pimping gangs.

Asian... Chinese? Indian? Malaysian? Mongolian? Give me a minute... I'll get this....

Under the control of the pimps, the girls develop something akin to Stockholm syndrome, where they begin to have empathy and sympathy for their abusers. Shirley Gorek, a former social worker employed by Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council to advise on child sexual exploitation, has run support groups for girls caught up with pimps. She found the girls can get completely brainwashed by their abusers. "It is almost as if they are programmed into a cult," she says. "There is often no getting through to them."

A "cult" -- funny choice of words....

The pimps' methods of brainwashing often rely on making the victim feel responsible for their welfare. "Amir got me into prostitution by making me feel sorry for him," says Gemma. "He said he was in debt to his landlord, and I was the only way he could make money. I would have done anything for him."

Not all the girls are from disadvantaged backgrounds. A recent national survey by Barnardo's found that, of underage children selling sex, nearly half still lived with their families, with only 14% being in care.

Pimping is lucrative. According to the Metropolitan Police Vice Squad, a pimp can make £300,000 to £400,000 a year selling a 16-year-old girl. There is, appallingly, no shortage of men who wish to buy them. The criminals often use the girls themselves to recruit their neighbours and school friends into the gangs. One mother, who used to drive around the town looking for her daughter when she went missing, says she once saw an older teenage girl apply make-up to two young girls in the street, while older Asian men, whom she recognised as pimps, waited by their BMWs. "The girls then were told to perform a 'sexy dance' for them," says Jean. "But they were so young! I had watched them skipping earlier."

There's plenty of money to be made in prostitution -- so long as you're not the prostitute.

("Asian" men.... Vietnamese? Cambodian?)

Despite evidence from rigorous research by organisations such as Crop that the gangs are largely made up of men from the Pakistani Muslim communities, many are determined to downplay this. "What we’re dealing with is gross criminality," says Kosaraju. "That should be confronted whatever the race of the perpetrator."

Pakistani Muslim?! I am shocked and appalled! I would have never guessed that!

It's amazing how far the politically correct world has come. In the name of equality, they have created a group of people who are so above the law, that they cannot even be openly described when they commit a crime. Now that's progressive -- that's equality!

Mike Cunningham, an assistant chief constable with Lancashire police, says he is aware that several recent cases reported to police in Lancashire have involved Asian men, but that the issue of sexual grooming of young girls is not based solely on race or culture.

"Offenders can and do come from a variety of cultural backgrounds," says Cunningham, "and we deal with each case on its own individual merit." He says he is not aware of "any accusations of racism from the accused or their respective communities".

Historically, many of Britain’s pimps have come from immigrant communities – Jews in the early 20th century, Jamaicans and Maltese in the 1950s and '60s. White, British-born pimps have tended to operate as individuals, rather than within criminal gangs. In recent years, however, young Asian men have been operating in formal, organised networks in the north of England, particularly in the impoverished towns with high unemployment and racial disharmony.

"Asian" men... we now know that means (shhhh) Pakistani Muslims!

Perhaps there is a cultural connection.

Perhaps the men victimizing the girls feel they can do so because the girls are from an inferior culture.

Perhaps the men committing these crimes have an interpretation of a religion that permits this type of conduct with girls who are not members of their religion.

Perhaps their religious beliefs, not necessarily shared by other adherents of the religion in question, is at the very heart of the matter.

Perhaps that's why these "Asian men" (Pakistani Muslims) do this as organized groups of criminals.

How can you dismiss cultural factors without an investigation?

Pak Sex Slave Ring in UK, Part 2

We continue from Part 1 with our look at a Pakistani sex slave ring in the UK.

Before we continue reviewing the in-depth report entitled Mothers of Prevention, it is worth reviewing some other articles for further background on the incidents. I will have two other articles in this post, plus two in another, in addition to the remainder of Mothers of Prevention subsequently.

We begin with Grooming of white girls for sex is exposed as two Asian men jailed by Lucy Bannerman and Richard Ford, August 11, 2007.

A hidden world in which Asian men "groom" young white girls for sex has been exposed with the jailing yesterday of two men for child-abuse offences.

Zulfqar Hussain, 46, and Qaiser Naveed, 32, from east Lancashire, were each jailed for five years and eight months after exploiting two girls aged under 16 by plying them with alcohol and drugs before having sex with them.

Both men pleaded guilty at Preston Crown Court to abduction, sexual activity with a child and the supply of a controlled drug.

Despite being told explicitly by police and social services that both girls were under-age and should be returned to care, the men picked up one girl from a children's home in Blackburn and then drove on to collect her friend who was living in temporary foster care in North Wales.

Naveed, from Burnley, gave one girl the first of five Ecstasy tablets at a motorway service station before having sex with her on the back seat of the car while the group drove back to Lancashire. The court was told that the two men later took the girls to an address in Blackburn where Hussain, from Blackburn, had sex with the second girl and gave her a total of ten Ecstasy tablets.

In addition to "grooming" the girls to gain their confidence, the men drugged them -- fairly extensively -- prior to having sex with them.

Yesterday Judge Andrew Gilbart, QC, jailed the two Asian men under new sex laws designed to protect youngsters from being groomed for sexual activity. Judge Gilbart said: "This is a truly shocking offence. You knew them. They were exploited for sex by the two of you. No other description is possible. They were under-age girls who you knew it was your responsibility to protect and not exploit."

If it was their responsibility to protect and not exploit, then the mice were in charge of the cheese.

If you really want a response from the "Asian" community, do the following: Declare that this is an honor crime against the families of the girls, and that the only way to cleanse the honor of the victims' families is to execute the perpetrators -- and then whack these two guys.

At the very least, the penalty should be chemical castration.

It's not, and that's why these guys do it -- they know they can get away with it. The police will "explicitly" warn them before trouble starts.

Try going to certain "Asian" countries (Pakistan) and victimizing their people -- you will be tortured, then executed, though not necessarily convicted!

Where is the PC elite? They are shutting up because of the protected status of the perpetrators. They can't condone the activity (or perhaps they do?), but neither will they speak out against the "Asian" immigrants:

The trial came amid growing concern at the attitudes of some Asian men towards white girls which campaigners for women claim few people wish to address.

Parents have complained that in parts of the country with large Asian communities white girls as young as 12 are being targeted for sex by older Asian men yet the authorities are unwilling to act because of fears of being labelled racist.

The reason they target twelve-year-olds is because they rape the girls when they turn 13 -- the age at which the protection offered by the laws changes, making the authorities have to wait for the girls to come forward and complain to launch an investigation.

Ann Cryer, a Labour member of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, has been at the forefront of attempting to tackle the problem after receiving complaints from mothers in her constituency about young Asian men targeting their under-age daughters.

Although campaigners claim that hundreds of young girls are already being passed around men within the Asian community for sex, she said that attempts to raise the problem with community leaders had met with little success, with most of them being in a state of denial about it.

A state of denial -- they don't even want to say these are Pakistanis, so they call them "Asians". The Vietnamese, Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, etc., ought to be screaming about this.

Hell, the Brits ought to be screaming about this.

Say they are Pakistanis, and tell everybody what they are doing. When the PC elite call you racists, fire back at the PC elite, that they are aiding and abetting child-abusing, drug-pushing rapist-pimps, because that is exactly what is happening.

After the case, the mother of one of the girls, who cannot be named for legal reasons, welcomed the jail terms. "This will hopefully act as a warning to others," the woman said. She had had to leave the court as details of the men’s sexual relations with the teenagers were read out. After the trial, Ms Cryer said that young Asian men were caught between two cultures having been brought up in a Western society in families while retaining the cultural values of the Asian sub-continent.

She said: "The family and cultural norms of their community means they are expected to marry a first cousin or other relative back in a village in Mirapur or wherever the family comes from. Therefore, until that marriage is arranged they look out for sex.

"At the point in their lives when they are ready for this sort of activity, Asians cannot go to Asian girls because it would be a terrible breach of the honour of the community and their family to have sex with an Asian girl before marriage." She said that the reason Asian men targeted very young white girls was because older white girls knew that a relationship with an Asian youth was unlikely to last as the community would seek an arranged marriage with someone from the Asian sub-continent. Police and groups campaigning to protect women insisted that the grooming of youngsters is not segregated along race lines, though there is concern at the attitudes of some young Asian men towards white girls.

Parents claim that criminal networks are able to prey on young girls because the authorities are reluctant to tackle the issue for fear of upsetting race relations in areas of the North West with large ethnic minority communities.

However, Ms Cryer added: "I think there is a problem with the view Asian men generally have about white women. Their view about white women is generally fairly low. They do not seem to understand that there are white girls as moral and as good as Asian girls."

Again, I call your attention to the way they are speaking about this in code: "Asian men" and "Asian girls".

Many of the "Asian" immigrants in the UK are from Pakistan. They are for the most part Muslims. This is not to imply that all Pakistanis are causing problems, or that all Muslims are causing problems, or that all Pakistani Muslims are causing problems.

However, if calling these perpetrators "Muslims" or "Pakistanis" is racist, then it is even more racist to call them "Asians" -- as if all people of any kind of Asian background were involved!

The PC elite thought-police, driving everyone to use the term "Asians", is instilling its own brands of racism: first, they are slandering anyone from any part of Asia, when the culprits are only some (not all!) Pakistanis; second, they are denying justice to victims who are not "Asians".

The issue here is that this activity is organized, and the organizations involved in it are Muslims from Pakistan.

In other countries, in Sweden and Norway for example, Muslim immigrants have a similar pattern of behavior victimizing the women of their host society. Instead of plying young girls with drugs, the immigrants there brutally gang-rape the women, and since they merely overcome the victims with force, they can go after victims who are older; targeting younger girls is only necessary when one is attempting to gain their trust, and so needs a victim who is more naive.

The explanations are the same, however: the infidel women are abused for sex, so it is a sexual jihad; for marriage, they seek "decent" women from their own culture. The blogger Fjordman has written extensively about the situation in the Nordic countries, and has documented this thoroughly. I recommend you read Fjordman's work, and learn about the connection between the permissive attitudes regarding these types of criminal activities, and the PC elites that have these attitudes.

I challenge the Politically Correct elements in the UK to look into whether Islam plays a role here. Do these perpetrators consider themselves Muslims? If so, are they practicing Muslims? Do they justify their activities with reference to Islamic texts? Or, if they consider themselves Muslims, do they believe that what they are doing is wrong according to Islamic laws and traditions?

In short: Is plying young girls with drugs and then raping them and renting them out for sex to others a form of sexual jihad, or is this merely disgusting and despicable criminal activity?

And for my readers who are decent people, and who happen to be either Pakistani or Muslim, there is no need to be offended: we know you do not condone this activity, and we know that any society has its criminal element.

The criminal element in British society are the elitists who allow these heinous crimes to go either inadequately punished, or unpunished and unacknowledged altogether.


Another article addressing this matter came out the same day, entitled 'If it had been white guys, it would have been reported sooner' by Lucy Bannerman, August 11, 2007:

Some parents, support workers and community leaders claim that an ugly pattern has emerged across Lancashire and Yorkshire in particular in which vulnerable, white, working-class girls are being used for sex by groups of older and predominantly Asian men.

Once the girls have moved into these social circles, they are encouraged to rebel, with peer pressure leading to petty crime, says Samantha Pratt, of CROP, the Leeds-based Coalition for the Removal of Pimping.

The victims become criminalised themselves, she said. "A lot of these kids are getting ASBOs and being treated as if they are naughty teenagers. But these men are puppeteers."

This is a universal pattern, familiar throughout communities across Britain. Julie (not her real name), whose 13-year-old daughter fell prey to this kind of sexual exploitation, believes that, in her case, sensitivity about perceived racism led to a reluctance to tackle the problem. "There must be hundreds of girls going through the same thing. But I felt I had a brick wall to knock down before you even got to the real issue. I do believe if it had been white guys, it would have been reported a lot sooner."

She believes that the men have no respect for the victims. "These guys think the girls are white trash. They know what they can get away with."

Therein lies the problem with what this new-age political correctness has done: criminals know they can get away with their crimes, from the cathouse to the White House.

It is a point picked up by Abdul Hamid Qureshi, chairman of the Lancashire Council of Mosques.

"We in the Muslim community are failing in the sense that there are young people in society with little or no moral values. After the age of 12, nobody is engaging with them. We have to transform ourselves.

"It is not just white girls being exploited. Asian girls are involved too, but their numbers are less. There is less access to them, and the criminals are more likely to be deterred by their fathers and brothers, who they know will come after them."

He rejected an argument by Ann Cryer, the local MP, that forbidden extramarital sex and the expectation of arranged marriage is leading Asian men to use white girls for sex.

He said: "I think that is a shallow way of looking at it. This is a social evil. We have to put up enough barriers so that it becomes difficult for [these men] to operate."

The argument made by Ann Cryer is the same as that made elsewhere, and makes sense. It is possible that Chairman Qureshi is right, though.

Regardless, while the perpetrators come from a Muslim/Pakistani background, it would be interesting to know whether they actually practice Islam, and whether they attend a mosque. In short, does Islam play a role here?

The Islamic community needs to help identify these people and bring them to justice. If Muslims don't, they run the risk of being lumped in with the criminals, conspirators through silence, conspirators after-the-fact.

Chairman Qureshi hits it spot-on (emphasis added):

"Asian girls are involved too, but their numbers are less. There is less access to them, and the criminals are more likely to be deterred by their fathers and brothers, who they know will come after them."

The voting public and its elected officials might wish to consider my suggestion:

Declare that this is an honor crime against the families of the girls, and that the only way to cleanse the honor of the victims' families is to execute the perpetrators -- and then whack these two guys.

Pak Sex Slave Ring in UK, Part 1

Here is an article I have been meaning to post about. It is entitled Mothers of prevention, Investigation by Julie Bindel, September 30, 2007, and I use the first part of this article to begin another series.

Schoolgirls in Lancashire and Yorkshire are falling prey to sinister gangs of pimps. Two men have been sent to jail, but the girls' mothers, not the police, are at the forefront of the crackdown. Why are the authorities so reluctant to get involved?

Would any of my readers care to guess?

At the crown court in Preston on August 10, a trial involving two Asian men caused unusual interest across a number of cities in the north of England. The defendants, Zulfqar Hussain and Qaiser Naveed, were each sentenced to five years and eight months for abduction, sexual activity with a child, and the supply of a controlled drug.

"Asian" men -- from Korea? from Vietnam? from Japan?

They had both pleaded guilty, and they were placed on the sex offenders' register for life.

It seemed a shabby, seedy episode, probably typical of many cases down the years that have involved exploitative men and naive women. Yet, until these convictions, the police in over a dozen towns and cities, including Leeds, Sheffield, Blackburn and Huddersfield, had appeared reluctant to address what many local people had perceived as a growing problem – the groups of men who had been preying on young, vulnerable girls and ensnaring them into prostitution.

The expression "ensnaring them into prostitution" does not convey the full degree of insidiousness of what is going on here.

It was a very uncomfortable scenario, not least because many of these crimes had an identifiable racial element: the gangs were Asian and the girls were white. The authorities, in the shape of politicians and the police, seemed reluctant to acknowledge this aspect of the crimes; it has been left to the mothers of the victims to speak out.

Why do you suppose that is?

Maureen's daughter Jo was one of Hussain and Naveed’s victims, having been groomed by them and a number of other Asian men when she was 14. Jo went missing from her Blackburn home 90 times during the six-month period in 2005 that she was in Hussain and Naveed’s clutches.

"I was told by one police officer that he did not 'want to start a race riot' by arresting Pakistani men for sexual offences," Maureen said. During the six months that Jo was in the clutches of these men, they raped, beat and abused her to the point where, says her mother, she did not even know who she was any more. Eventually, after she was attacked by Hussain and Naveed with an iron bar, Jo somehow found the courage to report them to police, and they were arrested. The case took 16 months to come to court. In the meantime, other pimps, undeterred by the impending trial, continued to go about their business.

The term "Asian" has become a codeward in the British press for Muslims, usually from south or southwest Asia. To use the term "Muslim" is to be Islamophobic, and using the term "Pakistani" without proper cover is borderline at best.

So what are the police doing? Lancashire police say that in the past few months they have sent letters to 70 men who were believed to be spending an unusual amount of time with young girls. The letters warn the men that the girls are underage; the men are required to sign the letter, confirming they have received and read it.

The police have started a letter-writing campaign, informing suspects of what everyone in any decent society should already know.

Instead of alerting these suspects that they are on to them, the police should just bust them, and take these guys down.

The details are left on file – but there is no guarantee that the police will take any further action if the grooming continues.

Blackburn, in common with many northern towns, is experiencing a huge upsurge in pimping, and it is an unpalatable truth for the authorities – and indeed the police – that many of the newest wave of pimps come from within the Asian community. Research, conducted in 2005 and involving 106 families seeking help from the Leeds-based campaigning organisation Coalition for the Removal of Pimping (Crop), found that in Yorkshire alone more than 30 girls were sexually exploited, with some being forced into prostitution, by what Crop says are predominantly Asian networks. As many as 200 families have gone to the organisation for advice.

Do not believe this is unrelated to defending ourselves against terrorism. As is addressed in other posts, especially those quoting Makarenko's work, terrorism is just one kind of activity in a broad world of criminality. If law enforcement would take down these networks for the other laws they break, the terrorist threat would be greatly diminished.

Other infidel bloggers write at length on why certain elements in the Islamic world feel they can do pretty much whatever they want to infidels -- if you wish, you may explore that issue for yourself.

My point here is that this sexual predation is part of the same ideology that generates suicide terror attacks. To be sure, neither sexual predation nor suicide attacks are peculiar to Islamic circles, but there is a correlation that can be denied only by sticking one's PC head in the sand -- or by willful and criminal negligence.

Many affected parents are unhappy with the police response. As this piece goes to press, the families are meeting lawyers to discuss possible action against the police. This could result in the biggest civil action ever brought against police for failing to protect children from sexual predators.

Alice Knowles, a chief inspector and the officer with responsibility for Operation Engage, set up by the police and the local authority in Blackburn to tackle the sex-grooming problem, insists her force takes a robust approach to tackling the problem of sexual predators such as Hussain and Naveed. "We work very closely with social services and other agencies to educate and prevent young people becoming victims, and to target and arrest offenders," says Knowles. She believes the recent sentencing of Hussain and Naveed reflects the serious nature of this crime, and that police will "continue to work very hard to demonstrate that this sort of behaviour will not be tolerated in Lancashire".

I would be interested in hearing Chief Inspector Knowles candidly describe what kind of constraints she is working under. If she ever did, and word got out, she would probably be fired within the week.

The Mall in Blackburn is popular as a meeting place for the town's young men and women. Set on two floors, with over 100 high-street stores, it is brightly lit and usually busy. It teems with young women with pushchairs, elderly people window-shopping, and teenagers meeting up with their friends. The crackle of security guards' radios mingles with the cheesy piped music.

Not everyone is there to shop. Well-dressed Asian teenage boys can be found on the lookout for young white girls, following them around those stores that sell cheap jewellery and perfume. Meanwhile, older men sit on the benches, watching their workers and potential recruits in action. The older men are "employing" the boys to chat up the girls and eventually hand them over.

These "Asian" (= Muslim? Pakistani?) boys are described as well-dressed. This is a business, and significant money is being made acquiring girls as prostitutes and sex slaves. That money provides a budget so these "Asian" boys can dress nice, and sufficiently impress the girls they are luring in.

The Mall is widely known locally as the Lap because of the way young men and girls circle around the arcade, seeking each other out. The girls, keen to hook up with a boyfriend, call it "doing the Lap". Young men stop to chat to the giggling girls, teasing and flirting. To many, they look like any other group of teenagers. One security guard, asked if the men are pimps, said he neither knew nor cared. "It's the girls," he says, "they love the Pakis. We can’t get a look in." Nearby, a young man takes two of the girls into a shop, where he buys them make-up and perfume. Later on, the groups of men move on to the Vue cinema complex near Blackburn station. The younger men are on bicycles, the older ones in expensive-looking cars, sound systems blaring out bhangra and gangster rap. Girls begin to approach them, and are soon driven away in cars by the older men. It is possible that they are taken to "slag houses", where they will be sold for sex.

Too often, the money that is spent to buy "gifts" for the girls is tallied and kept track of. Later, when the girls are sold into slavery, this "debt" will come back to haunt them, and they will find that they have to work to pay for the cost of these "gifts", as well as having to pay for the cost of their room and board, clothes, transportation to wherever they are being held, and even the cost of the condoms their clients use -- assuming condoms are used, of course: the girls may not have a great deal of say in the matter as they are being raped and beaten.

Other scenarios are perhaps more common in the UK.

Meanwhile, at the Lap and the Vue, the young men swagger up and down the road wearing gold chains and diamond earrings, and clicking their fingers at girls hovering close by.

Ultimately, the girls have sex with men, and the money paid by the men to have sex with the girls goes to pay for the gold and diamonds that so impress the girls in the recruiting process.

Gemma cannot remember ever being happy, although her mother, Anni, says she was a contented child until she reached the age of 13. That was the day she fell out of puppy love. It was the day that Amir, her 24-year-old boyfriend, chose to brutally rape her.

Beginning in Part 2, we will continue with this article, but also go beyond it, examining why the criminal elements in the Pakistani immigrant community are different from the criminal elements of other immigrant communities or of native British communities.

Interview with No Sharia, Part 2

We continue from Part 1 our interview with No Sharia. Questions are numbered, and No Sharia's answers are in italics.



14) In your answer to Question 5, you indicate that anti-Semitism is due to "left leaning journalists". Why do you associate anti-Semitism with left-leaning journalists? In other words, what causes you to have that impression? Why, in your opinion, are "left leaning journalists" anti-Semitic?

The journalists in e g Sweden belong to the left to a large extent. They are not only social democratic but many vote for the former communist party. They are against the market economy, the US and therefore also against Israel. In reality many detest the West because the West defeated socialism, and now they think they can defeat the West by the help of muslim immigration. They hate the fact that the West has a superior system. Their beloved system –socialism - was revealed to have been a sham, and they hate that. So they sympathize with the Palestineans and with arabs who critizize the west. They have taken over the arguments of the Palestineans. Their so-called anti-sionism seems in reality often be anti-Semitism even if they never will admit that.

They don't understand that the Palestinean problem has been held unsolved intentionally by Arab governments for 60 years in order for those to have a scapegoat and be able to blame others for their own shortcomings. Antisemitism fulfills the same function, and during the last decades it has been based more and more on islam which in itself is antisemitic.

15) In your answer to Question 4, you state that Christianity is treated by the media "with indifference or concealed contempt". In Question 6, you indicate that non-Christian religions, other than Judaism and Islam, are treated "with indifference or some respect owing to their not being Christian". These answers indicate a distinct anti-Christian public bias. Is this accurate? Why would this be so? Please explain, for an audience that is not familiar with Sweden, the cultural dynamics that have resulted in this.

Yes I think it is accurate. The journalists are seldom religious and they often seem to despise religion. Christianity was earlier connected with what they interpret as a class society which they as socialists naturally abhor. They are Marxists and the church historically belongs to the oppressors.

16) In Question 9, you state: "I suspect that some members of the government may be willing to sacrifice freedom of expression etc in order to appease muslims". The implication of the word "appease" is that there is a problem, presumably with violence associated with the Muslim community. Is that accurate? What information or evidence can you offer to support that? Is this first-hand (i.e., something that you have witnessed or experienced), is it second-hand (i.e., something a friend or relative of yours witnessed or experienced, and then told you about), or how far removed is this information?

You mentioned violence; I didn't so I don't need to present any evidence for just that.

Political violence has not started yet in Sweden besides that many rapes performed by muslims sometimes seem to have a religious undertone. The behaviour of those muslims is probably accepted by many other muslims because they are in Dar al-Harb – Europe - and the women dress in the wrong way anyway.

However, the demonstrations around the world regarding the cartoons and "rondell" dogs seem to have made the politicians apprehensive and very cautious. Their knowledge about islam is so shallow that they may believe that by suppressing some human rights they will satisfy the muslims. They don't understand that muslim organizations use the salami tactics. I judge the states of mind of politicians from what they say in the media and from their decisions.

17) In Question 6, you indicate that Islam is treated "both critically and with multicultural lies". This seems related to your answer from Question 9, quoted in Question 16 above. Please elaborate. What is stated about Islam publicly that is accurate, and what is stated publicly that is inaccurate? By whom? Why?

The lie that islam is a religion of peace and tolerance is repeated by politicians and journalists too often. Nobody dares to talk about the real islam which now takes over the muslim world everywhere. The moderate Islamic variants in some countries are now revealed to just be just local cultural phenomena which have no basis in the religious doctrine. So the moderate variants retreat when the real islam appears and takes over the mosques and muslim organizations (helped by oil money, of course).

They don't dare to talk about how muslims look at non-muslims and their view of the superiority of muslims. They don't dare to talk about human rights generally in the muslim countries and what it may mean for us. They don't dare to talk about the long-term plans of muslims for introducing sharia in Europe. What they can critizise is e g the treatment of women by muslim men but they don't do much about it.

What we need is a proactive nontolerance of all crimes against women by muslims. And we need to define new crimes: (1) religious hate crimes i e crimes based on and caused by religon and (2) crimes against integration.

18) Following the thread of Questions 16 & 17, and in light of your answer to Question 9, do you perceive an effort on the part of the government to cover up violence and criminal acts perpetrated by people associated with Islam? If so, is it merely ambiguously labeled, but with its existence acknowledged? Or is it buried as if it never occurred? Why would this be happening?

It is in many cases buried deep. Media generally don't talk about the religion of criminals even when the crime evidently is based on religion. The reason they conceal these facts is basically that they want the immigration to continue so that the social democrats will get a permanent majority on its side. So they don´t want to give any arguments to those who want to stop the immigration of muslim fundamentalists.

Why the non-socialistic government keeps quiet is surprising. Probably the reason is that the non-socialistic parties increased their shares of the immigrant vote in the last election and that the government wants Turkey getting into the EU. They think that a stand against muslim immigrants regarding any issue will weaken them in these two respects.

Another weaker reason is that they don't know how to handle the issue. They behave like children; by not talking about it they think it will go away.

However, when a terrorist act will be committed by a muslim the media will label it as such but they will draw no conclusions. The media and the intelligentia have betrayed their functions in the society. They shall upheld [should uphold -- YD] the standards in society regarding rationality and logic, and also intellectually protect the society and human rights. They fail miserably in both respects.

19) Following up to Question 18, are there other criminal acts that are covered up? For example, acts associated by other religious or political groups? If so, how do you know that and why do you perceive that? What do you feel might be the reason for this, and why do you think it is a reason?

No, I don't think so. The acts by nazi and extreme leftist groups are published by the media, and the government sees no advantages in not talking about such atrocities. Regarding these groups, the media find no difficulty in talking about the underlying ideology. It is only regarding islam that they can never discover a connection between the ideology - a religion – and the crime.

20) In Question 8, you indicate that there is a political elite. In Question 12, you indicate that political leaders adopt some policies, specifically regarding immigration, that do not reflect the will of the people. Why do you feel that the people do not support such policies? Why does the political elite ignore the will of the people they govern? How can they get away with it?

The opinion polls indicate a hardening attitude towards muslim immigration and illegal behaviour of immigrants. Government policies don't reflect that.

If you have a smaller group which reacts against a government policy, and a large group – the Swedish population – which really doesn't care, the smaller group can influence the politicians. That's one of the reasons for the opportunism of the government. But now a growing part of the population starts to care and that will hopefully cause a change in the behaviour. The government can't get away with ignoring the issues, if the people care about them and it affects the opinion polls.

The social democrats cannot be expected to do the right thing. The people didn't want them so they try to create another people. They will protect immigration with teeth and nails in order to arrange a new permanent majority in the future. They risk the future of the nation of Sweden in order to win political goals.

21) Also in Question 12, you indicate that "the press and other media are in effect controlled by left leaning journalists". Why do you state that?

Journalists cannot be fired if those dismissals are not a part of a program to save the economy of the newspaper. So the journalists and the editors are to a great extent the newspaper. They tend to recruit people who have the same opinions as they have. The exception regards the economy pages of a newspaper.

So the number of promotions and recruitments of non-socialistic journalists will certainly be held down. However, regarding higher positions where the management of the newspaper has a larger influence, this power of the journalists diminishes distinctly. But the power to influence what is written in all the articles is real power. Journalists push the multicultural agenda meaning that all cultures have the same value but that the western civilization is worse than most.

22) Related to Questions 20 and 21, how did the situation develop wherein there is a political and media elite in Sweden that is not responsive to the people? What are your thoughts on that?

The media have always been to the left. After the Berlin wall, the socialists among them (the large majority) seem not to have accepted that they were wrong all their lives and that their chosen ideology was pure shit. Now they – like communist and social democratic politicians - try to put new life into socialism and take back the political initiative by protecting a huge immigration. Muslim immigrant voters will overwhelmingly vote for socialistic parties. The former communists and the socialdemocratic party will protect the immigration. The reason for the passivity of the non-socialistic parties were commented upon in q. 20. They have yet not understood the real issues and the great danger of the muslim immigration.

23) In Question 13, you indicate that the native Swedes who live in areas with concentrations of Muslim immigrants are anti-Muslim as well as anti-Islamist. Please define what you mean by the terms "anti-Muslim" and "anti-Islamist". You also indicate that native Swedes outside those areas share those feelings as well. Why is that? What makes you believe there are such feelings? And, did they have such feelings before Muslim immigrants arrived, or have these feelings developed since Muslim immigrants arrived? Please explain.

To be Anti–islamist is to be against Islamism i e radical, political islam. To be Anti-muslim is to understand that there really is no moderate islam and that moderates sooner or later can easily and rapidly develop into radicals and islamists. They just have to be better muslims (according to the doctrine). It may also mean that one doesn't like the attitudes of people from the Middle East who don't have the same view as we regarding any human rights.

I said that people outside these muslim-dominated areas start to have a similar view but just start. The reason is an increased understanding of the muslim culture and of islam: honour killings, the attempts of muslims to suppress all critique of islam, their contempt for Western human rights, what the muslims say about political issues etc.

It is said – and it is a basis of multiculturalism — that if we know more about each other we like each other more and will become more tolerant. That is totally false. The more people know about islam, the worse opinion they will have of that religion. And if they know the truth they will want to prevent all muslim immigration and resist all attempts to introduce sharia in Sweden. In a decade the peoples of Europe will – owing to the anti-jihadist movement – know much more about the important theological issues. The conflicts between muslims and non-muslims will then increase rapidly (also see my prognosis of the political development of Europe). The path of Europe is set. It points towards civil war if we don't implement the strong anti-islamist policies (or similar) which I have defined.


No Sharia is an author at Islam Watch. The prognosis No Sharia refers to, and No Sharia's other writings, can be found there on No Sharia's page.

I hope you will read those writings, because when we next catch up with No Sharia, we will be asking questions about them. If you have a question you would like to submit to No Sharia, please leave it in the comments, or submit it to me via email, with the words "Question for No Sharia" in the subject line, and I will pass the question along.

Please note that since the content of emails is generally considered confidential, I will pass your question along, but not your email address. Similarly, you will only get back the answer to your question and any related comments, and no one's email address but my own. However, unless you specifically state otherwise, the question will be assumed to be publishable on the blog; similarly, unless No Sharia specifically states otherwise, the answer will be assumed to be publishable on the blog as well.

Terror, Corruption and Sex Slaves: From Moldova to Macedonia

From Human Trafficking (undated):

Trafficking in persons, also known as human trafficking, is the modern practice of slavery. It is the third largest criminal industry in the world today, after arms and drug dealing, and is the fastest growing. Traffickers generate billions of dollars in profits every year while victimizing millions of people around the globe.

Readers of Stop Islamic Conquest have seen the connection between the Islamic terrorists that we call Al Qaeda and corruption in the US federal government; that connection is via organized crime, especially the Turkish mafia and Turkey's Deep State.

Al Qaeda is involved in the production of narcotics -- heroin -- and Turkish organized crime, having fairly thoroughly infiltrated the Turkish government, helps move those drugs to the West. The money that is made goes in part to fund terrorist activities, but goes also toward the theft and proliferation of US nuclear and other weapons technology. An extensive network of bribery and corruption among US government figures, including elected and appointed officials in the Executive and Legislative branches, enables all this to occur and facilitates terrorist activity, including strikes against US targets; bribery and corruption also keep the narcoterrorist leaders safe from effective US action.

In this post, we will begin to take a look at the hub of international organized crime where much of this comes together, the Balkans, approaching this sphere from a new direction: that of the sex slave industry.

About five years ago, MSNBC did an investigation of the sex slave trade. The first part is entitled Infiltrating Europe's shameful trade in human beings: MSNBC.com exposes a sexual slavery network, which can also be found at a website dealing with human trafficking; this article is by Preston Mendenhall, MSNBC.com International Editor, and is reproduced here in its entirety, with my comments:

VELESTA, Macedonia — Olga winced as she drew back the bandage on her right breast, revealing an infected puncture wound that hadn't healed since a man bit her in a fit of sexual rage. But the wound, for which the 19-year-old Moldovan lacked even basic medicine, is only a small part of Olga's daily agony. For more than a year she has been held as a sex slave in this town in western Macedonia, where human trafficking flourishes and young girls are forced to endure the sexual whims of thousands of men.

SITTING IN a brothel bedroom in Velesta, a town synonymous with forced prostitution that police and experts consider one of the most dangerous places in Europe, Olga said that her "owner" would kill her for telling a reporter about her state of captivity. But the cruel conditions under which she is held, and her deteriorating mental and physical health, compelled her to speak out. Her head hung in shame, Olga's dark brown eyes welled with tears. She brushed back her long black hair, revealing a fair complexion flushed with anger at her fate. "There is only one word for this," she said. "Slavery."

Forced to have sex with as many as 10 men every day, Olga and other women clandestinely interviewed by MSNBC.com as part of a four-month investigation into the sex trade in Europe, insisted that their real identities not be revealed.

Their fears are not unfounded. Those brave enough to seek help have been savagely beaten — and sometimes killed — for trying to escape.

FLOURISHING SEX TRADE

Olga is one small cog in a huge transnational industry, and Macedonia is merely a way station on a path to bondage that begins in impoverished Eastern Europe and the chaotic states that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and stretches to Western Europe, the Middle East and beyond.

In Europe alone, officials estimate that more than 200,000 women and girls — one-quarter of all women trafficked globally — are smuggled out of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics each year, the bulk of whom end up working as enslaved prostitutes. Almost half are transported to Western Europe. Roughly a quarter end up in the United States. Human rights activists say the numbers do not tell the full story, because most women remain silent rather than turn to frequently corrupt authorities for help.

Other sources agree with the 200,000 figure for that time frame, but place that as one-fifth of the women trafficked globally each year for the early part of this decade. Regardless, the problem is immense, and the Balkans, near the crossroads of three continents, is also a major crossroads for the sex slave trade.

The term "corrupt authorities" here may refer to local police who tip off the owners of the illegal brothels prior to a raid. However, those political leaders whose policies result in the creation of regions of the world where organized crime essentially takes over also play a role, especially when those policies are influenced by bribes paid by organized crime.

Since the collapse of Yugoslavia into chaos a decade and a half ago, the Balkans has become a particularly lawless place. This will be addressed in more detail in future posts.

Also key to the growth of the sex slave trade has been the collapse of the Soviet Union:

The rapid rise of this sex slave trade can be traced to the fall of the Soviet Union, where borders once heavily guarded by the Red Army suddenly became porous and Soviet republics and Eastern European satellites once in the Kremlin's grasp saw their industries and subsidies collapse overnight. Millions of young women like Olga came of age amid this economic misery. Their childhood fantasies of a better life in the West soon became a human trafficker's golden opportunity.

MOLDOVA'S MISERY

Nowhere is this trafficking worse than it is in Moldova, Olga's home, where experts estimate that since the fall of the Soviet Union between 200,000 and 400,000 women have been sold into prostitution — perhaps up to 10 percent of the female population. The numbers are staggering, but for Liuba Revenko of the International Organization for Migration in Moldova the bondage of the country's young women has become routine. "Moldovans are a hybrid population of Russians, Romanians, Jews, Ukrainians and Bulgarians," Revenko said. "That creates a special race of women that are beautiful and in demand. They have no future. They are a good target for the traffickers."

The sex slave industry did not come into existence with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe; rather, it evolved: it has been there for centuries. The plight of women under communist rule often was little better than it is now, as women under communist corruption often had nowhere to turn for help, and state-controlled media were not quick to expose shortcomings in their societies.

In Velesta, a town so small that the 120 Moldovan girls working as prostitutes there make up a sizeable part of the population, the sex slaves are rarely seen during the day. Kept under lock and key in the back rooms of a dozen "kafane," or café-bars that double as brothels, they are summoned by their owners when a customer arrives. Then the girls, most in their late teens or early 20s, are paraded in skimpy lingerie before clients who "pick us according to their tastes," said Irina, a Moldovan who answered a want-ad to be a waitress in Italy, but ended up trapped in a Balkans brothel instead of working in a restaurant in southern Sicily.

Rural Moldovan women, lacking education and desperate to escape, are easy targets, activists say. Sometimes the bondage is built around a debt that is impossible to pay off. Other times, it is simply brutal captivity. They end up servicing clients with the false hope of working off a "debt" to their owners, who continue to entice them with real jobs in Europe.

The victimization of young women who are poorly educated, or perhaps merely not "worldly" enough, is in some ways not obvious, as is the psychological torment of the "invisible chains" used to bind them. In addition to being threatened with brutal treatment or death for attempted escape, victims are often told that the local authorities will consider them criminals because they are "prostitutes" even though their prostitution is coerced. Furthermore, local authorities in the Balkans often have corrupt officials somewhere who occasionally make money selling escaped girls back into slavery. A variety of factors cause the girls to be apprehensive of escape. This is often combined with the ongoing promise that somehow, some day, the girls will be able to work their way out of their plight. The goal is to keep the girls subdued, preferably divided up amongst themselves (through distrust, language barriers, jealousy), but not so miserable that they give up on life altogether.

The corruption among the authorities is a double slap in the face to those authorities who are honest, because now their integrity is called into question because of the actions of others, even as they risk their lives to battle criminals who are very well-funded, well-equipped, and well-informed about police activities and operations.

UNWITTING VICTIMS

The women's tales of bondage are hauntingly similar. Olga, the Moldovan with the breast wound, was virtually kidnapped when she played hooky from school in rural Moldova. Initially, she was drawn to the prospect of a new life in Italy — far away from her alcoholic mother and abusive brother. But the next thing she knew, a Serb smuggler called "Dragan" was pulling her out of a car trunk in the Romanian town of Timisoara, on the border with Yugoslavia. Dragan and his Romanian pals loaded 10 girls on a boat to cross the Danube. After a few days in a basement near Belgrade, Olga was led across the Serbian frontier with Macedonia — under the eyes of obliging border guards — and brought to Velesta. "There were clients on the very first night," she said. With no passport and little idea where she was, Olga was raped, beaten into submission and humiliated until she no longer had the will to challenge her horrible fate.

"Meti made me clean the toilet with my tongue. It was horrible and dirty. I think they did it because I was the newest girl," Olga said of her ethnic Albanian owner. "He made me lick another girl's ... you know, down there. And then he laughed."

Young and beautiful, Olga has stayed in Velesta longer than most trafficked women, many of whom are moved on into Albania and Greece after the local population "breaks them in or gets tired of them," Olga said. Once they reach the Albanian coast, they are easily trafficked to Italy, where the European Union’s lax border controls allow them to be smuggled deep inside the continent.

Here is another big reason why borders should be established, respected, monitored and guarded. It is not just about illegal aliens coming in to do low-paying work; it is about interdiction of the flow of drugs, weapons, contraband, and slaves.

BILLIONS IN PROFITS

Ten years of wars in the Balkans have turned the region into a trafficking highway paved with lawlessness and corruption that has prompted former enemies — Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and ethnic Albanians — to set aside ethnic rivalries in the name of vast profits. "You're talking about big international organizations," said Rudolf Perina, a former U.S. ambassador to Moldova who was involved in Washington-funded anti-trafficking efforts.

Ethnic Albanian rebels in Kosovo, Macedonia and south Serbia — long the masters of drug running in the Balkans — are deeply involved in the human smuggling business, using the flesh trade to fund their separatist movements.

This is where the connection to Islamic terrorists and corruption in Washington, DC, is made: the ethnic Albanian rebels in these areas are Muslims, and are connected ideologically to Al Qaeda. Practically, however, their business partners include secularized organized crime figures, including the Turkish Deep State and the Turkish Mafia. The "Albanian rebels" don't just traffic women, they traffic drugs as well, the very same narcotics that Al Qaeda produces, and that Turkey distributes.

These rebels then use the profits from these activities to fund their "separatist movements" -- movements supported by the Bush Administration in the case of Kosovo, much of whose population is comprised of ethnic Albanians seeking independence from Serbia.

Luisa, a 32-year-old single Moldovan mother whose neighbor persuaded her to accept a job in Italy and "marry a rich Roman," found herself repeatedly raped by her "owner," Dilaver Bojku, an ethnic Albanian trafficking kingpin from Velesta. European law enforcement officials say Bojku, one of the sex trade’s "Most Wanted," has used cash and, reportedly, contacts with ethnic Albanian rebels to avoid arrest for years. "He bought me for $700," Luisa said.

She was freed in a police raid on Velesta, after MSNBC.com confronted Macedonia's interior minister, Ljube Boskovski, with tales of sex slavery only a few hours' drive from his office in the capital of Skopje. But Olga and other women who took great risk to speak about their predicament were nowhere to be found.

The Macedonian SWAT team that raided bars called Coca Cola, Safari and Bela Dona was only partly successful. Tipped off to the raids, brothel owners had spirited girls out secret exits in the backrooms of the bars and hidden them in the woods behind the buildings. The sheets on the beds were still warm. With the exception of a few minor pimps, the kingpins like Bojku escaped.

This whole industry would get nowhere without corruption on the part of government authorities. There is another ingredient, however, one that is far more essential....

LACK OF LAWS

The raid on Velesta was the first by Macedonian police, long wary of upsetting the uneasy peace between the country’s Macedonian Slavs and ethnic Albanian minority.

Even Boskovski admitted his own policemen were on the smugglers’ payroll, making it virtually impossible to surprise the traffickers and rescue their sex slaves. Boskovski also complained about a lack of laws to keep traffickers behind bars. "The punishments are not really severe," he said. In an interview with MSNBC.com, Vitalie Curarari, the head of Moldova's anti-trafficking police, lashed out at the media for "sensationalizing" sex slavery and placed much of the blame for trafficking on the women themselves. "Fifty percent of our women just go abroad to find another man and then come back to divorce their husbands," Curarari said.

Does Mr. Curare (notice my spelling of his name) really believe this, or is he just saying what will ingratiate him to those who pay his bribes?

IN THE HEART OF EUROPE

Farther along the trafficking pipeline, hundreds of women and girls are smuggled into Europe every day and forced onto the streets of cities like Hamburg, Paris, London and Amsterdam. Amsterdam, a city synonymous with hedonism, is perhaps best known for its legalized sex industry, in which prostitutes pay taxes and undergo regular health exams. The city's Red Light District is a virtual Disneyland of sex — with only European Union passport holders allowed to ply the trade.

Oh, but prostitution is a victimless crime! We're just too intolerant!

But only a few miles' drive from the city center, traditional Dutch tolerance is helping fuel the trafficking problem. In Theemsweg, a fenced-in, football field-sized parking lot built by the government for unregulated sex workers, girls sit in bus shelters — also courtesy of the government — waiting for clients. There are no EU citizens here — and the prostitutes' countries of origin are strikingly familiar: Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Romania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic. On weekends, men looking for cheap sex wait in cars that back up for a mile. Sexual encounters, which take place right in the cars, cost $20.

Keep in mind, these girls likely have it relatively easy, compared to what happens to others like them elsewhere.

SMUGGLED INTO EUROPE

Asked how she got to Theemsweg, 20-year-old Anna from Russia's Far East said, "You don't want to know." Dutch police officials, speaking privately, estimate that as many as 70 percent of the prostitutes in the Netherlands are working illegally, using false documents provided by smugglers to skirt Dutch and European laws.

With the women facing poor odds, activists are working overtime to try to thwart traffickers and rescue some of the thousands of sex slaves in Europe. The International Organization for Migration, backed by U.S. funding, has managed to return only 400 of the perhaps hundreds of thousands of Moldovan women victimized by the sex trade. Activists are beating a path to rural areas to educate young girls about the dangers of the trade.

Twenty-one-year-old Natasha, a single mother, considers herself one of the lucky ones. She escaped Velesta, where her clients included NATO soldiers from Germany, France, Britain and the United States who were stationed in Macedonia for peacekeeping duties. It was an Albanian client who took pity on Natasha and bought her from her owner for 5,000 Deutsche Marks, about $2,500. "Yes, I'm back in Moldova, but it's difficult," she said in a village three hours north of the Moldovan capital, Chisinau. "We do not have money to buy bread. We do not have money to pay for the electricity." For Olga, tending to her sore breast in captivity, anything sounds better than Velesta. "What kind of animal can do this to me?" she demanded, tears streaming down her face. "All of Macedonia is filled with girls like me, and we're all crying."

This is the most important ingredient: customers of the sex industry. Without them, the whole industry would dry up.