Barry Weiss
speaker
976 appearances
13 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Barry Weiss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Julie Bindel, welcome to Honestly. Thank you. Thank you. I'm really, really glad that you guys are here for this important conversation. A few days ago in the Free Press, we ran a piece by a British writer called Dominic Green with the following headline, The Biggest Peacetime Crime and Cover-Up in British History.
And he wasn't talking about a financial cover-up or government corruption. He was talking about mass rape. And I want to read the beginning of that story to both of you. The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years.
It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims. British governments, he writes, both conservative and labor, hoped they had buried this story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.
Now, I suspect that most non-British listeners to this show are going to hear that and think, what?
In our post-Harvey Weinstein, post-Jeffrey Epstein age, where Americans now know that some of the richest and most powerful citizens were involved in horrific sex crimes, the notion still that there were gangs of men systemically raping young women and girls seems kind of too insane to be true, but it is true.
And I want to start this conversation not with Elon Musk or the politics, although we'll get to that. I want to start with the basics here. When did this begin? Where did it happen? Who did it happen to? Who were carrying out these crimes? And Julie, I don't think there's anyone better suited to answer those questions than you. So I'd love it if you could jump in and start us off.
My understanding, just sort of the big picture, is that this pattern of gangs of men, mostly Pakistani Muslim origin, their victims mostly working class white girls, was repeated in as many as 50 cities across the country. And a 2014 inquiry estimated that in Rotherham alone, 1,400 girls had been serially raped. Does that check out for both of you?
I think this is maybe a place where the two of you might see it a little bit differently. Julie is seeing things from a very consistent feminist perspective. You know, this is the nature of men. This is the kind of crimes that men in groups commit, and we shouldn't be surprised by it. But Ayaan, I wonder if you disagree about that.
To what extent does the fact that these are Pakistani immigrants—and I'm curious if they're sort of first or second generation— How should that inform the way that we understand the nature of the crimes and why there wasn't more of a sense of public outrage about them? Does their ethnicity and religion figure in here in a way that Julie maybe doesn't feel?
As I mentioned before, your book Prey was one of the first places other than Douglas Murray's book where I came across some of these anecdotes. And I just want to share them with listeners because, frankly, reading about these over the past few days again, they were keeping me up. I mean, it takes a lot to keep me up at night. I read about a lot of bad things in a day.
So let's just share maybe two of these stories so people have a sense of what we're talking about. In the piece that we ran, the writer writes about one 12-year-old girl who's named Sophie. And she's molested in a graveyard by a man who's named Ali. And these are not their real names, I'm assuming.
A desk officer told her to come back to the police precinct with an adult when she was sober, and two men accosted her in the police station. Joined by a third, they raped her in their car. When they dumped her on the street, she asked a man named Sarwar Ali for directions. He then took her to his home, raped her, and gave her money for a bus fare home.
A man named Shaquille Chowdhury pulled up in his car then and offered to take her home. He abducted her and took her to a house where he and four other men then repeatedly raped her. That's one story. Here's another one. This is a girl who's called Lucy in Telford. Azhar Aleem Mahmood groomed Lucy Lowe from the age of 12 and impregnated her at 14.
He burned her alive in her own home with her mother, her disabled sister, and her unborn second child, who was also fathered by Mahmood, this rapist. If you went to the average British person, would they know about stories like this, Julie?
Let me just – let me set us up just for the listener who doesn't know who he is. Tommy Robinson is in prison right now. He is serving an 18-month sentence for defaming a Syrian immigrant. Robinson for years has been denounced by mainstream conservatives, even – Conservatives like the right-wing populist leader Nigel Farage, who leads the Reform Party.
But now there's sort of this relook at Robinson saying that he should be released from prison. I think I've got that about right.
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