Imagine if, following the rape charges against Harvey Weinstein, a mob of angry people had rallied to his defence. Imagine if this smug, seething crowd had raged against the women who accused Weinstein of sexual offences. Imagine if they wagged their fingers in the women’s faces. Imagine they branded the women troublemakers. Imagine they went so far as to taunt the women by displaying banners saying: ‘Rich movie producers welcome here!’
Local women rallied around a girl, just 14, who had accused a man of sexually assaulting her. And those women were demonised
We would have been appalled, right? Well, that very thing happened in Epping. Local women rallied around a girl, just 14, who had accused a man of sexually assaulting her. And those women were demonised. They were mocked by the digital left, caricatured in the liberal media, even protested against. Plummy activists swarmed Epping, not to offer solidarity to the women but to scold them, to call them bigots, to scream: ‘Get off our streets!’ ‘Fascists’, they screamed in the women’s faces.
It was an extraordinary spectacle. And a chilling one. And it should not be forgotten just because the abuser in the eye of this storm – one Hadush Kebatu from Ethiopia – has now been found guilty. Kebatu had been in the UK for just eight days when he touched and tried to kiss the 14-year-old girl. He also incited her to engage in sexual activity with her friend, and assaulted a woman who had tried to help him. This week a judge at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court lamented his ‘disgusting and sickening’ crimes and sentenced him to 12 months in jail.
Kebatu had been staying in the Bell Hotel in Epping, at our expense. So, naturally, local mums and their male allies protested outside the hotel. They wanted to know if there were other men inside who were likewise ignorant of British laws and contemptuous of British girls. It was a ‘MeToo’ moment for working-class women. Yet instead of being welcomed into the feministic fold, the women were defamed as far right and essentially told to shut their traps.
The more I think about it, the more horrifying it becomes. These women – mums, aunts, sisters – were crying out for protection from male violence. And yet it was they who were branded a danger to society. Cartoons in the national press depicted the Epping protesters as a neo-fascist menace. The women were written off as the dim brides of that notorious rabble-rouser Tommy Robinson. They were met not with sympathy but with wails of ‘Nazi scum, off our streets!’.
Just think about this: ordinary women, good people, took a stand against a man who had grossly molested one of their daughters and they were called Nazis. The middle-class left made a beeline for Epping. Viral clips showed well-spoken radicals lecturing the local women. A so-called refugee was suspected of a ‘disgusting and sickening’ assault on a schoolgirl and what did the placards of these smug outsiders say? ‘Refugees welcome here.’ It is almost unbelievable.
Stand Up To Racism was one of the groups involved in the counter-protests. Yet to the people of Epping it must have looked like these agitators were Standing Up For Rapists. It surely mystified the decent people of that town that their heartfelt pleas for female safety were met with such fury from the activist class. With guttural cries of fascist, Nazi, scum, bigot. All they wanted was for teenage girls to be safe, and for that they were libelled as a Hitlerite threat to the social fabric.
We need a reckoning with these events in Epping. Not only with the problem of migrant hotels but also with the frothing animus that greeted the women there when they dared to speak up. It confirms that women of working-class origin are absolutely unwelcome in the ‘MeToo’ movement. That rallying cry is for professional women only, the ladies of the bourgeoisie, not women in pink tracksuits who never went to university. You women should stay home and pipe down.
More starkly, the left’s sexist rage in Epping speaks to the classism of what passes for radical politics these days. The minute someone from the other side of the tracks expresses a political view, the graduate left wonders: ‘Is this fascism?’. The irony of Epping is that the true bigots were not the women raising concerns about sexual violence but the haughty outsiders telling them to shut up. Under the cover of being ‘pro-refugee’, these people give voice to an anti-masses hysteria of the like we’ve not seen since Victorian times.
It is essential we do not forget what happened in Epping. Women raised concerns about the sexual assault of a child and they were called Nazi scum for doing so. Dwell on that, and do something about it.
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