Hacker News Reader

Comment by okeuro49 | Hacker News Reader

The UK Home Office has not raised an eyebrow about people shouting "jihad" on the streets of London. The UK government also gave a housing allowance to a leader of Hamas. [1]

The Home Office doesn't seem to care either about child exploitation in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, if it is committed by a protected group. [2]

One could suggest that before implementing dragnet surveillance on the public, that the UK government could first investigate what is happening in public view, but is not talked about because it is politically inconvenient.

[1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hamas-chief-lives-london-... [2] https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/what-i-told-oxford

View on HN

The Rotherham failings were not so much because of the "wrong type" of perpetrators, but the wrong type of victims. Sexual assault and rape have pretty miserable conviction rates at the best of times, and victims experience substantial misogyny. In the case of Rotherham, most of the victims were young girls who were in the local authority "care" system, many of whom were known to the police already. So the police reacted to their complaints with the old "of course you were raped, you shouldn't have been there / doing that".

(Think about it: do you know the names or faces of any of the Rotherham victims? Are they doing the campaigning? Or is it people using them to grind an axe which has little to do with the actual crimes?)

What is the actual reason for not giving Muhammad Qassem Sawalha, a person with no UK criminal convictions, the rights of any other resident? Are we saying that local authorities should screen people for political views before offering them housing as they are statutorily required to?

> The Rotherham failings were not so much because of the "wrong type" of perpetrators, but the wrong type of victims

> Are they doing the campaigning?

Yes they are

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zRuK5wPd_Fc

And they are saying that the reason why their cases were not investigated was institutional nervousness around race, contrary to what you believe about the situation.

It is a massive burden to place on the victims to also expect them to campaign against the institutions who failed them.

You can also see those such MPs such as Sarah Champion who were ostracised for raising awareness of this issue.

> Are we saying that local authorities should screen people for political views before offering them housing as they are statutorily required to?

Hamas is a designated terrorist organisation in the UK. We should not be offering housing to those connected to terrorist organisations. We should be deporting them.

Why is the sibling comment to this flagged? It's very reasonable.

The full investigation is https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-... , for those that want to dig deep.

The home office aren't giving enough funding (and/or organisational change?) to the police either. Bike stolen? Car stolen? House broken into? Mugged on the street? They don't have time to investigate any of it.

This stuff is what actually reduces the quality of life of the average person. Why waste time and money putting this sort of draconian and technically infeasible law through when they're doing nothing about petty (or increasingly less petty) crime?

Wikipedia does not corroborate the hysterical claims from the times article.

If UK couldn't see Israel as terrorists group guess they don't do much about Hamas and Jihad.

You very well know Home Office won't go harder on the cases you mentioned, because of fear of backlash.

Sane, rational people have been calling out these double standard about all sorts of things for many years.

The problem is that certain groups are not allowed to be offended because people are afraid of the backlash. So instead they target only the harmless groups.

Go outside and offend a black person or a muslim.

Go outside and offend a white person or christian.

And you'll see.

It is a symptom of a failing democratic system that is basically a two-party system. There are only two countries in Europe that employ FPTP: the UK....and Belarus.

Labour will need to be pressured into democratic measures that might not be in its best interest as a party.

Tbf, having a coalition system doesn't really solve it either. You avoid some of the more egregious edge case results, but overall having a few large parties that agree on nothing eventually has them unable to form a functional government and the ones that manage to do so fall apart before their term is up.

Having a system with political parties at all is the crux of the issue and we can't move forward without addressing that. We are tribal in nature, and if you give people the slightest excuse to form smaller groups they'll fight other groups forever.

Germany and Sweden both face similar problems with “protected assailants”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com