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By Melanie Phillips
The flaming shooting star that is Elon Musk has lit up a dark corner of our troubled western society.
He has forced open previously sealed issues by personally taking to his social-media platform X to cut through the denial and obfuscation that has stifled public debate.
🇺🇸 🇮🇱 Elon Musk:
“You cannot have people who want to slaughter everyone in Israel. You’ve got to stop that. Those people either need to be killed or incarcerated, or they will simply try to kill more Israelis. They want to kill Americans too.”pic.twitter.com/PZGNK6NFiV
— Vivid.🇮🇱 (@VividProwess) January 9, 2025
He has ruffled many feathers in Germany and the United Kingdom by using that platform to openly influence the course of domestic politics in these countries. Some of this is questionable and even dangerous. But he has also shown how the grip of the deranged narrative about Israel might be broken.
Musk’s intervention over the past few days has not just electrified the British but also gripped America, which has been introduced for the first time to Britain’s hideous child rape and grooming-gangs scandal.
For at least 25 years, gangs of mostly Pakistani-heritage Muslim men have been grooming young white girls by luring them with gifts, alcohol and drugs in order to pimp, rape, imprison, torture, and in some cases, even murder them. In town after town, tens of thousands of girls — many of them young teenagers — have been subjected to debauched and depraved sexual violence, with many serially raped by multiple men in one night.
After Britain’s Labour government rejected calls by one of these towns’ councils for a government inquiry into this abuse there, Musk started hurling volleys of tweets on X in furious protest.
He claimed that the anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson, who is serving a prison sentence for contempt of court, was a “political prisoner” who had been jailed for exposing the grooming gangs, and he demanded that Robinson be released from prison.
He even turned on Nigel Farage, the “populist” leader of Reform and a close ally of president-elect Donald Trump, saying Farage wasn’t fit to be his party’s leader because he refused to allow Robinson — a former football hooligan and member of the neo-fascist British National Party — to be a member of Reform.
The effects of this onslaught have been as fascinating as they have been perverse.
Musk’s specific allegations are wrong. Robinson was not jailed for exposing the rape gangs but for two offences of contempt of court. The first occurred because, under the UK’s strict rules of criminal procedure, his attempts to interfere with the criminal trials of rape-gang members, who were eventually convicted and jailed, almost caused those trials to collapse and the gang members to walk free.
On the second occasion, Robinson libelled a teenage Syrian refugee who had been attacked by boys at his school. Robinson falsely claimed that the boy was not an innocent victim but had himself been abusing girls. Although a court carefully considered these claims and threw them all out as wholly unfounded, Robinson reposted them and so was jailed.
It’s also untrue that the dreadful details of the rape gangs were unknown until Robinson started protesting about them. They were first publicly exposed in 2011 by Andrew Norfolk in The Times of London, followed over the years by several criminal trials and multiple inquiries.
When these abuses started, they had indeed been covered up. For at least 10 years, police and welfare agencies studiedly ignored these crimes out of terror of being called racist — and because the girls came from the other side of the tracks and were regarded as little more than juvenile prostitutes.
Despite the fact that the scandal had been discussed in public for years, it had never caught fire. It was only when Musk started tweeting and created a political drama involving America that Britain exploded into a storm of recrimination and breast-beating.
Politically, it is likely to have changed nothing. The government is treating the rape gangs as just another aspect of generic child sexual abuse. Sexual abuse does indeed occur across all cultures. But these mass rape and pimping gangs form a specific pattern, with the vast majority of perpetrators linked by ethnicity and religion in a culture that treats women as the cause of sexual violence simply by being seen, and regards white girls as easy meat.
The same kind of behaviour is replicated, with some exceptions, throughout the Islamic world.
But the current British government, like its predecessors — and like successive American administrations — refuses to acknowledge, let alone deal with, aspects of Muslim behaviour that are inimical to western norms and threaten other citizens. And the rape gangs continue to operate to this day.
Nevertheless, Musk has enabled things to be said which hitherto people were cowed into not saying.
He achieved this despite his specific claims about Robinson being factually wrong. That’s because the deeper issue he tapped into was fundamentally all- too true: the march of Islamisation in Britain and the establishment’s refusal to deal with it.
That’s why Robinson has himself bamboozled a number of influential people who should know better. People believe the false claims he makes about himself because they know that the Islamisation he demonstrates against is all-too true.
Secondly, Musk achieves such traction because of the role he plays in the public imagination as a near-mythic technological wunderkind who is also young and informal, and who dares to go where others fear to tread in puncturing the delusions and hypocrisies of the age.
In other words, he is hyper-cool and apparently indestructible. As such, he gives permission to people to speak up on issues over which they have previously felt intimidated.
Just imagine what Musk could do if he came out swinging like this for Israel and against the Palestinian cause. Just imagine the effect if, in daily barrages of hundreds of tweets, he denounced America, Britain and Europe for having betrayed and abandoned Israel; if he demanded that the United Nations be defunded over its ties to genocidal Palestinianism; and if he called for the resignation of British, Canadian and Australian leaders for facilitating Jew-hatred around the world.
Just as Musk has made the cultural weather and forced a break in the clouds of denial over Islamisation, he could achieve the same effect with the deadly anti-Israel narrative.
Unfortunately, not only has he not done so but he has gone in the other direction by sharing a video of virulent Holocaust denier Ken O’Keefe falsely claiming that UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer “excused” the serial sex offender Jimmy Savile.
What should we make of all this?
It tells us about the dismaying credulity and ignorance of countless indivuduals faced with a manipulative opportunist like Robinson. It tells us how money and celebrity can hijack democratic political processes by unaccountable power without responsibility. It tells us that the same money and celebrity can force important issues from obscurity into the light. It tells us about the threat from predatory political Islam and the frightening way this has been denied in political and media debate.
Confusingly, it does not show how truth can pierce through lies. It shows instead that even lies can pierce a blanket of denial to expose a crucial but suppressed truth.
That’s a decidedly ambiguous development. But there’s a lesson here for the embattled defenders of Israel, who need to defeat the lies told about it but for whom it has proved well-nigh impossible to get a hearing at all for the truth.
Elon Musk is a one-off, but his targets were open ones for anyone who recognised them as such. Israel’s defenders (with rare exceptions) never do so. Instead they invariably play defence, protesting the justice of their cause and accusing their foes of lying. Playing defence means they’ve lost before they start.
They flinch from doing what they should be doing — going for the jugular by accusing named politicians and specific countries and institutions of promoting lies and facilitating jihad, appeasement and global Jew-hatred.
Of course, it would help to get Musk himself to do this. Someone should start educating him to get him to understand something few can get their heads around—that in order to rescue western civilisation, as he so patently desires, you first have to defeat the enemies of the Jews.
You can access all my blog posts on my website, melaniephillips.substack.com
