Kamar Jamil, 27, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 12 years. Assad Hussain, 32, and Zeeshan Ahmed, 28, were both jailed for seven years.

The six victims who gave evidence were aged between 11 and 15 when the abuse took place. They were plied with drugs and alcohol, repeatedly raped, sold and trafficked as prostitutes, all at a time during which when they were supposedly in the safekeeping of local authorities.

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The trial — details of which were so disturbing that jury members were excused from ever having to sit on a jury again — exposed years of failings by Thames Valley police and Oxford social services. The court heard that the girls were abused between 2004 and 2012 and that police were told about the crimes as early as 2006, that they were contacted at least six times by victims, but failed to act.

The mother of Girl “A” said the police and social services had failed to protect the girls and made her and other family members feel as if they were overreacting. She said: “I can recall countless incidents when I have been upset and frustrated by various professional bodies.”

The mother of Girl “C” told the British newspaper The Guardian that she had begged social services staff to rescue her daughter from the rape gang. She said that her daughter’s abusers had threatened to cut the girl’s face off and promised to slit the throats of her family members. She said that they had been forced to leave their home after the men had threatened to decapitate family members.

Despite irrefutable evidence that the girls were being sexually abused, no one — according to a report published by the House of Commons on June 5 — acted to draw all the facts together, apparently due to fears by police and social workers that they would be accused of racism against Muslims.

The report, “Child Sexual Exploitation and the Response to Localized Grooming,” states: “Evidence presented to us suggests that there is a model of localized grooming of Pakistani-heritage men targeting young White girls. This must be acknowledged by official agencies, who we were concerned to hear in some areas of particular community tension, had reportedly been slow to draw attention to the issue for fear of affecting community cohesion. The condemnation from those communities of this vile crime should demonstrate that there is no excuse for tip-toeing around this issue. It is important that police, social workers and others be able to raise their concerns freely, without fear of being labelled racist.”

These allegations have been confirmed by the imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation, Taj Hargey, who says race and religion are inextricably linked to the spate of grooming rings in which Muslim men are targeting under-age white girls.

Writing in the Daily Mail on May 15, Hargey states: “Apart from its sheer depravity, what also depresses me about this case is the widespread refusal to face up to its hard realities. The fact is that the vicious activities of the Oxford ring are bound up with religion and race: religion, because all the perpetrators, though they had different nationalities, were Muslim; and race, because they deliberately targeted vulnerable white girls, whom they appeared to regard as ‘easy meat’, to use one of their revealing, racist phrases.”

“But as so often in fearful, politically correct modern Britain,” Hargey continues, “there is a craven unwillingness to face up to this reality. Commentators and politicians tip-toe around it, hiding behind weasel words. … Part of the reason this scandal happened at all is precisely because of such politically correct thinking. All the agencies of the state, including the police, the social services and the care system, seemed eager to ignore the sickening exploitation that was happening before their eyes. Terrified of accusations of racism, desperate not to undermine the official creed of cultural diversity, they took no action against obvious abuse.”

According to Hargey, “Another sign of the cowardly approach to these horrors is the constant reference to the criminals as ‘Asians’ rather than as ‘Muslims.’ In this context, Asian is a completely meaningless term. The men were not from China, or India or Sri Lanka or even Bangladesh. They were all from either Pakistan or Eritrea, which is, in fact, in East Africa rather than Asia.”

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The writer is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group, one of the oldest and most influential foreign policy think tanks in Spain.