In the past, I documented the frequency of the “cultural differences” defense for Muslim rapists in Western nations.

Esmatullah Sharifi, an Afghan refugee, offered an Australian woman a ride home and then put his right hand around her neck and his left hand over her mouth and raped her. Sharifi’s lawyers claimed that due to cultural differences he was confused about the nature of consent.

This wasn’t Sharifi’s first misunderstanding of the difference between rape and sex. He had already been sentenced to 7 years in jail for raping an Australian teenager on Christmas Day in 2008.

Last year, an Egyptian Muslim cleric was arrested for groping women on a beach. The spokesman for the Dee Why Mosque said that by groping a grandmother pushing a stroller and an underage girl, Ahmed Alkahly had been “showing love and compassion but had misunderstood the cultural differences between Australia and Egypt.”

Almahde Ahmad Atagore made his own effort at showing love and compassion by sexually assaulting seven women and girls. The youngest of his victims was only 13 years old. Afterward he laughed.

Atagore’s lawyers blamed cultural differences and Judge Margaret Rizkalla agreed, telling the Libyan Muslim rapist, “It seems you were very ill prepared to deal with cultural differences.”

In the Ashfield rapes, four Pakistani brothers raped eighteen women and girls. Their father urged that his sons be pardoned because they “did not know the culture of this culture.”

One of the brothers appealed his sentence arguing that he had committed the rapes based on cultural differences with how Pakistani girls behaved. The older brother said in court that only now that he had gained a “better understanding of Australian culture” did he finally realize that rape was wrong.

The father of the rapist brothers said of the victims, “What do they expect to happen to them? Girls from Pakistan don’t go out at night.”

This defense popped up in the UK’s Muslim sex grooming gang scandal.

The report chronicles how Operation Augusta was launched and then scuttled after her death in 2003, despite identifying 97 suspects and 57 victims. The victims were, “mostly white girls aged between 12 and 16”, and the perpetrators were, “mostly men of ‘Asian heritage’”. By ‘Asian’, the report means “predominantly Pakistani men” though at least one of the perpetrators was apparently Tunisian.

Constable B, the anonymous cop responsible for some of the most revealing quotes in the report, said, “What had a massive input was the offending target group were predominantly Asian males and we were told to try and get other ethnicities.”

“There was an educational issue. Asian males didn’t understand that it was wrong, and the girls were not quite there. They were difficult groups to deal with. We can’t enforce our way out of the problem,” Constable B said.

That reminds me of the defeatist “we can’t kill our way out” of dealing with Islamic terrorism motto.

And as a result the UK is full of rapists and sex offenders with cultural differences.

A man who raped a 15-year-old girl after following her on a street in Stirlingshire has been jailed for nine years.

Sadeq Nikzad, 29, targeted the girl in Falkirk town centre in October 2023.

Nikzad, an asylum seeker from Afghanistan, repeatedly requested her telephone number, uttered sexual remarks then led her into a courtyard where he raped her.

The court heard that Nikzad had entered the UK illegally two years before the attack.

Defence counsel Janice Green told the court there were language difficulties and a “cultural barrier” between Nikzad’s home country where child marriage was common.

She said: “I’m not suggesting that means that he reasonably believed (the complainer) was consenting, but that there’s a reason why he could have misunderstood.”

The reason is that this sort of thing is fine in Afghanistan. It’s fine under Islamic law (as long as the victims are non-Muslim women and girls) which means that it’s fine to any devout Muslim.

The question then is whether the UK and the rest of the free world will choose between welcoming in cultures where sexual assault is understandable or protecting its own women and girls.

Refugees welcome really means rapists welcome.