OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: “Rotherham gang sentenced to 102 years in prison for abusing young girls,” John Sexton writes today at Hot Air. Note this detail: “According to the 2014 report, one reason police utterly failed to protect so many young girls was the ‘politically inconvenient truth’ that most the victims in Rotherham were white while most of the perpetrators were Pakistani men.”

As Sexton adds, “the perpetrators in Rotherham seemed to operate with impunity even when face to face with police.” And while the Rotherham perpetrators used race and Islam to their advantage in PC-obsessed England, as Jonah Goldberg notes today, England’s Jimmy Savile used celebrity and power:

A hugely popular DJ and TV personality in the United Kingdom for decades, Savile lived a double life as a child molester and rapist. He abused older victims as well. His victims, many of whom were patients in hospitals, ranged from five to 75 years old. As a major fundraiser for hospitals, he had free rein to prey on boys and girls. He assaulted one ten-year-old boy with a broken arm while he was waiting on a gurney for an X-ray. He assaulted teenagers recovering from surgery in bed.

All in all, at several hospitals and at nearly every division of the BBC where he worked, he raped or abused dozens of children — boys and girls — and scores of teenagers and adults.

Savile also reportedly did things to corpses best left unsaid.

He was so popular and so powerful, many victims felt comfortable coming forward only after Savile died in 2011 at the age of 84, to that point regarded as an esteemed member of the community. Sir Jimmy was even a knight.

The BBC has just published a nearly 800-page report detailing its complicity in Savile’s crimes. I haven’t read the whole thing, nor do I have much desire to. The main takeaway, however, is that the BBC shares blame for turning a blind eye owing to its “culture of deference” to celebrities. There was ample evidence that Savile was up to no good, but few were willing to say anything.

Let’s discuss the culture of deference.

Read the whole thing. (Perhaps as with Gloria Steinem in the earlier post, the photo of a young Savile burning a hole into the camera atop Jonah’s article should also merit a trigger warning.)

UPDATE: ‘Atmosphere of fear’ at BBC allowed Jimmy Savile to commit sex crimes, report finds.