Totalitarian regimes achieve compliance not by brute force alone but, first and foremost, by inculcating self-censorship.
Hence, modern anti-American and anti-Western leftists’ embrace of cultural Marxism, aka wokeness.
According to the U.K.’s Telegraph, neighbors of 43-year-old Urfan Sharif and 31-year-old Beinash Batool of Woking, Surrey, each sentenced to life in prison for the 2023 murder of Sharif’s daughter, 10-year-old Sara Sharif, failed to report concerns about Sara’s safety for fear that others might denounce them as racists.
That dispiriting revelation came courtesy of a safeguarding review commissioned by Surrey officials after the convictions.
“They feared being branded as being racist, especially on social media,” the report read.
In other words, constant scolding from woke liberals hurling “racist,” “bigot,” and “Islamophobe” epithets prevented neighbors from alerting authorities to the troubling behavior of a Pakistani couple toward Sara, who was half-Pakistani and half-Polish. Alas, pushing back against wokeness could have saved the child’s life.
Indeed, the report called it “concerning that race was a bar to reporting possible child abuse and it needs to be overcome.”
For instance, one former neighbor recalled that Batool often sounded “almost hysterical, screaming” at the child and her siblings.
Should this father be executed?
Likewise, two days before Sara’s murder, another neighbor heard a “single high-pitched scream.”
Still, neighbors kept quiet for the worst reason imaginable, and they weren’t alone.
There’s a brutal truth at the heart of the Sara Sharif case, and it cuts deeper than any official review dares to admit: in today’s Britain, the fear of being called “racist” carries more weight than the duty to save a child’s life. That is the poison that killed Sara. Not by… pic.twitter.com/EhBwb7gsAU
— Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧🎗 (@JChimirie66677) November 13, 2025
According to The Times of London, an occupational therapist visited the Sharif home in November 2022. There, she “noted that Sara was the only person wearing a hijab but did not think this was unreasonable at the time, although she has reflected that she may have been reticent to talk about it for fear of causing offence.”
Sara began wearing the hijab in 2021 at the age of eight.
“We now know that the wearing of the hijab did, in the later period of Sara’s life, hide bruising and injuries to her face and head,” the review read.
Moreover, social workers raised “significant concerns” about Sara’s safety, per The Telegraph. Still, no one protected her.
Of course, cases like this always involve unfathomable evil and many missed opportunities to thwart it.
Fear of “racism” or “causing offence” on the part of neighbors and professionals, however, constitutes a highly alarming element of this particular case.
In a forthcoming book, evolutionary psychologist Dr. Gad Saad calls the phenomenon “Suicidal Empathy.” That apt phrase means, in this instance, that if you hesitate to report evildoers because woke liberals have labeled them “oppressed” on account of immutable physical characteristics such as skin color, and if this attitude permeates your society as a whole, then your society will die.
Peddlers of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion nonsense in the United States have helped foster precisely that kind of environment. In fact, a 2024 study found that people subjected to “anti-racist” training tended to spot racism even where it did not exist.
In short, neighbors and professionals engaged in the kind of self-censorship that the woke regime demands. Otherwise, Sara might have lived.
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