This Times story covers the Birmingham riots which killed one man on Saturday. A second man was shot dead in the same area on Sunday, but it is not clear whether that was related to the riot. The starting point for the riots was an alleged rape of a 14 year old Jamaican girl by a man or men of Pakistani origin. I say “alleged” not merely to cover myself legally – there is, so far, no hard evidence that the rape happened or even that the girl exists.
Inter-communal riots started by rumour of rape. The pattern is age-old. Equally familiar to history is the fate of the innocent man cornered by a mob and killed not for anything he had done – so far as is known the man who was stabbed was simply returning from a night at the cinema – but for having the wrong coloured face. Cold comfort it may be to his relatives, but modern liberal democracies are by historical standards rather good at preventing riots or nipping them in the bud when they do occur.
Why is this? One reason may be that literacy and a free press ensure that we have many sources of reasonably accurate news to hand. Most people in the West nowadays simply have a more accurate picture of the world and are less susceptible to false rumours. When the rumours of crimes turn out to be true we are also able to be reminded that the actions of one member of a group are not the actions of all. Say what you like about the mainstream media, it is notable that those groups most cut off from it are most prone to riot.
That was a longer than average preamble. I thought it worthwhile to explain exactly why despite having no particular criticism of more recent BBC coverage of the riots, I thought it so unhelpful that the first story I saw, on Ceefax, was so evasive. Unfortunately I didn’t note the words of the story down, but it mentioned Birmingham, “disturbances”, a dead man and an alleged rape. The whole structure of the story made it obvious to anyone with half a brain that what had happened was a race riot but there was no mention of race. The nearest it got was a mention of “the community”. “Community” in modern parlance usually signals a pointed lack of it. Anyone wishing to know what had actually happened in Britain’s second city had to go to the newspapers.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. They may mean well but that trick only works in the short term. Yes, I know why they do it. One wants to avoid a situation where, for instance, a burglary by a white is reported simply as a burglary but a similar burglary by a black is reported as a burglary by a black. It is correct to avoid an undue focus on race in reporting general news. But these were race riots. Not to report the very thing that defined the two sides is not prudent, it is dishonest. It is treating adults like children. Worse yet it feeds the very paranoia that it intends to dispel. People think, “What else aren’t they telling us?”
I was out of the house all weekend and the first bulletin I saw was the “60 second news” on Sunday evening. Obviously, there isn’t a lot you can discuss in 60 seconds, but not one mention of race was made. Instead the bulletin reported an alledged sexual assault and a pitched battle between two opposing gangs of 20+ youthes.
My flatmate and I scratched our heads and put “two and two together”. However, the news report as it was made no sense. They might as well have not mentioned it.
The lesson of the past twenty years has been that the only way to solve racist behaviour is to confront it. This has even been taken to ludicrous extremes with claims that such and such organisations are “institutionally racist”, i.e. even the most subtle habits of an institution are suspect.
Well, there was nothing “suspect” or ambiguous in Birmingham on the weekend. What we saw was a viscous spike in the racist tension which has existed between “Asians” and “Blacks” for years (I placed them in quotes because I cannot be bothered to type “of the xxx community”). This racism has festered for years because it simply has not been confronted. The media, the police and the government have been too embarassed and instead have concentrated deeper and deeper on the minutiae of “white racism”.
Unless these people are shown to be racists, unless their communities re confronted with the evidence of their prejucide, they will never change. This is the lesson innocent whites have had stuffed down their throats for 20 or 25 years. Now we need to apply it to them.
Doh! Prejicide should mean prejudice, and so on. It is late.
Auntie musn’t tell us all the facts in case we interpret them wrongly. How lucky we are to have the BBC to screen the news so that we don’t form inappropriate opinions based on the full facts.
Ours is not to reason why but just to chant the mantra.
All together now.
Diversity is strength
Diversity enriches us all
Vibrancy, understanding other cultures etc etc
Rob: “Unless these people are shown to be racists, unless their communities re confronted with the evidence of their [prejudice], they will never change. ”
Right you are, Rob. The US has been going through this, too… but at long last in the US some prominant blacks, such as Bill Cosby and James Earl Jones, are starting to come out of the woodwork and denounce race baiters and the kinds of attitudes that allow that to happen. I think Britain needs someone like them from each major ethnic group to speak out.
Don’t worry mamapajamas, we’ll get Darcus Howe and ‘Sir’ Iqbal Sacranie right on to it…
Lol! Isn’t Howe that clown Joan Rivers read the riot act to a few days ago? 😀
See, we’re on to another one about race.
Much better to discuss plant photography.
🙂
When a white person murders a non-white person it is called a ‘race hate crime’
by the BBC and other left-wing news media.
The innocent black man stabbed to death
by ‘asians’ was murdered because he was black.
Is this not a ‘race hate crime’ and
why was it not reported as such?
I must be really slow.
At the mention of problems in Birmingham, I was wondering where ‘ol whitey’ was going to fit into this picture of ‘disturbances’.
When the Police were mentioned, I was preparing for tales of Police ‘heavy handedness’
If you kick a dog often enough, it will flinch when you call it.
Good old Auntie had such an amusing tease on it’s award-winning radio service, R5. Monday evening they announced that the Independent Police Complaints Commitee were investigating the shooting of the second man on Sunday. Yes, yes I know your imaginations are running wild, but calm down, the ‘Plod’ have not plugged another bystander, perish the thought.
It seems that the IPCC are wheeled in whenever the possibility exists that the Police might have been derelict in preventing the demise of a citizen at the hands of crims.
A similar thing recently happened in Georgia, USA. Blacks attacked a Mexican immigrant for racial or specifically anti-immigrant reasons (many blacks see Mexican immigrants as a direct threat to their jobs). Again- the MSM ignored the race of the attackers and thereby ignored the larger social issue. This story (that the original story had been edited) WAS reported on by CNN, to their credit-
Compare & contrast the reporting of the “rape” story here, where they went to some lengths to say, probably correctly, that there was no evidence with years of reporting of “rape camps” in Bosnia where they went to some lengths not to report that this was a story produced by our Moslem Nazi allies for which there was no evidence.
The difference being that in Birmingham the BBC were interested in defusing violence, whereas in Yugoslavia the BBC have, for 15 years, been deliberately lying to promote genocide.