Sunday, June 04, 2006

Observer Discovers Disturbing New Trend

Remember the old days, when white people traditionally attacked black people ? The Observer does, but says that this no longer reflects reality.

" ... stories about violence in school come as no surprise to Modqtar and Mustafa, nor to their Asian counterparts. Their school lives have been punctuated with fights and aggression, some involving knives, many more without. Often gang clashes are sparked by unfounded rumours. One 'riot' began because of a whisper that a Somali boy had beaten up an Asian girl.

This is not just indiscriminate violence between frustrated youth. It is a new form of vicious racism that breaks down the traditional notion of white on black violence. Now there is hate and distrust between ethnic groups: white, Asian, Afro-Caribbean, African and those from the Middle East."


But surely, we're a nation of immigrants, so this can be nothing new. I'm sure there was friction between the Huguenot and Flemish communities.

"Comments once associated with far-right white groups can now be heard among the long-established immigrant communities."

But the Huguenots said bad things about the Irish when they came over. And the Irish said bad things about the Jews.

"Rob Beckley, the spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers on police and faith community issues, said that a form of inter-ethnic violence had developed, with newly arrived immigrants the most targeted and most vulnerable.

'There is at least one incident a week of serious disturbances based around schools among groups, sometimes inter-ethnic, sometimes gangs. It is an issue significant enough to merit substantial police intervention on occasion.'"


This is just moral panic. If you look at a typical Victorian school you'd see there were frequent stabbings and gang fights.

"Beckley, also assistant chief constable of Hertfordshire, said that some school-based gangs were adopting an aggressive stance based on religious and cultural identities."

So ? It's always been that way. I remember at primary school that the C of E kids couldn't walk past St Peter's Catholic Primary without being ambushed by the Junior Warriors of Christ The King, whose punches and kicks would be punctuated by cries of 'that's for St Wulstan !' or 'you martyred John Wall !'.

I don't know what the Observer's up to with this sensationalist reporting, which has a distinctly tabloid feel to it. The problem with such reports are that a reader might conclude from this that multiculturalism isn't working that well. And that would be ridiculous.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There was a prog on the Beeb last night about 1976. It dwelt heavily on Britains burgeoning diversity and those liberal & minority elements who were given free reign to celebrate this in the prog, no other viewpoint was deemed necessary. I was going to mention it on biased-bbc but since the prog didnt see fit to mention Israel at all I dont think they would be interested.

Anonymous said...

Ah well it may be just inevitable that This Island Story evolves into the kind of Yugoslav situation. So long as the bulk of Scots stayed in Scotland, the bulk of the Irish stayed in Ireland, things worked because of a broadly-similar outlook.

When Britain absorbed 250.000 Poles in 1946 there were problems at The Guardian and New Statesman and TUC said vitriolic things about them; but now we are absorbing more than this number each year from cultures less compatible than Poles who had fought with Britain for 5 years already.

Maybe it is just inevitable that the system will collapse from within - it is what The Left dreams of.........but the new regime will be of necessity more authoritarian and with more powerful policing to suppress dissent. I doubt this will appeal to The Left who made such a terrible error in 1920s and early 1930s in Germany