Dogwash

Once in a while Yazz says something half sensible. In an opinion piece in last Thursday's London Evening Standard (not on line) in which she critically contrasts the invariable media frenzy in response to White-on-Black crime with the meejah's strange reticence when confronted with Black-on-White crime, she writes:

I have talked with some black and Asian inmates serving time in prison for such [Black on White] crimes; most [attempt to] justify their actions as collective retribution for attacks on "their people". A knife for a knife, they think, will make for a better world.

So there you have it, from the pen of one of PC's grandes dames: not only does the state religion of Anti-racism inculcate a corrosive sense of victimhood and entitlement into the BME population, it also incites and justifies their anti-White violence.

Update 2006-11-01

At the request of the estimable Mr Tall, here is the full text of the Alibhai-Brown piece quoted above.

When the victim is white, does anyone care?

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, London Evening Standard, 26 October 2006

Almost half of the 58 known victims of racially motivated murders between 1995 and 2004 were white, according to official figures just released. The picture of inter-racial hatred it reveals is complex – and very worrying.

Since the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, society has been rightly repulsed by racist whites who take black lives. The media comes out in force over every such case. Yet where the victim is white and the killers not, there is much less overt concern. The latest information, for example, was covered by only one newspaper and then disappeared from the news altogether.

Four white Britons were killed by black Britons and six by Asian Britons. Eighteen deaths of nonwhite individuals were caused by white violence and the rest were the result of inter-group hatreds.

This is a subject where angels fear to tread and I am no angel, only someone who has steadfastly opposed all forms of unjust discrimination and deadly prejudice. Howls of outrage from old mates and allies will greet this column, while my new best friends will be hideous white supremacists. But surely we have an obligation to oppose all racism equally?

White victims of racism also have mothers who suffer just as Doreen Lawrence does. Activists rush to support families of black victims; they go missing when white families face a similar tragic loss.

The Asian men just convicted of beating and stabbing the Scots teenager Kriss Donald did what they did because they were brown and he was white. Was that child a lesser being? Are his murderers less evil than those who killed Stephen Lawrence?

Friends of Ross Parker asked me these questions when I failed to write about his gruesome murder in Peterborough in 2001. He was only 17, walking with his girlfriend, when three Muslim slayers set upon him with hunting knives.

I have talked to some black and Asian inmates serving time in prison for such crimes: most justify their actions as collective retribution for attacks on "their people". A knife for a knife, they think, will make for a better world, But one young Asian prisoner was contrite: "I kicked the guy nearly to death just because he was a gora [white] – that's racism, man. This is bad for all of us if we become as bad as those National Front guys."

The definition of racism has long been confined to the undesirable actions of whites who hate blacks and Asians. The new figures prove lethal race hate is distributed among all ethnic groups. To treat some victims as more worthy of condemnation than others is unforgivable and a betrayal of anti-racism itself.

If pigs could fly, people would have to carry umbrellas.

The case of Codie Stott, the 14-year old English schoolgirl fatuously accused of racism for objecting to being seated with a group speaking Urdu in a schoolroom "syndicate" exercise, has attracted considerable attention, but one aspect has almost completely escaped remark. The four non-English speakers she was asked to sit with, presumably also about 14, were described as "newly arrived in the country". So these kids spent their earlier childhood in Pakistan and have now been shipped across the UK to live with uncles or whatever.

What the hell is going on here?

Firstly, if these kids speak (effectively) no English, what are they doing in a mainstream class in the first place? They should be studying the English language full time, separately and at their guardians' expense, until they reach a standard where they can participate independently in mainstream education.

Secondly, this chain migration, not only of spouses through arranged marriage, but also of entire extended families, is resulting in entirely unacceptable levels of continuing immigration, especially from the subcontinent. The 1971 Immigration Act was sold to an increasingly restive British public on the basis that it would put a stop to primary immigration from the Commonwealth. It made residual provision for immigration for the purposes of family reunion; it did so on the naïve assumption that take up would be (a) limited in extent, (b) confined to genuinely humanitarian cases and (c) would dwindle to almost nothing over time. Instead the flow has continued apace, and the privilege has frankly been blatantly and cynically milked by immigrant "communities" who have turned it into a monumental immigration scam.

It must be stopped.

Janice Turner wrote last week about people tending to stick with their own ethnic group, even in otherwise relatively intergated and friendly contexts.

My sons’ inner city primary could not be more diverse, yet in the playground you usually see mothers chatting in groups restricted to their own race and class. That is not to say there is hostility. Far from it: there is much kindness, cordiality, respect, many smiled hellos. Just rarely deeper intimacy: that is reserved for those who understand you best, with whom you feel most at ease; those, it seems, like you. Likewise the children gravitate — for the most part — towards friendships with those from similar backgrounds.

I saw a striking example of this while waiting for a train the other day. On the opposite platform was a large group of teenagers, probably about 16 years old. They were conservatively and uniformly dressed and most wore identical garish lime green jumpers, so I guess it was a school trip of some kind.

They had fallen into three distinct groups, chatting within each group. In the middle, a loose group of four or five kids of mixed gender and race. To the left, a group of five Black girls. And to the right, a group of five White girls.

In the wake of Jack Straw's recent comments on the wearing of the niqab, some self-appointed spokeswoman for the Muslim sisterhood was interviewed on the jolly old steam wireless – on the Today programme if my ageing memory serves. After coming out with a lot of patently insincere conciliatory waffle – right to comment, right to choose, etc, etc – she went on the counterattack. If Straw could challenge the niqab, then she, as a devout Muslim, should equally well be allowed to challenge White women walking around "half naked", as she put it, presumably meaning short skirts and low-cut tops. Other Muslims have argued in a similar vein.

As recently as five years ago I would have nodded unthinkingly, accepting this self-evident reciprocity. But I have moved on. She is arguing from the classical multicultural position, ie all cultures are equal. I disagree this premise. There is one core culture in the UK, the indigenous British culture. Define or describe "British" and "British culture" how you will, and let's have none of the usual dismissive diversionary bollocks about fish and chips and football hooligans, for the reality is much more complicated than that. But certainly most of us know British culture when we see it. That it is not susceptible to a pat definition that will satisfy the sort of smug undergraduate oik that infests CiF and GUT does not mean that the concept is meaningless.

Recent immigrants have brought with them and continue to a significant extent to practise or, if you'll pardon the dismal cliché, "celebrate", the culture of their homeland. Being easygoing coves, we Brits tolerate this outlandishness – within reason.

But the indigenous and imported cultures are not equal.

More-or-less "revealing" women's fashions are, currently at least, an accepted part of the British and general "Western" scene. Our Muslim sister is free to dislike this, and to express her dislike, but we are not obliged to take any notice of her. The niqab and other features of Muslim life, such as the repellant practice of halal slaughter, are not part of the British culture. There is no right to assert or demand these practices, and certainly no right to demand equal status or, to use a term favoured of the Righteous Left, "validity" as against indigenous cultural norms. Muslim cultural behaviour is permitted in the UK because we choose, being good hosts, to tolerate it; and we set the boundaries within which it will be tolerated.

We are not engaged in intercultural horse-trading here. The bottom line is perfectly clear: this is my people's country and my people's values have primacy. Your culture, and indeed you, are tolerated here on our sufferance and under our rules. If you don't like it, bugger off somewhere else.

I was chatting to a geezer in a City pub the other day. An amiable young man of vaguely Middle Eastern or North Indian appearance, with a vaguely matching accent. He seemed to view himself as a bit of a Jack-the-Lad and was assiduously chatting up the new barmaid, at the same time as I was patiently explaining to the young lady, whose first experience of bar work it apparently was, that a 5cm head on a pint of Guinness was somewhat outside the acceptable range of tolerance, even for the City of London, and explaining to her the meaning of the phrasal verb "to top up" and describing the necessary technique to implement this. (Really. Despite seemingly being a native English speaker, she didn't understand what the phrase topping up meant, or that she should tip out some of the foam to allow space for additional liquid. I suppose getting the customers to train the new barstaff represents an attractive cost saving for the cheapskate thieving bastards who own these places.)

Our young would-be Lothario was telling me that he had been barred from a nearby establishment for general bumptiousness and taking the piss – which didn't entirely surprise me – as well as making racist remarks to the (East European) bar staff in the other place.

This last one he couldn't quite get his head round. "Racist? What? Me? I'm a Pakistani, for fuck's sake," he complained.

I didn't have the energy to challenge this non sequitur; nor, I suspect, would there have been any point in trying. I suppose in the end it's vaguely reassuring to confirm that's it's not just completely up-their-own-arse Black Guardian columnists like Joseph Harker and Cameron Duodu and the entirely ineffable Gary Younge (see CiF passim) sincerely delude themselves that racism is something only White people can be guilty of.

It seems to be "the unravelling of the multiculture" week again at the Sunday Times. This piece is frightening enough in itself, although it tells those of us familiar with South and East London little we didn't already know. But it's a couple of paragraphs towards the end (second page of the on-line version) that particularly caught my eye.

First, describing our hero's expulsion from school

An early victim of Miah was his history teacher at Stepney Green school. “He’d pissed me off the day before. I just brought a kitchen knife to school up my sleeve. When he started making those silly jokes again (about me truanting), I pulled out a knife.”

Miah held the blade to his teacher’s throat and pinned him to the desk before being restrained by his friends. He was questioned and released by the police but was expelled from school and fell into a full-time life with the Shadwell Massive, mugging, dealing in drugs and petrol-bombing the homes of members of rival gangs.

He pinned a teacher down and held a knife to his throat. And he was questioned by the police and released, ie with no further action. Oh well, I suppose it's some consolation that the school at least had the gumption to throw the little sod out.

And then this one:

In August Carly saw a gang pull a knife on a passer-by. When the police were called, said Carly, they stopped briefly at the end of the road and drove on. "I’m planning to move out now," she said.

OK. The number of gang members involved in this (second) incident is unspecified, but if we are talking about two coppers in a panda car, then they are obviously going to want to call up reinforcements before wading in; maybe there was a sequel which Carly didn't see. Maybe even there was no backup available. Who knows? But if this incident is be taken at its face value, it reads that the police have become inured to local casual violence to a frightening extent. Effectively, they appear to have given up.

Apart from some extremely lame jokes, this rather sporadic blog is mostly full of gloom and doom about race relations and immigration. Here's something cheerful for a change. Yesterday I saw a hen party out on the town. Someone had taken advantage of the availability of cheap customized T-shirts and instead of the usual get-up, each woman wore jeans and a tastefully done white T-shirt with H3N DO, done in the style of a car registration plate, with an "L" plate hanging from it, printed on the front, and advising us of Debbie's forthcoming nuptials.

But it was the finishing touch that made me smile. Across the back of each shirt was printed the individual's role in the celebrations, rather like the way the various emergency services have their role – Police, Fire, Paramedic, and so on – printed across the back of their HV jackets. Most of them read "Bride's Friend", apart from one somewhat older woman, who confirmed my suspicions when she turned round to reveal the words "Mother of Bride".

Nicely done, girls.

Weekend line closures due to engineering work on the railways are, I suppose, inevitable, though I do wonder whether there need to be quite so many of them, and whether the work could be better co-ordinated to reduce the number of separate closures. When our line is closed, replacement buses are laid on, as is the usual practice. These I generally avoid as Govia are as big a bunch of cheapskates as the previous, sacked, private-sector franchisees, Connex, and hire ... well let's just say they tend to hire at the bargain-basement end of the coach hire market. I usually take the scheduled bus service, which is a significantly slower journey, but I am considerably more confident of getting to the other end in one piece.

These bus journeys serve as a salutary reminder of the demographics of South East London. When I travel, as I generally do, by train, the passengers are typically 20%-40% Africans – mostly Nigerians – with a dash of other "minorities", particularly Vietnamese, Chinese and occasionally South Asian. This overbearing diversity is depressing enough, but travelling by bus through the streets of South East London reveals an altogether starker truth: the Woolwich area has, over a period of less than a decade, become overwhelmingly Black. Woolwich town centre is now full of "African Cash & Carry" outlets and you find yourself involuntarily playing the game of spot the White man. I find I have to stop myself from exclaiming out loud in delighted surprise when I see other White people.

The more recent colonists welcome contributors to our vibrant multiculture seem to be predominantly Nigerian. To be fair they seem – so far – to be decent enough people, and their happy-clappy churches are bursting at the seams at weekend but, when it comes down to it, there are just too fucking many of them.

On the subject of rail replacement buses, this weekend I broke my usual rule and caught the service laid on by the railway. Waiting at the bus stop were the usual crowd of Poles, Nigerians and Unidentifiables, along with a surly half-caste of vaguely African heritage openly smoking a joint. The double-decker deathtrap that turned up was dirty and smelly. The driver (or his gearbox, or both) was, shall we just say a bit on the uneven side – holding onto the the seat in front at all times seemed advisable. At one stage he rode over the pavement while turning a corner, which was fun. I will concede that some creative parking by the Woolwich Africans didn't exactly smooth the traffic flow.

And then when we eventually got to Greenwich I found myself having to give the bus driver, who from his appearance and accent was Turkish or Middle Eastern, directions to Greenwich railway station. He was, it transpired, unfamiliar with the district. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if he turned out to be unfamiliar with the entire country.

I wonder if the bus ever got to New Cross in the end.

Good old Sarf London, eh?