Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Prejudice against white Eastern Europeans OK

`Britain faces an explosion of crime when Romania and Bulgaria join the EU,' warned the Sun newspaper this week. According to a `secret Cabinet memo', Eastern European gangs will trigger dramatic increases in street violence, vice rackets, cash point theft and fraud. Some 85 per cent of robberies at cash points, the report said, is said to be committed by Romanians. Quite how the authorities have worked that out is anyone's guess. But it's clear that Eastern Europeans are now targeted as a problem-in-waiting by the police, politicians and pundits. So just what is so awful about these Eastern Europeans?

Since the summer, panics and prejudices about migrants from the former Eastern Bloc countries have been aired by left and right alike. They've ranged from the age-old Malthusian concerns of `too many people, not enough resources'; to last week's statement by Trevor Phillips that Bulgarians and Romanians have racist attitudes towards black people. Now, Romanians are a bunch of sex-traffickers and cash-point robbers ready to wreck havoc in the UK. `It doesn't bode well for the future', said Sir Andrew Green of Migration Watch.

When preposterous figures such as `Romanians commit 85 per cent of crime at cash points' is peddled by the government it doesn't bode well for John Reid's sense of perspective. Are there even enough Romanians in the UK to commit nearly all robberies at cash machines? Do teams of Romanians travel the breadth of the UK to make sure no cash-machine is left safe? According to those ridiculous figures, they must certainly have to.

Panics surrounding ethnic groups and criminality are, of course, nothing new. Back in the 1970s, the press and Metropolitan police force launched the infamous `mugging' panic. Then it was young black men who were said to be causing an `epidemic' of street robberies across Britain, even though such recorded crimes had gone down since the peak of 1968. The moral panic was accepted because it confirmed and exacerbated racial prejudice and hostility to black people. Today, the government and media's drive against Eastern Europeans is also driven by panics and prejudices, but of a different but no less reactionary kind.

Even though it has benefited the UK, the relatively big hike in migration from Eastern Europe has rattled New Labour on a number of levels. Firstly, the free-movement of migrants in and out of the UK goes against their regulatory, controlling instincts. UK Home Secretary John Reid's plans to impose a limited quota on migrants from Romania, for instance, says more about New Labour's target-driven approach to governance than any real consideration on migration and the economy.

More importantly, though, it seems any discussions on Eastern Europeans can be aired freely precisely because they're white. After all, who could accuse them of playing the `racist immigration card'? Therefore, low-life scare stories about cash robbers and sex traffickers wouldn't be loudly proclaimed if the migrants were from Africa. White migrants are considered fair game because, as Mick Hume has pointed out, it's a reflection of how the political class sees white working-class Britons too. When Trevor Philips said that Bulgarians have backward attitudes towards black people, and therefore should be denied entry into Britain, he could have easily followed that up with: `haven't we got enough of those types of people already?'

It's worth remembering that a few years back, a leaked government memo reckoned that British pensioners couldn't be accommodated into New Britain because of their dated `racist attitudes'. Clearly, though, it hasn't stopped with pensioners either. Younger generations of white Britons and now Eastern European migrants are either under suspicion or downright guilty of harbouring hostility to non-whites. The old pub philosophy of `there's good and bad everywhere amongst people', it seems, no longer applies.

All this, though, is simply a consequence of `objective subjectivism' that lies at the heart of multicultural thinking. What this means is that humans are no longer seen as transformative agents, but having fixed or `essential' characteristics passed on through traditions, values and beliefs. So according to the sociologist Tariq Modood, ethnicity or cultural belonging should be viewed `as being essential to a person's characteristic as skin or eye colour'. In other words, there's no escape from our cultural heritage.

This is why today black people are viewed solely as victims of slavery and racism and therefore objects of pity. British Muslims are seen either as victims of Islamophobia and therefore inherently anti-western and/or ultra-religious, while whites are viewed as racial supremacists itching to cause pogroms or go lynching. If humans really are automated products of generational cultural influences, then it makes sense to manage them accordingly. This is why the language used to justify restrictions against Eastern European migrants and to regulate the `backward' white masses of Britain are often the same. What it really demonstrates, however, is the deeply anti-human thinking of official, multicultural thinking.

It's no longer enough that morality has been re-drawn around who is considered racist or anti-racist (though more often, officialdom is in the latter, self-flattering camp). Instead, the essentialist outlook of multiculturalism means that some groups in society will be guilty through historical association, rather than anything they've actually done. The current hysterical panic against the supposed racism, and now the criminality, of Eastern Europeans says as much about what the political class thinks of white Britons over here as it does Romanians and Bulgarians over there.

Source



U.K.: A BISHOP WHO GETS IT

The Church of England's only Asian bishop, whose father converted from Islam, has criticised many Muslims for their "dual psychology", in which they desire both "victimhood and domination". In the most outspoken critique of Muslims by a church leader, Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, said that because of this view it would never be possible to satisfy all their demands. "Their complaint often boils down to the position that it is always right to intervene when Muslims are victims, as in Bosnia or Kosovo, and always wrong when the Muslims are the oppressors or terrorists, as with the Taliban or in Iraq," said Nazir-Ali. "Given the world view that has given rise to such grievances, there can never be sufficient appeasement and new demands will continue to be made." The failure to counter such beliefs meant that radical Islam had flourished in Britain, spread by extremist imams indoctrinating children for up to four hours a day, he said.

Nazir-Ali added that rigorous checks, from which the government had retreated in face of Muslims' protests, should be imposed to ensure that arriving clerics were committed to the British way of life. "Characteristic British values have developed from the Christian faith and its vision of personal and common good," said the bishop in an interview with The Sunday Times. "After they were clarified by the enlightenment they became the bedrock of our modern political life. These values need to be recovered to help us to inculcate the virtues of generosity, loyalty, moderation and love."

Nazir-Ali, who was born in Pakistan and whose father converted from Islam to Catholicism, said radical Islam was being taught in mosque schools across Britain. "While radical teaching may not be happening everywhere, its presence is felt across the country. It affects all Muslims," he said. "The two main causes of the present situation [rising extremism] are fundamentalist imams and material on the internet." He proposed to filter out imams who might whip up extremism: "They must be vetted for appropriate qualifications, they must have a reasonable knowledge of the English language and they must take part in a recognised process of learning about British life and culture."

The government, after lobbying from Muslim groups, retreated from proposals to toughen entry requirements put forward by David Blunkett, the former home secretary, two years ago. Plans to require foreign clerics to sit a test on British civic values a year after arriving were cancelled along with the introduction of a requirement to speak English to conversational level.

Nazir-Ali also criticised women wearing veils that cover the whole face. Tony Blair called the full veil a "mark of separation", but Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said any curbs on wearing it would be "politically dangerous".

Nazir-Ali drew attention to a "huge increase" in the wearing of Muslim dress in Egypt, Malaysia and Pakistan, saying that in Britain there were circumstances where the full veil should not be worn: "I can see nothing in Islam that prescribes the wearing of a full-face veil. In the supermarket those at the cash tills need to be recognised. Teaching is another context in which society requires recognition and identification."

Nazir-Ali, 57, was born a Catholic in Karachi, converted to Protestantism and was received into the Church of Pakistan at 20. He settled in Britain in the 1980s and became the youngest bishop in the world at 35.

Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said his comments were not "very helpful for community relationships".

Source



Australia: Politically correct solutions to black crime fail

The rate of Aboriginal imprisonment has increased by almost 55 per cent since 1991 despite more than $400 million spent on programs to cut the rate after the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. Two reports to be published today say the $400 million in Federal money and a host of state and territory reforms to reduce Aboriginal contact with the justice system have failed to cut imprisonment rates - and there are no signs of improvement.

The reports, by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, say the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal rates of imprisonment continues to grow and is now far greater than the gap between blacks and whites in the United States.

According to one of the reports, Indigenous Over-representation in Prison, the rate of Aboriginal imprisonment has risen 23 per cent in the past six years, despite the huge injection of funds after the publication of the royal commission report in 1991. The director of the bureau, Don Weatherburn, said that while the data gathered for the reports varied, depending on whether it had been adjusted for age or other factors, it was clear the problem was worse than ever - and far worse than in the US.

At the end of 2004 the black male imprisonment rate in the US was 6.95 times the white male imprisonment rate while "the crude [non-age adjusted] imprisonment rate for indigenous Australians is more than 16 times higher than the corresponding imprisonment rate for non-indigenous Australians", the report says.

The royal commission found that the high number of Aboriginal deaths in custody was largely explained by Aboriginal overrepresentation in prison. That finding prompted federal governments to spend $400 million on programs to keep Aborigines out of jail by reducing their economic and social disadvantage and reducing discrimination against them in the justice system. The bureau found this money, along with state legislation to decriminalise public drunkenness, provide alternative punishments and make prison a last resort, had "not met with much success". The bureau found "no evidence of bias on the part of sentencing courts" when dealing with Aborigines.

The reason Aborigines were 2r times more likely than non-Aborigines to be jailed when facing a court was that they had longer criminal records, were convicted of more serious violent offences, committed more multiple offences, often breached previous court orders and were much more likely to have reoffended after being given an alternative to full-time imprisonment such as a suspended sentence.

The reports identified drug and alcohol abuse as the best predictors of Aboriginal imprisonment and said the quickest way to reduce the rate of Aboriginal imprisonment was to cut access to drugs and alcohol. Dr Weatherburn said almost a fifth of the $400 million had gone into treating drug and alcohol programs, but society's "reluctance to tackle the supply side of the equation has seriously constrained out [the] capacity to reduce alcohol-related crime . it makes no sense to preach restraint while increasing availability". He urged a host of measures to cut access to alcohol and drugs by helping Aboriginal people enforce controls that they wanted. "Where the Aboriginal community agrees to restrict supply, it's critical that police enforce that."

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