|
2001: Who Is Rioting in England? by Steve Sailer UPI, July 27, 2001 |
|||
|
News coverage of the recent race riots in Northern England has been highly confusing to American readers. Many of us have had a hard time deciphering even such basics as which racial group has been doing most of the rioting. So, here is a quick guide to understanding who the rioters have been. The first problem faced by readers is the elite press' aversion toward publishing unpleasant facts about people of non-European descent. Just as the New York Times had been reluctant last April to use the word "rioting" to describe Cincinnati's large-scale African-American rioting, the Times was squeamish about making clear to its readers that most of the criminal acts in Bradford, Burnley, and other English industrial cities has been committed not by whites, but by what the British call "Asians." For example, nowhere in New York Times' reporter Sarah Lyall's July 8th story on the Bradford brouhaha, "Race Riot in Another City in Northern England Is Worst So Far," does she ever directly say that Asians made up the main mob. One might think that when reporting on a race riot, the identity of the race doing most of the rioting would be the single most important fact. Yet, a reader of this account in America's "newspaper of record" would have had to be alert enough to connect clues in two separate paragraphs to get a hint of this essential detail. Since then, an organization of Bradford's Asian businessmen has taken out an ad in a local newspaper apologizing to the community on the behalf of the law-abiding majority of Asians for the actions of some violent Asian youth. Asian Trades Link chairman Amjad Pervez explained the ad: "When somebody is upset you can send flowers, but we didn't know what to do in this situation." The Asians were not solely to blame. Some violent acts were carried out by working class whites. And the elite press have devoted large amounts of verbiage to blaming shadowy white racist "outside agitators," although in several cases, their participation appears to have been more rumored than material. Neo-Marxist commentator Mick Hume scoffed in The Times of London, "After National Front supporters threatened to break the ban on marches in Bradford, police reported that five of them were 'persuaded to turn back' at the city's railway station. They could literally count the fascist infiltrators on the fingers of one hand. Yet when large-scale violence later broke, many rushed to accuse the NF of inciting 'race riots' … Why must we flatter a handful of fascist morons by attributing so much influence to them?" Of course, even knowing that "Asians" were the primary rioters still can mislead Americans. In the U.S., the word "Asian" has come to describe not all Asians, but just the East Asian peoples that used to be called "Orientals" - Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and other Pacific Rim peoples. Americans have a hard time visualizing East Asian immigrants as rioters. That memorable news footage from the 1992 Los Angeles riot showing desperate Korean shopkeepers blasting away with pistols at African-American arsonists intent on torching their stores helped persuade many Americans that "Asians" are more likely to be the victims of race riots than the perpetrators. In Britain, though, "Asian" generally refers to South Asians rather than East Asians. Yet, even this information is puzzling to many on this side of the Atlantic. America's South Asian population primarily consists of Hindus from India, who rival Jews for the title of America's best-educated and highest-income ethnic group. It's hard for Americans to picture the U.S.'s Asian Indians - who tend to be affluent, educated, polite, and cheerful - rampaging about, smashing windows and burning cars. These rioters in England, however, were mostly not Hindu Indians, but generally the sons and grandsons of Muslim immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Most Indian immigrants were admitted to America because they possessed valuable technical skills, or at least were related to an earlier skilled immigrant. But the British rioters' immigrant forebears had largely been peasants in Pakistan, who came to England around 1960 to work in decaying textile mills, many of which have shut down, stranding their offspring on the dole. Rioting has begun to spread to other racial groups besides South Asian Muslims and whites. Last Friday, 120 black youths in the London neighborhood of Brixton overturned cars and smashed windows following a protest of a police shooting of a black man. Steve Sailer (www.iSteve.com) is a columnist for VDARE.com and the film critic for The American Conservative.
Subscribe to The American Conservative Steve Sailer's iSteve.com home page
|
Steve Sailer's iSteve.com homepage
|