Riots in England. Down at the other end of the civilizational scale, there were the riots in England. Police in North London shot a black drug dealer dead on Saturday. That ignited a race riot, and that in turn led to a cycle of rioting that soon got ethnically complicated. There was a big black cadre in all the subsequent riots, but elements of the white and Pakistani-Bangladeshi welfare underclass quickly joined in.
Soon there was open fighting between smarter, more entrepreneurial ethnic minorities — notably Sikhs, Turks, and religious Muslims — and the disorganized underclass rabble. The shopkeepers and small business owners closed ethnic ranks to defend their property and their kin.
The worst incident was in the West Midlands city of Birmingham, where I spent a fair part of my childhood, and where some of my relatives still live. A car with three black men in it went full speed at some Pakistanis guarding a gas station. Three of the Pakistanis, all young men who had just recently come out from services at a local mosque, were killed. That opened up the fault line between inner-city blacks and Muslims. The blacks resent the entrepreneurial success of the stricter kinds of Muslims; the Muslims despise the blacks for their loose morals, shoplifting, and drug dealing. It got very inflammatory, with Pakistanis arming up with baseball bats and cars full of blacks cruising past local mosques shouting "Burn! Burn!" At the time of recording here, things are calm, but to quote the London Daily Mail, quote, "feelings remain high."
There was some comedy amidst the tragedy, most of it arising from the dogged determination of Britain's liberal media to try to ignore the race aspect of the riots. My own favorite instance was where a lady reporter on Sky News, a satellite TV channel, interviewed a white English fellow whose stores had been looted. You can see the clip for yourself on YouTube: put the words "Man comments live on Sky News" into the search box. The sound quality is poor, but here's the essence of the exchange.
The lady reporter asks what happened. The man says, quote: "At ten o'clock I got a text saying one of my other stores was being raided. I came down. By eleven o'clock there was at least a hundred, two hundred black youths with hoodies and stuff, just rampaging, every shop." The lady reporter interrupts him, saying: "You're not being stereotypical now? Are you sure they were black?" The man tries to protest: "I was there," he says; but the lady is determined to get him back on the P.C. rails. "I'm sure they weren't all black, were they?" she prompts. "OK," says the man, "let me just say they were not all black. I was the white guy there." The lady reporter of course misses the joke and forges ahead with telling this eyewitness what she just knows he must have seen, quote: "There was probably other white guys there as well."
Watching that clip, you find yourself wondering why media lefties bother with eyewitnesses at all. Why don't they just make up the stories to suit their prejudices, and call in one of their lefty film-maker friends to fabricate some footage?
The response of the authorities was just what you would expect in the lunatic asylum that is multicultural Britain. The basic strategy was to reward the guilty while hunting down and punishing the innocent.
The police mainly focused their attention on anyone who tried to resist the rioters. Here's a sample quote from Wednesday's edition of the Guardian, long quote:
"We were outside ready and expecting them," said the manager of Turkish Food Market, who asked not to be named.
"But I felt very panicky because we are not safe from either the rioters or police. We put all of our efforts into this shop. It took 20 years to get it like this. But we do not know about our rights. I'm scared that the police and the government will attack us if we defend our businesses. We are being squeezed between the two."
End long quote. Our Turkish friend is quite right to fear the police equally with the rioters. Look up the story of British farmer Tony Martin, who shot a burglar dead in 1999. Martin lived by himself in a lonely farmhouse that had been burgled multiple times. The deceased was a career criminal. Martin was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Martin's defense attorney — his defense attorney, mind! — argued that he suffered a paranoid personality disorder specifically directed at anyone intruding into his home. Heaven forbid an Englishman should have negative feelings towards the stranger climbing in through his living-room window!
As for rewarding the guilty, under Britain's juvenile justice system, most of the underage offenders — under age 18, that is, which means a high proportion of the looters and rioters — will be sentenced to an Intensive Surveillance and Supervision Programme (ISSP). What does that mean? It means they'll be escorted by youth workers on trips to gyms, adventure centres, theme parks, and training courses for disc jockeys. The idea is to show them what fun they can have without being criminal. A few of the really hard cases might be given custodial sentences, which will mean, according to the Daily Mail, that they will spend their days watching TV and playing video games.
"Liberalism," said James Burnham half a century ago, "is a philosophy of consolation for Western civilization as it commits suicide." Burnham never wrote a truer thing; and he wrote a great many true things — many of them, I'm proud to say, for National Review.
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