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Tag: riots

How To Prevent Riots

August 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Systemic social problems are not an excuse for rioting and theft.

But changing some of our social systems to encourage personal responsibility may make ‘entitlement’ riots and opportunistic looting less likely.

That is the gist of Michael Coren’s new column in the Toronto Sun:

If the British riots disaster is not to be replicated elsewhere, here is a manifesto of advice. Ignore it at your smug peril.

1) Reduce the role of the state and, as a balance, increase the role of the family.

For many years in Britain, parents have been told their children’s social, sexual, moral and cultural formation was better achieved by schools and social workers than mothers and fathers. Not only is the notion flawed philosophically, in practical terms it emasculates parents and enables children to act out every aggressive and narcissistic fantasy imaginable.

In West Indian families, for example, there are numerous cases of poor but good and responsible parents who, in trying to discipline their children, are prosecuted by white, middle-class lawyers for spanking a kid who goes on to join a gang and spend years in prison. Equally, parents are not informed by law if their underage daughters tell doctors or teachers they are sexually active, but they are left to face the consequences when teenage pregnancy or STDs occur.

2) State-supported education and health care may, arguably, serve a purpose, but state-supported welfare and social services have become so all-embracing that individual self-reliance has evaporated. The balance is important here. Neither the fanatical libertarian nor the obsessive socialist model works.

3) Stop the war on religion. Whatever your view of faith and God, the massive decline of religious observance and community in Britain has removed one of the glues that held the country together.

When churches disappear, the vacuum is filled by gangs or tribes. Beyond this is the disappearance of moral standards and ethical absolutes. Witness how in the black community it is the Christian evangelical youths who are least touched by the anarchy.

4) Control immigration, so it is based on the cultural and social needs and unity of the host population as well as on compassion and economic growth. The privileged people who decide our immigration policy seldom live in those areas where the mass of newcomers settle. A nation is more than an assembly of financially viable shopping malls, and without some sort of national and emotional fraternity we see inevitable decay.

5) Liberate the police from the whims of political correctness and government fashion. If London police had reacted swiftly and harshly to the rioting, there would not have been copy-cat incidents throughout Britain. Because of years of “racial sensitivity” training, they were held back in Tottenham, meaning — irony of ironies — law-abiding local people were attacked and robbed.

The police are not guardians of the state but protectors of the people. Their job is not to arrest storekeepers protecting their property, not to hand out traffic tickets, not to control controversial speech, not to be empathetic, but to stop crime and arrest criminals.

6) Do not romanticize the worst of lower-class antics on TV and in cinema and music. Entertainment once presented a world worthy of aspiration, now it glorifies the mud and muck. It makes the rich richer, keeps the poor poorer.

In conclusion, will any of this be achieved? Keep the baseball bat handy.

Get Real!

August 12, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Wow! Language warning. Courage warning. Un-PC warning.

And on reaping what we sow, by the fierce Theodore Dalrymple:

The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor—quite likely—any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.

Race and Riots

August 11, 2011 / / 0 Comments

The ever interesting Katharine Birbalsingh says the riots in England are about race, and nothing will be resolved until authorities are willing to face this fact:

Some of the black kids I used to teach will tell you that the riots are absolutely justified. A number of adults would agree with them. Everywhere I read that the protest was understandable because “people are very angry”. …

At school I remember watching a presentation given to the kids by Trident, the Metropolitan Police Service unit set up to investigate and inform communities of gun crime in London’s black community. I didn’t know what Trident was then, and it struck me that all of the photos of people shot (the idea was to scare the kids) were black. So at the end, I approached one of the policemen and asked him what percentage of those involved in gun crime were black. I kid you not, but my question made this thirty-something white man who was, after all, trained to deal with the black community and its issues, turn pink.
 
He explained that about 80 per cent of gun crime took place in the black community. I smiled uncomfortably. But no, he said, it was worse than that. Then he told me that 80 per cent was black on black gun crime, and that of the remaining 20 per cent about 75 per cent involved at least one black person: black shooting white, or white shooting black. I pushed to know more. While he kept saying his stats were crude and he didn’t have scientific numbers, on the whole the whites who were involved in these shootings tended to be from Eastern Europe.
 
Was any of this ever mentioned in their presentation? Of course not. Just like the news about the Tottenham riots doesn’t mention race either.
 
Problems cannot be addressed unless people are willing to tell the truth. As with so many other things in this country, we stick our heads in the sand and refuse to speak out about it.

The death of petty criminal and gangster Mark Duggan in a shootout with police was not part of a ‘context of oppression’ that explains why young black people are so angry. Nor is planned reduction in social welfare services. These are simply handy excuses to destroy property and steal.

Brendan O’Neill writes in The Australian that the riots are nothing like a political rebellion. They are an expression of the toddler-like rage of a molly-coddled mob.

One of the most disappointing things about these conflicts is the police warning against ‘vigilante justice.’ You have got to be joking.

Vigilantism is when something bad has been done and people try to catch the wrongdoers and punish them without due process under law. Sikhs, Kurds and others who have had the courage to stand and defend their properties and families are not vigilantes. They are trying to prevent crime. They are doing the job the police should be doing.

I don’t mean to be critical of individual police officers. Most of them are people of courage and integrity who really do want to make a difference in their communities. Most of them do not accept the ‘we police with the consent of the communities we serve’ platitudes. They police because they are sworn to uphold and enforce the law, regardless of locality, race or creed.

They are hampered (perhaps betrayed would be a better word) by a politically driven management class of senior officers, many of whom have very little enforcement and operational experience. Christine Nixon, recent and unlamented Commissioner of Police in Victoria, is a perfect example.

The riots in England, and the attempts to excuse them by reference to the down-trodden lives of the rioters and the uncaring attitude of government, remind me of the Palm Island riots in Australia in 2004.

‘Respected local man’ and petty criminal Cameron Doomadgee died in police custody. The circumstances are still unclear. The habitually drunk and violent Doomadgee allegedly attacked the police, who defended themselves and responded with sufficient force to subdue him, including punches to the abdomen. He suffered internal injuries which were not noticed, and died a few hours later.

This was the pretext for riots on the island in which the courthouse, police station and police barracks were burned down. Local police (eighteen police for a population of 2000) and their families were threatened. Fearing for their lives, they barricaded themselves in the small hospital until another eighty police arrived from the mainland.

There seemed to be an infinite supply of social workers and government officials ready to describe the islanders as ‘justly outraged’ and expressing the anger of accumulated years of mistreatment. Police involved were demonised in the press, and the usual intellectuals offered the usual claims about institutionalised racism.

What hogwash.

I have worked with police in remote locations with high aboriginal populations. Overwhelmingly they are men and women who care for their communities enough to put themselves in danger when things go wrong. Those who work in remote communities can find themselves alone in threatening circumstances, under great pressure and with little time to make decisions about appropriate words or actions.

The 1999 Guiness Book of World records said that, apart from war zones, Palm Island was the most violent place in the world to live. Criminologist Paul Wilson has confirmed the island has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world. The homicide rate is 94 per 100,000 people per year, compared with 6 per 100,000 per year for the rest of Australia. Serious assaults are 930 per 100,000, compared with 46 per 100,000 per year for the rest of Australia. Almost every female between the ages of 13 and 16 has at least one sexually transmitted infection. Wilson claimed this horrifyingly destructive behaviour was the fault of repression and colonial mismanagement.

No it is not. Do we really have so little regard for the young people of Tottenham and the aboriginal people of Palm Island that we have no expectation of any ability to control themselves, to take reponsibility for their actions? Do we have so so little respect for them that they don’t even have to make up their own excuses any more, because there is an army of Mrs Jellybys with baskets full of excuses suitable for any occasion?

Even in the poorest parts of London there are still parents who are responsible, honest, work hard, and teach their children to do the same, and to respect other people and their belongings:

In his coffee shop in Stoke Newington, Karagoz tried to explain another feature of these riots – why Turkish and Kurdish youths had generally not joined the looting.

“We have businesses and work hard for what we have. As parents we want our children to work, earn money and be able to buy what they want, not steal it. Our young people know we would be ashamed of them if they were doing this.”

Thanks Karagoz. And all the parents like him.

Egypt is Revolting

January 29, 2011 / / 0 Comments

And so is Tunisia. And Yemen. And Jordan. And Algeria.

None of these are places I would choose to live. And since Islamic states generate most of the world’s refugees, I guess lots of other people would choose not to live there either. If they had the choice.

So it is not surprising that residents of those countries want things to change.

Many of the protestors across the Arab world seem initially to have been motivated by increasing food prices. Algeria’s frantic purchase of a million tons of wheat may not be enough to save its government.

Bookworm Room has some interesting, and only partially tongue in cheek thoughts on this, sugggesting global warming hysteria is a major root cause of the present riots:

…

2.  As part of their apocalyptic battle against rising seas and dying polar bears, warmists declare ethanol is one of the answers (never mind that it turns out that it takes 1.5 gallons of fossil fuel to produce a gallon of ethanol).

3.  Did I mention that ethanol comes from corn?  In the old days, people used to eat corn.  Now they drive it.

4.  To satisfy the panic-stricken need for drivable corn, food crops are diverted into fuel production.

5.  The cost of staples rises substantially around the world.

5.  In 2008, food riots break out, including riots in Egypt.

Bookworm Room links to this Business and Media Institute article on ethanol production, rising food prices and riots. Even Al Gore has acknowledged the problems the ethanol campaign has caused.

Whatever the intial cause of the rioting – hunger, a desire for greater freedom, perceived alliance of some leaders with the West, trouble-making by Mossad (wait for it) – radical islamists are using the widespread dissatisfaction to grow their own powerbases.

In Jordan, for example, protests are being organised by the Islamic Action Front, the only real opposition party in Jordan, and the political wing of the Islamic Brotherhood.

The same is true in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood are supporting Mohamed ElBaradei. Mr ElBaradei is not a liberal, or even a moderate, despite his history of involvement in Western organisations.

These are not pro-democracy protests. The Muslim Brotherhood is not a democratic organisation. It regards democracy as contrary to the Koran, and the practice of sharia.

I hope I am wrong about this, but I see nothing hopeful for the West, or democracy, or North Africa or the Middle East, in the current political unrest in the Arab world. It could very well be the beginning of a widespread political implementation of sharia and radical Islam.

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