Pogrom meme

Of all the paradoxes of the situation, none is greater than that the Muslim traders of Lozells, among whom an unthinking anti-Semitism is probably widespread

Why of course it’s “unthinking”. Those ragheads wouldn’t recognise a racism if it hit them in the face, would they? How paradoxal.

… Ah, the Telegraph.

“Maybe I should be worried about that!”

Indeed you should!

I don’t know about the ‘official sanction’. I seem to remember reading a book (Isaac Babel’s, most likely) where the author describes redneck pogromists wearing several thick jackets in anticipation of being confronted by whip-swinging cossacks dispatched by the authorities. The notion that it was usually officially sanctioned is arguable.

I apologise in advance for the length, vitriol and lack of reference to pogrom in this comment, but Dalrymple’s piece is patently offensive, and I feel entitled to a sharp remark in response. Maybe a letter to the Telegraph would be more appropriate, but the point will not be lost on this audience.

Dalrymple’s presumptions and uninformed ideas about Birmingham places and residents exemplifies the blood libel he pretends to abhor, and as they appear in a national newspaper, it’s worth making the point that he’s making things worse.

His characterisations of Birmingham places and people are consistently off-the-mark, and in lieu of accuracy he parrots simple-minded stereotypes about inner-city Birmingham and the people who live there. For instance, he would like us to believe that Asian and West Indian ‘communities’ are saturated with loathing for each other. He has no use for any evidence of tolerance between minority groups (even though it can be found quite easily), and would much prefer to see – and sow – divisions. He is, in an entirely obvious way, perpetrating racist stereotypes about people and place, in a way that is consistent with the aims of blood libel: to discredit and demonise a particular group of people, notably for political ends.

Dalrymple is apparently clueless about local history, and would do well to make even the most cursory check into the character and community spirit of the place, the earlier riots, and even some basic geography (this in spite of being identified by Cohen as a Birmingham doctor). His characterisations of Lozells and Handsworth are off the mark – not least because Lozells is a Handsworth neighbourhood, but also because he misrepresents Handsworth as ‘famous for its riots’ – without bothering to note that the ‘Handsworth riots’ of 1985 occurred mainly along Lozells Road; the same road, the same neighbourhood, the same place as the scene of last week’s violence. So, which is it, Doctor, one place, or two? And which is the ‘violent’ one? Or is it now two places of violence, side by side, in an escalating destruction of inner-cities?

It seems Dalrymple doesn’t know or care about the geography, history, or social conditions of the place, but prefers instead to circulate misinformation about Asians, Jamaicans, Pakistanis, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, and all of the other people in the area. In this way his misrepresentation of people for political purposes is rather wider than the blood libel against Jews. It is also disgraceful, and maybe pernicious, that someone writing in a nationally prominent newspaper can be so thoughtless.

Note also that one of the remarks here refers to media ‘betrayal’ as a factor in the 1985 riots. Dalrymple’s comments can be seen in the same light, and that irresponsible news media may have something to do with local anger towards those who misrepresent the place.

Chris – you probably know more about him than I do, but a brief Google has him living in France, in semi-retirement after working ‘in a decayed district of the Birmingham conurbation and as a prison doctor’, and just as saliently, the author of an infamous diatribe about Walsall:

While Walsall undoubtedly exists, it is difficult to know where precisely it begins and ends, because it is in the middle of one of the largest and most depressing contiguous areas of urban devastation in the world. … To the hideousness of nineteenth-century industrialization is added the desolation of twentieth-century obsolescence. The Black Country looks like Ceaucescu’s Romania with fast food outlets.

This doesn’t tell us much about whether he knows the streets and people of the city and region, but given his appetite for hyperbole, I suspect that he’s riffing on ignorance; that he knows little of where he speaks.

Thoughts that are outrageous on Crooked Timber on Monday, are conservative talking-points by Wednesday and the conventional wisdom of the “decent” left by the following Sunday. Maybe I should be worried about that!

Only if you take ideology seriously. Those of us who recognize “ideology” as being, in practice, a set of political alliances, rather than political ideas, are completely unsurprised. The “left” is (these days) generally allied with Blacks, immigrants, Muslims, criminals, the poor and the unemployed, against Whites, racists, businesspeople and the police. The “right’s” alliances are basically the mirror image of the “left’s”. So what are both sides to do when the police try to stop poor, unemployed, racist Black criminals from attacking racist immigrant Muslim businesspeople?

Well, they massage the story to make it align more comfortably with their alliances. The “real” battle, they conclude, was between poor people/criminals and businesspeople, or between oppressed/troublemaking minorities and the police, or between more and less assimilated/establishment-allied immigrants–whatever it takes to avoid thinking beyond “us vs. them”.

(By the way, I lambaste Amy Chua’s contemptible thesis here.)

Dan Simon,

I have to say, I am surprised at your review of Amy Chua’s book. Chua repeatedly emphasizes that she neither opposes free markets and democracy nor blames free markets and democracy for all the evils of the world. The book was even endorsed by Thomas Sowell.

Want more narcissistic and trivial comment? Step forward one Canadian chickenhawk and torture apologist- with the sheer nerve to call someone else’s views contemptible, presumably because she wasn’t slavering about hurting prisoners- and one monomaniacal American leftie giving us the benefit of his thousandth ‘Chomsky for beginners’ speech.

Any comment on the race riots and murders in the UK? Well, no: Abb1 and Dan ‘Armchair torturer’ Simon don’t live there, so it doesn’t matter.

Chua repeatedly emphasizes that she neither opposes free markets and democracy nor blames free markets and democracy for all the evils of the world.

Perhaps not for all the evils of the world, but apparently for the inequalities associated with “market-dominant minorities”. At least, that’s how I understood her New York Times op-ed. Perhaps her book is more circumspect.

(As for Dan Hardie–whatever he says about me–anyone around here who’s willing to take the trouble to heap ridicule on Abb1’s comments can’t be all bad….)

Shorter Abb1/Dan Simon: As an American/Canadian resident in the US, I regard the comments thread of a post on UK race riots as a marvellous opportunity to talk about the United States, the whole United States and only the United States. Gee, why do foreigners think that Americans are self-obsessed, self-pitying nationalists with a gross ignorance of foreign countries?

Shorter Dan Hardie: I really hate a couple of commenters here and I’m totally nuts.

Whichever idiot it was who said I was confusing race and religion should answer the following questions:

How many white children are going to go to Muslim schools?
How many black children are going to go to Jewish schools?
How many brown children are going to go to Christian schools?
If the answer to all of these questions is ‘hardly any,’ and it is, then faith schools will divide children by religion AND race.
Why you pseudo-leftists are so keen on segregation is a wonder of the age.

Btw, if Bruschetta Boy isn’t Dave Weeden, my heartfelt apologies to an excellent writer.

Whichever idiot it was who said I was confusing race and religion should answer the following questions:

How many white children are going to go to Muslim schools?
How many black children are going to go to Jewish schools?
How many brown children are going to go to Christian schools?

Not many and not many, and quite a few. However, since the riots in Birmingham were, by and large, not that well attended by white people and/or Jewish people, perhaps a more useful question would be:

How many black children go to Muslim schools?
(answer: quite a lot, Somalis and Nigerians)
How many Asian children go to Muslim schools?
(answer: quite a lot, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis)
Would a Muslim school in Handsworth be either all black or all Asian?
(answer: probably no. It wouldn’t have many white children at it, but that is not what we are talking about).

The point here is that it is quite likely that faith schools are a bad idea, but they did not cause the riots in Handsworth and it is a bad idea to try and hijack every single news event to your own pet issue of the moment. The reason why the black and Asian communities disliked each other was pretty much agreed upon by both sides; the blacks thought the Asians were parasitical capitalists and the Asians thought the blacks were thieves. This wasn’t really about Islam, Nick, some things aren’t you know.

Dsquared, Cohen can no doubt defend himself, but… He only brings up ‘faith schools’ in the penultimate paragraph of his piece, and does so whilst mentioning other Government policies which he sees as contributing to racial segregation (eg the ‘Black Community Centre’/’Asian Community Centre’ disgrace). His article isn’t solely or even largely ‘about’ faith schools.

Re your other point, that faith schools didn’t caused the violence, it seems fair to say that if you already have a polarised community, it’s not too sensible to deepen that polarisation by sending kids of largely different ethnicities off to different ‘faith’ schools.

‘‘if you already have a polarised community,…’

‘This point has not been established.’

Oh aye? We’ve had one race riot, two murders and a parade of ‘community leaders’ blaming each other’s ‘communities’ for all the trouble. What will it take to ‘establish’ in your mind that there might just be a leetle ethnic polarisation in Handsworth? Please state the approximate number of riots- body count optional.

I don’t see how anyone who doesn’t take Margaret Thatcher’s view on the existence of communities can really object to the fact that Actually Existing communities will sometimes be racial or national. There is an Asian Community Centre and a Chinese Community Centre near me, but they’re not the main community centres and I doubt they are in Handsworth either.

It ought to be pretty obvious that if you dole out money to all the inhabitants of a given area, you are encouraging them to co-operate together in a given cause […] If, on the other hand, you award grants to faith or ethnic group leaders, you are setting such groups in competition with each other…

Not that it matters much, but one could easily argue (and consider it ‘pretty obvious’) that the opposite is true.

Well maybe. But the actual facts of this riot don’t actually seem to fit the theory. Both sides actually defined the conflict as one in which “blacks” (including Carribeans who are usually secular or Christians and Africans who are usually secular, Christians or Muslims) and “Asians” (including Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs) fought against each other because of a conflict that was defined specifically in economic terms.

In other words, the problem here is actually the inequality and the poverty, an issue which I believe is still a minor concern of the Left. These were two groups that can be marked out by “race” (as long as you’re prepared to call all black Britons a “race” and all South Asian Britons another separate “race”), but they didn’t actually live separate lives at all; quite the reverse, they met each other whenever they went shopping for hair products. Someone has managed to dig up an alleged grievance about government “community” money, but the actual email that was circulating was entirely about the position of Asians in the private sector.

I am not at all convinced that this is an appropriate occasion for us to have the “faith schools are bad” sermon. It might very well be that faith schools are bad and will make this problem worse, but not having faith schools isn’t going to make it better. The fundamental problem here appears to be the extent to which it is worse to not own a shop than to own one, which is something that has (as measured by the inequality statistics) something that hasn’t got better and has arguably got worse over the last ten years.

What I (and presumably Bruschetta Boy) object to is the use of a news item to hack out the same old article. It’s “Why The Riots Mean We Must Support My Politics”.

Dsquared: ‘because of a conflict that was defined specifically in economic terms.’
Um, no; because of a conflict that was defined in partly economic terms (competition over the local legal retailing and illegal drugs trades); partly in terms of ‘respect’ (cf the many vox pops with blacks saying that they were treated with contempt by Asian shopkeepers and Asians saying that their premises were threatened by blacks); partly in weird sexual terms (more than one allegation of Asians gang-raping or molesting black women) and partly, yes, in religious terms: unless you’re going to say that the holding of a protest meeting inside a Church, followed by attacks on a nearby mosque, were empty of religious significance.

Dsquared: ‘ Someone has managed to dig up an alleged grievance about government “community” money, but the actual email that was circulating was entirely about the position of Asians in the private sector.’
Well, in the presence of such expertise one speaks with humility. None the less, Gus John, who does know rather a lot about inner city education and racism, wrote in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/race/story/0,11374,1600704,00.html):
‘The answer lies in the strained relationship between the African and Asian communities in Handsworth-Lozells over the past three decades and the way Birmingham city council and government funding regimes have fuelled this hostility. …
‘the perception is that access to funding is anything but equitable. In the past two years there have been inter-ethnic conflicts over the allocation of £49m from the single regeneration budget (SRB) and the balance of representation of African and Asian people on the SRB board. African-Caribbean groups complained of losing out because they were required to find £3,000 to match each £1,000 they were given, something the Asian community found easier to do because of the way their communities and businesses were run. And Asians complained that there were too many Africans on the board.

‘What is more, the perception is that access to funding is anything but equitable. In the past two years there have been inter-ethnic conflicts over the allocation of £49m from the single regeneration budget (SRB) and the balance of representation of African and Asian people on the SRB board. African-Caribbean groups complained of losing out because they were required to find £3,000 to match each £1,000 they were given, something the Asian community found easier to do because of the way their communities and businesses were run. And Asians complained that there were too many Africans on the board.’

Gus John knows a lot about it and he is saying that competition for funding is part of the problem. And, unlike you, he is citing dates and figures, rather than referring to one single email. Furthermore, he goes on to argue that poverty and inequality are indeed part of the problem: he just isn’t simple-minded enough to suggest that they are the only causes of the problem.

Dsquared: ‘I am not at all convinced that this is an appropriate occasion for us to have the “faith schools are bad” sermon.’
Really? Personally I’m sick to death of the use of the word ‘inappropriate’ to mean ‘might offend any self-appointed community leader with ready media access’. You yourself admit that there’s a case to be made that faith schools didn’t create, but would worsen, pre-existing ethnic tensions: this is precisely what I said and precisely why it is an ‘appropriate’ time for Cohen to talk about faith schools.

Shorter Dsquared: ‘I have definitely run out of arguments, but if I accuse somebody else of ranting I might get a last ironic cheer.’

So let’s agree that i) there doesn’t seem to be too much evidence of ethnically exclusive projects for the unemployed; ii) there is plenty of evidence for ethnically exclusive ‘regeneration’ projects, and of competition for the same; iii) Chris Bertram has rather generously defended a particular point made by Nick Cohen, and were Mr Cohen to happen by again, he could acknowledge that Chris Bertram isn’t a defender of religious segregation.

Nick — have you read the white paper? And do you know that, for examples, church schools no longer interview parents? Do you have a practicable solution to the inequity concerning religious schooling?