Monday 12 May 2008

Unwelcome truths



On Sunday, following the tragic murder of 16 year old Jimmy Mizen, in Lee, South London, the day before, I visited the website of the local Newspaper the quaintly named News & Shopper and read the comments section beneath a news item about the case.

As one might expect with the case so recent, and with feelings regarding the loss of a much loved young man so raw a number of the comments were angry and emotional, in particular there was much anger and frustration at the fact that police and media had, up to that point, failed to release an adequate description of the suspect, beyond the fact that he was a “male youth”.

In these politically correct times, the community cohesion censors routinely use such terms as code for “black male”, in the belief that if the public do not read about non white crime they will not get upset about it, therefore, this odd omission led a number of correspondents to assume that the suspect’s race was being withheld for reasons of political correctness.

At this stage none of us who did not witness the attack can know for certain what colour Jimmy’s assailant was, however, it is a well known fact that if the press suppress a criminal's ethnic identity, and you assume the suppressed identity is non-white, nine times out of ten you will be correct, consequently, there was some justification for such an assumption.

I understand that, as of the time of posting the prime suspect is a Turkish youth who is known to the family. However, if Jimmy’s killer had turned out to be white, he would have been the first white assailant involved in any of the 40 most recent teenaged murders in London (68 killings if you include all those under 25).

As opinion from all sides of the political spectrum were represented on the News & Shopper site, the debate became quite heated, and sadly some political point scoring took place. A number of BNP supporters ventured their views in a restrained and respectful manner and were met with the predictable and unfair accusations of racism from the fanatical advocates of enrichment.

In addition some individuals who were clearly not BNP supporters, but who were posing as such posted strings of obscenities and UAF standard hate speech in order to portray the party in the manner which best suits its enemies at SearchLite and Common Purpose.

When I looked in again later in the evening both groups of protagonists were still batting away with some vigor.

Out of interest I visited the site again today to see what remained of the various exchanges after the moderator had pruned the unruly and rather passionate thread, and, as expected, a lot of messages had disappeared, including, thankfully, all the rubbish posted by the ludicrous BNP impersonators from the UAF.
Surprisingly, however, some quite strident comments from nationalists lamenting the state that the country was in. Also some quite abusive messages had been left, where contributors had called each other “idiots” or worse.

The fact that such messages had survived made some of the casualties all the more surprising.

I looked back for a number of rational non abusive messages I had read last night and they had gone.

One from a man who said that he did not wish to "criminalise all non whites", but if we are to solve the problem then we have to accept uncomfortable truths. In the last two years, he said, 40 teenagers have been murdered in London, but, on the basis of all available evidence, none of the killers were white.

Why had that message gone?, it was not abusive or racist, it was not BNP propaganda, it was a stark statement of the truth. But it was not a truth the moderator wanted read, so it did not pass muster.

In another message a woman had tried to explain why there was so much anger, as a locals, she said, most of those writing to the News Shopper know from experience that white boys are the primary victims of racial violence, whereas non-whites are the main aggressors. Yet, the press and the media ignore the fact and keep holding new and bigger ceremonies in memory of Stephen Lawrence, who, if he was a victim of racial violence, he was a rare exception to the rule.

Of course there was no chance that such sacrilege would survive a politically correct site moderator's wrath, no matter how true.

The moderator on one local Lewisham website is no different from those on any news site in this country, it seems they will allow you to squabble and you can snipe, but if you get close to telling the truth about racial violence in this country, you will be silenced.

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