Wednesday, June 21, 2006

YET ANOTHER HATE CRIME HOAX



A homeowner awoke Monday to find messages of hate scribbled on his house and van with shaving cream. Eddie Godette said he woke up to find swastikas and anti-Semitic comments written on his property at 3801 N. Longfellow Circle. "It's getting to be a hate crime," he said. "When they put swastikas and they indicate what they want to do, what their intentions are, it's time that this neighborhood, that used to be the nicest neighborhood, stick together and pull together." Police were investigating the vandalism, but did not have any suspects.

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Look at the picture above. A real Nazi would have put up a Nazi Swastika, not an Indian one. The "arms" of the Nazi and Indian symbols point in opposite directions



SURPRISE! IT'S MINORITY RACISM THAT IS REALLY DANGEROUS

Fridays were the most scary. 'Twenty kids would wait for me at the school gates and beat me up. Once they put me on the floor and stamped on my head. It started when I was 12.' A group of Somali boys were sitting outside a cafe on Stratford Road in Birmingham talking about their experience of school. Modqtar, now 17, was beaten up twice a day and picked on for having poor English. The perpetrators were often Asian gangs.

Five years after his family fled Somalia, the teenager was petrified about travelling around his adopted homeland. 'I have to get two buses here, and two buses back. That is four chances of getting beaten up every day. They shout at us to go back to where we came from. But they are not from here either.' His friend Mustafa nodded sagely, adding: 'We get attacked by everyone in school - Asian gangs, white gangs, black Jamaicans. Everyone wants to fight us.' Their group began laughing, yanking up hooded tops as they adopted the posture of a streetwise gang. 'This is our ghetto,' said one, lifting his hand and sticking out his index and little finger before collapsing in giggles. They were joking but there was some truth in it: 'If you get beaten up twice a day for years,' added Modqtar, 'you grow up to be aggressive.'

Across town, in Washwood Heath, three Asian boys whose families are from Pakistan were having a similar conversation. 'A small incident can set off a riot in school,' said the 16-year-old, who asked not to be named. 'There are fights every other day. If there is an Asian gang and one Somali boy, he is in trouble, but if there is a Somali gang and one Asian boy it is vice versa. Even the girls are at war. Parents are afraid to let their children out.' It is not just fists. They talk about a Somali pupil who was a victim of a stabbing. Then, just over a week ago, 14-year-old Mohammed Ahmed Hussain was knifed in the stomach as he played football opposite his school gates around the corner. The teenager, known as Romeo because of his good looks, had arrived in Britain from Pakistan last year.

Open a newspaper, turn on the television or switch on the radio, and it is impossible to miss the spate of knife crime spreading across the country: Rudy Neofytou, 19, knifed trying to stop shoplifters; Tom Grant, 19, stabbed to death on a train from Glasgow to Paignton, Devon; Nisha Patel-Nasri, 29, a Special Constable killed on duty.

Worse are the daily reminders of violence and death among young people. Mohammed Ahmed Hussain survived the attack in Birmingham but others were not so lucky. Last month 15-year-old Kiyan Prince, a promising footballer, collapsed, dying 50 yards from his school gates in north London after he was stabbed. This week a 14-year-old girl will appear in court charged with knifing Natashia Jackman, a fellow pupil at Collingwood College in Camberley, Surrey. Jackman had a pair of scissors repeatedly punched into her face, head, chest and back.

In the last month alone there has been a plethora of violent or threatening clashes between school pupils across the country. Just an hour after Kiyan Prince fell to the ground, another boy was seriously wounded in a knife attack in Hendon, also in north London. Nine boys were excluded from Downend school in Bristol after two fights during which one of the teenagers was found to be carrying a knife. In Cornwall an investigation was launched in a primary school after allegations that a 10-year-old was threatened with a knife by a classmate.

Back in Birmingham, stories about violence in school come as no surprise to Modqtar and Mustafa, nor to their Asian counterparts. Their school lives have been punctuated with fights and aggression, some involving knives, many more without. Often gang clashes are sparked by unfounded rumours. One 'riot' began because of a whisper that a Somali boy had beaten up an Asian girl.

This is not just indiscriminate violence between frustrated youth. It is a new form of vicious racism that breaks down the traditional notion of white on black violence. Now there is hate and distrust between ethnic groups: white, Asian, Afro-Caribbean, African and those from the Middle East. Comments once associated with far-right white groups can now be heard among the long-established immigrant communities. They fear the new arrivals in the same way they were once feared. Those feelings permeate down to their children.

A hard-hitting documentary made for teachers will be broadcast tomorrow, revealing the true level of inter-racial tension inside the school gates. Dealing with Race - on Teachers' TV - will show how small altercations can spark mass fights. In one scene an assistant headteacher from John Kelly Boys' Technology College in London talks about a battle where up to 100 pupils ganged up on a few Afghan boys. 'A group of people were fighting each other almost indiscriminately,' says Richard Ockan. To help newer groups of immigrants to integrate, John Kelly Boys' has started running Saturday sessions for local families. It has already been successful in helping Somali youth integrate, and now the school is hoping it will do the same for the new Afghan population.

Nooralhaq Nasimi, spokesman for the Afghan Community Organisation of London, said youngsters needed to be given more protection by the police and the Home Office, adding that they were constantly being singled out for attack by more established ethnic minority groups. He said that schools had become increasingly dangerous. 'We need a safe environment in our schools in order to tackle bullying and conflict among ethnic minorities,' he said, adding that the knife culture was terrifying parents.

Senior police officers who are monitoring inter-community tensions are increasingly aware of an evolving hierarchy of violence between ethnic groups. Rob Beckley, the spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers on police and faith community issues, said that a form of inter-ethnic violence had developed, with newly arrived immigrants the most targeted and most vulnerable. 'There is at least one incident a week of serious disturbances based around schools among groups, sometimes inter-ethnic, sometimes gangs. It is an issue significant enough to merit substantial police intervention on occasion.' Beckley, also assistant chief constable of Hertfordshire, said that some school-based gangs were adopting an aggressive stance based on religious and cultural identities.

In the past month police have responded to four major outbreaks of violence in Britain's inner cities involving young people from differing backgrounds. 'These are significant incidents that might set a trend in the surrounding community,' said Beckley. 'The carrying of knives is causing problems and carries big consequences.'

The most senior police officers monitoring Britain's complex and constantly shifting race relations say that the Somali community, in particular, has been subject to violent attack by other ethnic groups. 'Disturbances affecting the Somali community have been recorded from Plymouth right up to Glasgow,' said Beckley. 'A lot of the Somali families came over in the early Nineties, compared to some of the Asian and black communities who are now third generation and well established. There is a real vulnerability about the most newly arrived.'

The myths about the new communities are perpetuated across the country. In Washwood Heath, young Asian people talk about perceptions of the newcomers that were once used to alienate them. 'They are taking all our housing,' said one boy. 'They fill them with kids,' added another. 'They smell.' A nearby park has been labelled 'Somalia village' and is avoided by youths of other ethnic minority backgrounds.

But they too are victims of crime. 'It is complicated - there is not one pattern, not one trend and not one answer,' said Simon Blake from the National Children's Bureau. 'But we have to bust these myths about who gets the best housing and how resources are allocated.' He said he had been in a school recently where African-Caribbean boys were picking on African boys. The first group, he argued, had 'currency' because of the credibility around their clothing and music. However, Blake praised pro-active action across the country.

The Washwood Heath Youth Inclusion Programme (YIP) is running a conference to tackle the problem at the request of three schools. 'Hear my Voice' aims to promote inter-ethnic dialogue. 'This issue arises because it is a high density area,' said Farrukh Haroon, a project worker at the YIP. 'Communities are scrapping for scarce resources and due to an irresponsible media misperceptions are bred.' Three teenagers, Usman, Yasser and Iksar, all 16, are helping to organise the conference. All three see fights daily in and out of school but want to help the two communities to get on. 'The religion may help as we are all Muslim,' said Yasser. 'I hope that things change in the future.' ...

More here



WOMEN IN THE MILITARY

A small excerpt

Military leaders from their first days in training are steeped in a culture that accepts and believes in civilian control. And they are doers. A policy that was strongly opposed while under consideration will be just as strongly implemented once it is decided upon. Furthermore, generals at the three-star level are selected with (at a minimum) heavy participation from the civilian leadership, and those at the four-star level are chosen at the complete discretion of civilians, allowing politicians to shape the top levels of military leadership. When, as in the present administration, views on the expansion of female roles become a litmus test for advancement, arguments questioning accepted political wisdom are not conducive to the possibility of reaching the very highest levels.

With little support from the outside, and in a culture that demands performance, those "in the ranks" have learned that pointing out the difficulties inherent in an undertaking as politically volatile as the assimilation of women will quickly end a career. At the same time, enormous pressure is exerted on them to accentuate the positive aspects of this social experiment and ignore or diminish the negative. But male members of the military know that things aren't that simple. As is always true when people are asked to believe in and promote an image they know to be untrue, cynicism soon explodes. This cynicism feeds a backlash, which increases tensions even in areas where women perform well and where their presence is not counterproductive to the military's mission.

These hard realities have created the greatest potential cultural change in our military's history, and if matters are left in this state, we run the risk of destroying all notions of leadership as we have known it. The fundamental disconnect is this: In many areas where females have been introduced into the military, leaders imbued with the imperative of ethical conduct are constantly challenged to hold back on the truth or risk their futures.

And so politicians and media commentators usually end up arguing over only half the story. They are right to call for investigations of commanders who have not dealt preemptively with sexual harassment and unpermitted sex among members of their command. Women forced into unwilling sexual conduct are put into an inexcusable hell when their superior is the culprit, and there is no one to whom they feel they can report the crime.

But politicians and the media are blaming the wrong social forces for such problems. They have not been able to hear from those who have firsthand knowledge of what the sexual integration of the military has meant in matters of military conduct. Consider the commander who knows that the culprit in such situations is not one or a half-dozen individuals, but a system that throws healthy young men and women together inside a volatile, isolated crucible of emotions -- a ship at sea or basic training, to take two notable examples. Whom does this commander tell if he believes that the experiment itself has not worked, that the compressed and emotional environment in which these young men and women have been thrust together by unknowing or uncaring policymakers actually encourages disruptive sexual activity?

The commander knows the political mantra for twenty years has been that sexual misconduct is simply one more cultural problem, and that, like racial insensitivity, it can be overcome by a few lectures and command supervision. He knows also that this is wrong. But to speak his mind or force the issue would most likely be his undoing.



Cultures are not all equal

I remember the mid-1970s, when multiculturalism was first beginning to entrench itself as the official religion in state schools. Celebrating diversity suddenly became the only possible response to that often-confronting phenomenon. In the same way, overnight it seemed that all cultures became equal and demanded uncritical acceptance, except for the Anglo-Saxon kind, about which we were encouraged to feel ashamed and apologetic.

It became less and less possible to make critical, cross-cultural comparisons. If, for example, you wanted to talk about the Aztec practice of human sacrifice, there were all sorts of shibboleths getting in the way of plain speaking. Even the most remotely negative reflection on priests cutting out the still-beating hearts of their victims with obsidian knives had to be prefaced with mea culpas about the victims of Anglo imperialism. The verdict of Mircea Eliade, the previous century's most distinguished historian of comparative religion, that the Aztec rites were "a perversion of the religious impulse" had become almost literally unspeakable.

It was the same with other, less spectacular examples of barbarism. The clitoridectomies of African tribes and the genital mutilation of Aboriginal boys in initiation were subjects hedged around with taboos. The same was true of cannibalism, on the rare occasions when anthropologists and historians could bring themselves to acknowledge the existence of the problem among some Australian and New Guinean hunter-gathers. Who, after all, were we white Westerners to criticise the customs of other cultures, especially those so much closer to nature?

Where all other cultures are notionally equal, all sorts of crucial differences are annihilated and categorical distinctions swamped. For example, basic issues such as comparative levels of cultural development are set at naught. Primitive nomads, villagers and the inhabitants of cities become all much of a muchness because they all have a culture of some sort, and comparisons are odious or at least ill-mannered.

Even if they paid lip-service to those pieties, you may well be thinking, surely the school-teaching classes never really believed all that claptrap? The fact of the matter is that the calibre of people attracted into teaching has been falling steadily since at least the '50s and it's a long time since the profession encouraged independent-mindedness in its members. The chances are that most of the people entrusted with values education swallowed their multicultural pieties whole and cling to them in much the same way as they would to articles of religious faith.

It is as Allan Bloom warned in The Closing of the American Mind. Barbarism has largely triumphed in the classroom. Judeo-Christian civilisation has been trivialised and marginalised by those entrusted with the task of transmitting it. As he put it: "Cultural relativism succeeds in destroying the West's universal or intellectually imperialistic claims, leaving it as just another culture."

Mandating tolerance as a civic virtue leads not only to cultural relativism but to a more general moral relativism. Knight alluded to the problem in her speech and returned to the theme in an opinion piece she wrote with a colleague, Carol Collins, which appeared in The Australian on Friday. "We must be wary, though, of moral relativism," they argued. "A society of individuals who believe that all beliefs, all values, have equal legitimacy, for whom anything goes, is neither tolerant nor just."

If anything, this understates the problem. If such a society were conceivable, it would be profoundly anomic and anarchic. Its citizens would lack any moral compass in their dealings with one another. There would be no internalising on the part of individuals of the constraints imposed for the common good by the criminal code. If people were law-abiding, it would be a matter of personal preference or convenience rather than considered obligation.

As Knight and Collins maintain, it is a matter of vital importance to any society that it not only inculcates ethical values in the classroom but that it teaches the young how to make complex moral assessments. It's a process that, in the days before the word acquired a negative connotation, used to be called discrimination. To be reckoned a person of discriminating judgment was once high praise.

Knight and Collins say: "Surely a focus on social mores sanctioning racism, bullying or the abuse of women and children show us what is wrong with relativism. Think of Australia's treatment of asylum-seekers, and the complex issues of tribal law and the treatment of women and children in indigenous communities. These are examples of situations in which tolerance is dangerous."

Just as I had begun to revise my longstanding low opinion of the University of South Australia and all its works, Knight and Collins gave the game away with their choice of our treatment of asylum-seekers as an example of self-evident evil. They are trying to suggest that a policy of mandatory detention is an open-and-shut case of abuse of women and children. That suggests, to my mind at least, that they're less interested in public policy to develop young people's ethical judgment than in using ethical education instrumentally to push ideological barrows of their own.

The ethical questions surrounding the entitlements of unauthorised immigrants are by no means simple. Amitai Etzioni, the distinguished American sociologist, contributed the leading essay in the June edition of Quadrant magazine on the rights and responsibilities of immigrants. Those who doubt the moral right of sovereign states to provide a place of asylum in a third country will find it challenging. Liberal senators with delicate consciences may find it instructive and Knight and Collins may learn a thing or two.

The charge of instrumentalism shouldn't be levelled lightly. In this case the issue is quite clear-cut. Moral education ought to be designed to enable people to make considered judgments for themselves, not to dispose them to a particular political ideology. To confuse those two objectives is, at the very least, a sign of moral obtuseness. Yet all unawares, it seems, Knight and Collins convict themselves out of their own mouths. "A just democratic society depends on its citizens judging such practices to be morally wrong and, indeed, on equipping children to understand not only that such practices are wrong but able to see why they are wrong," they write. "In other words, social justice depends on a form of moral education, which introduces children to the grounds for moral judgment."

Social justice is a Vatican cant term for an ill-considered, church-sanctioned halfway house to socialism. Readers who are interested in how the clerical Left got a toe-hold in as profoundly conservative an institution as the Catholic Church should have a look at the encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). Happily, as can be seen from another encyclical, Centesimus Annus (1991), the church has evolved a more sophisticated understanding of economics and the role of markets in free societies. If only the same could be confidently said of the Australian Labor Party.

The rhetoric of social justice is a legitimating device for the sort of old-fashioned class-war politics the ALP once thrived on and that, to his credit, Bob Hawke largely abandoned. It is a self-serving, partisan rhetoric and a moral education worthy of the name would enable the rising generation to work that out for themselves.

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