racial violence in the UK (asians vs blacks)

[ndrthl]

"Night of violence in Birmingham leaves Asians fearing for their lives
By Cahal Milmo in Birmingham
Published: 24 October 2005
Iqbal winced as his finger touched the purple bruising and neat line of stitches above his swollen left eye. He stood in the wreckage of his fast-food shop, including an upturned charity box, looted of its donations to victims of the South Asian earthquake.

The 33-year-old shopkeeper, who did not want to give his full name, said: " This is racial harmony in Britain today: where a rumour of a crime leads to a mob who trash your business and want to smash your face in because of your colour."

Shortly after 7pm on Saturday night, a gang of about 100 youths, most of them black, swept along Iqbal's street in the Lozells area of Birmingham, smashing his windows and display counter with cricket bats and bricks. The charity box was emptied of £200 donated by customers, both black and Asian.

A few yards from the kebab shop, a British Pakistani taxi driver suffered serious head injuries when his car was set upon by masked attackers, throwing house bricks through the windows. Yesterday the wrecked car stood outside the man's house, a pile of blood-stained bricks in the front and passenger seats.

By the end of a night punctuated on at least 12 occasions by gunfire, one man was dead, 20 people had been sent to hospital, including three with stab wounds, and at least a dozen homes and businesses ransacked in the worst racial violence to have hit Britain's second city since the Hands-worth riots in 1985. Police said that more than 80 offences had been committed during one 75-minute "burst of extreme violence". They confirmed that the victim of the fatal stabbing was a 23-year-old black man.

Hundreds of police were patrolling the Lozells area to try to prevent a recurrence of the vicious clashes between Afro-Caribbean and Asian youths, which senior officers blamed on a "small minority" intent on stirring up racial hatred.

The disturbances on Saturday came after a week of increasing friction. This had been caused by unsubstantiated allegations of the gang rape of a 14-year-old black girl by up to 19 Asian men in an Asian-owned shop selling Afro-Caribbean beauty products in the nearby district of Perry Barr.

West Midlands Police said last night that an exhaustive investigation had yet to find any evidence that the assault had taken place and the alleged victim had yet to come forward. Supporters say her status as an illegal immigrant means she is too afraid to do so.

But the lack of evidence did not prevent details from being broadcast in lurid detail by DJs for two Afro-Caribbean pirate radio stations in Birmingham throughout last week. This led to protests outside the beauty products shop and a petition signed by 1,000 calling for more to be done to trace the alleged rapists.

The Independent has learnt that at least one of the radio stations, Hot FM, and a DJ named "Warren G", called for a boycott of Asian businesses in Lozells. This is a racially mixed area north-west of Birmingham city centre with a large Muslim community originating from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Claims were made that several black women had been assaulted by Asian men.

The 33-year-old owner of the beauty products chain, Beauty Queens Cosmetics, who has strongly denied that any sexual assault took place after being interviewed by police for 12 hours last week, said a mob mentality had been generated. He said: "What kind of society are we living in when hundreds of presumably law-abiding citizens can be duped into coming on to the streets to protest when the so-called organisers don't know exactly what they are protesting about?"

Police sources said they were investigating claims of incitement to racial hatred against Hot FM and another station, Sting FM.

Ilyas Mohammed, 28, a Royal Mail worker who narrowly escaped injury when a brick was thrown through his car window, said: "I happen to listen to Hot FM and the stuff this station was putting out was poison. It was about how this girl had been attacked and the Asians were to blame. They said black people should not be spending their money in Asian shops and how we were too successful. The sub-text was obvious.

"It was more like Rwanda than Birmingham. What happened last night was black kids feeling they could respond to that by beating up some Pakis."

The disturbances, which also left one police officer injured when he was hit in the leg by a projectile fired from a ball bearing gun, followed a meeting held at the New Testament Church of God on Lozells Road, attended by two senior police officers and the Labour MP Khalid Mahmood, who represents Perry Barr.

Police played down suggestions that the violence was inspired by rival Asian and black drugs gangs. Assistant Chief Constable David Shaw said the meeting and an earlier peaceful demonstration had led him to believe there would be a "successful conclusion" to rising tensions. He said: "It now becomes clear some people did not intend that to happen. People started the day with intent to actually create mayhem."

A senior figure in the Lozells Afro-Caribbean community, many of whom are of Jamaican extraction, said a sense of social injustice lay behind the trouble. He said: "I'm ashamed of what I've seen in recent days ­ people from my community walking into Asian shops and telling them to shut down or be burnt down. It is an absolute minority but beneath it is the fact that the Asian community here has been successful. The shopping area on Lozells Road 20 years ago had two or three Asian shops ­ now they make up the vast majority. Some people here think that's down to some sort of unfair advantage and last night was their way of seeking their revenge."

Iqbal winced as his finger touched the purple bruising and neat line of stitches above his swollen left eye. He stood in the wreckage of his fast-food shop, including an upturned charity box, looted of its donations to victims of the South Asian earthquake.

The 33-year-old shopkeeper, who did not want to give his full name, said: " This is racial harmony in Britain today: where a rumour of a crime leads to a mob who trash your business and want to smash your face in because of your colour."

Shortly after 7pm on Saturday night, a gang of about 100 youths, most of them black, swept along Iqbal's street in the Lozells area of Birmingham, smashing his windows and display counter with cricket bats and bricks. The charity box was emptied of £200 donated by customers, both black and Asian.

A few yards from the kebab shop, a British Pakistani taxi driver suffered serious head injuries when his car was set upon by masked attackers, throwing house bricks through the windows. Yesterday the wrecked car stood outside the man's house, a pile of blood-stained bricks in the front and passenger seats.

By the end of a night punctuated on at least 12 occasions by gunfire, one man was dead, 20 people had been sent to hospital, including three with stab wounds, and at least a dozen homes and businesses ransacked in the worst racial violence to have hit Britain's second city since the Hands-worth riots in 1985. Police said that more than 80 offences had been committed during one 75-minute "burst of extreme violence". They confirmed that the victim of the fatal stabbing was a 23-year-old black man.

Hundreds of police were patrolling the Lozells area to try to prevent a recurrence of the vicious clashes between Afro-Caribbean and Asian youths, which senior officers blamed on a "small minority" intent on stirring up racial hatred.

The disturbances on Saturday came after a week of increasing friction. This had been caused by unsubstantiated allegations of the gang rape of a 14-year-old black girl by up to 19 Asian men in an Asian-owned shop selling Afro-Caribbean beauty products in the nearby district of Perry Barr.

West Midlands Police said last night that an exhaustive investigation had yet to find any evidence that the assault had taken place and the alleged victim had yet to come forward. Supporters say her status as an illegal immigrant means she is too afraid to do so.

But the lack of evidence did not prevent details from being broadcast in lurid detail by DJs for two Afro-Caribbean pirate radio stations in Birmingham throughout last week. This led to protests outside the beauty products shop and a petition signed by 1,000 calling for more to be done to trace the alleged rapists.

The Independent has learnt that at least one of the radio stations, Hot FM, and a DJ named "Warren G", called for a boycott of Asian businesses in Lozells. This is a racially mixed area north-west of Birmingham city centre with a large Muslim community originating from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Claims were made that several black women had been assaulted by Asian men.
The 33-year-old owner of the beauty products chain, Beauty Queens Cosmetics, who has strongly denied that any sexual assault took place after being interviewed by police for 12 hours last week, said a mob mentality had been generated. He said: "What kind of society are we living in when hundreds of presumably law-abiding citizens can be duped into coming on to the streets to protest when the so-called organisers don't know exactly what they are protesting about?"

Police sources said they were investigating claims of incitement to racial hatred against Hot FM and another station, Sting FM.

Ilyas Mohammed, 28, a Royal Mail worker who narrowly escaped injury when a brick was thrown through his car window, said: "I happen to listen to Hot FM and the stuff this station was putting out was poison. It was about how this girl had been attacked and the Asians were to blame. They said black people should not be spending their money in Asian shops and how we were too successful. The sub-text was obvious.

"It was more like Rwanda than Birmingham. What happened last night was black kids feeling they could respond to that by beating up some Pakis."

The disturbances, which also left one police officer injured when he was hit in the leg by a projectile fired from a ball bearing gun, followed a meeting held at the New Testament Church of God on Lozells Road, attended by two senior police officers and the Labour MP Khalid Mahmood, who represents Perry Barr.

Police played down suggestions that the violence was inspired by rival Asian and black drugs gangs. Assistant Chief Constable David Shaw said the meeting and an earlier peaceful demonstration had led him to believe there would be a "successful conclusion" to rising tensions. He said: "It now becomes clear some people did not intend that to happen. People started the day with intent to actually create mayhem."

A senior figure in the Lozells Afro-Caribbean community, many of whom are of Jamaican extraction, said a sense of social injustice lay behind the trouble. He said: "I'm ashamed of what I've seen in recent days ­ people from my community walking into Asian shops and telling them to shut down or be burnt down. It is an absolute minority but beneath it is the fact that the Asian community here has been successful. The shopping area on Lozells Road 20 years ago had two or three Asian shops ­ now they make up the vast majority. Some people here think that's down to some sort of unfair advantage and last night was their way of seeking their revenge." news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article321776.ece


Perils of multiculturalism
(Filed: 25/10/2005), Daily Telegraph

"The race relations industry became established in Britain to educate whites out of prejudice towards the ethnic minorities. Whether or not it has been successful, it faces a new challenge today. The riots in the Lozells district of Birmingham have shown that ethnic minorities themselves can engage in racial hatred when the occasion arises.

The black and Asian communities there are largely insulated from each other and primed for hostility. That the troubles appear to have been stimulated by a claim on a black website that a black girl had been gang-raped by Asians shows the scope for mayhem offered by the combination of new technology and vicious rumour.

The chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, has warned in recent months of the dangers of the multicultural society. Lozells proves his point. While it is correct that, in a free society, the cultures and ways of life of different groups should be tolerated, toleration almost to the exclusion of the cultural mainstream is highly dangerous. Instead of having warring factions in our inner cities, we should have communities that, first and foremost, regard themselves as British. A sense of common culture might not prevent tragedies such as these occurring again, but it would make them far less likely.

Mr Phillips can do no more than make his pitch on the matter. Those with political power must now put into practice the ideal that he quite sensibly seeks. Sadly, politicians of all parties cling to the sacred cow of multiculturalism despite the frequent evidence of its unwholesomeness. There is no point in the race relations industry rising at last to this challenge if politicians are going to shirk it in the interests of avoiding an argument. An intellectual confrontation now is far preferable to another conflagration later on"

www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/10/25/dl2502.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/10/25/ixopinion.html

[ndrthl]

Too little melting in the pot

Leader
Tuesday October 25, 2005
The Guardian


Yesterday's Daily Telegraph headline - "Melting pot boils over in fight for respect" - got it wrong. One reason the weekend riot between blacks and Asians in the Lozells area of Birmingham broke out was too little melting in the pot. Indeed, some close observers argue that there has been no melting at all. All are agreed that the spark was a rumour - still unsubstantiated - that a 14-year-old Afro-Caribbean girl had been raped by between three and 25 Asian men. As Derek Bishton, author of a book on the Handsworth riot 20 years ago, noted: "What's surprising is not that the rumour was started, but that people so willingly believed it. That shows how far the state of affairs between the two communities has deteriorated."
The deeper background - economic deprivation, high unemployment, commercial decline - are the same as they were 20 years ago. This time, though, the conflict was confined between ethnic-minority groups. Young Afro-Caribbean men say they are angry at the degree to which both legitimate businesses (grocery and beauty products) and illegitimate ones (drugs) have moved from the black community to the Asian. The weekend attack by young black men on Asian shopkeepers is not the first such conflict, though it is the most dramatic: two men stabbed, one of them dead, 35 injured including three with gunshot wounds, burnt-out cars, smashed shop windows, 300 police in riot gear needed to end the conflict.

Multiculturalism has moved on. Where 30 years ago "black" often sufficed to cover both black and Asian communities - each seeking to resist white racism - now multiple identities and communities have emerged: Africans have separated from Afro-Caribbeans; Somalis from Yemenis; Yemenis themselves into three groups; Asians into even more - Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, with a succession of subgroups. Intergenerational attitudes make the scene even more complex. As the CRE's Trevor Phillips noted last month, one shortcoming of multiculturalism was that it concentrated too much on emphasising the differences between groups and too little on the values they shared.

This proliferation is not in itself a problem providing that there are sturdy, well-made bridges between the groups. Ironically, one of the best reports for improving the government's community-cohesion strategy was produced in the West Midlands by its race-equality unit. It called for smarter strategic goals - specific, measurable, agreed, realistic, targeted ethnically and reciprocal. That is the approach that is again needed now.

www.guardian.co.uk/race/story/0,11374,1600008,00.html

[ndrthl]

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4373040.stm

The BBC report:


"In any crisis, there are facts, rumours and lies. The challenge facing Birmingham is to work out which is which in the wake of clashes between the city's black and Asian communities.
The story started when a pirate radio station DJ aired allegations that a black teenage girl had been gang raped by Asian men in a beauty shop near to the Lozells area.

Anger mounted and a public picket outside followed. By the weekend, with no victim having come forward, the mood was sufficiently heated for the police to try to start calming things down.

But by Saturday night, violence hit Lozells' streets as gangs took matters into their own hands. Young black men attacked Asian businesses; Asian youths attacked the black men; both gangs had a go at the police.

Who killed Isiah Young-Sam, a city council IT analyst returning home from the cinema, remains unclear as the police have not publicly confirmed the ethnicity of the mob behind the vicious stabbing.

After a second night of trouble saw more tension (and a fatal shooting that may or may not be related), the police swamped Lozells on Monday to stamp out the trouble.

Warren G, the DJ who aired the rape allegation, has kept quiet. The woman screening his calls told the BBC News website that he had only sought to do the right thing.

Ajaib Hussein, the owner of the beauty parlour at the centre of the allegation, has denied the claims and said his business is the victim of a plot by rivals.

Rumours abound

What's clear is that Lozells is rife with rumour and paranoia. There are stories of black gangs coming in from Nottingham to attack Asian businesses. Pakistani men are supposedly coming down from Bradford to prepare their response.


Campaign: But no sign yet of a victim

Then there are the rumours that this is really about a tawdry war for street influence between rival black gangs who have allegedly united to use minor community differences to escalate racial tension.

"There is going to have to be a lot of hard work to rebuild relations," said Maxie Hayles, Birmingham's veteran and outspoken racism campaigner.

"A conflict that has been growing for some time between the African Caribbean community and the Asian community has finally come to the surface.

"It was going to come out sooner or later. There are a lot of [black] people who think that the Asian people look down on African-Caribbean people. People don't want to talk about this because they think it plays into the hands of right-wing extremists. But if you don't talk about it, then this is what happens."

Birmingham is certainly a patchwork of communities. But the city's story is not of segregation and tension. If anything it has long been an example of natural integration.

It has twice the national average proportion of mixed-race children - kids born into relationships that stitch together this patchwork.

Even amid this week's events, that mixing is obvious. One of area's DJs who has defended the pirate stations is a Sikh man whose partner is a black woman. Down Lozells Road itself you see black and Asian people talking and shopping.

Changes and fear

But what is also clear is that change appears to have made some people nervous - and that has heightened tensions and differences in Lozells, an extremely deprived area.


Integration: Lozells is a diverse area

Some members of the long-established black communities appear to feel the most nervous, not least because some people in an area as diverse as this believe they are in competition with other communities for meagre resources.

On Lozells Road, you see the economic success of Asian communities. Shop after shop - grocers, chippies, sari sellers and newsagents - stand testament to a community's ability to pull together. While this is by no means an exclusively Muslim area, a new mosque is a symbol of success.

But very few businesses here are owned by black people, even though many of the customers are black. Asian shopkeepers say that if the allegations of rape remain unsubstantiated, it can surely be no coincidence that the location for the crime was an Asian-owned beauty parlour.

One Pakistani kebab shop owner said he had suffered a week of abuse by a gang who had kept away on Monday only because of the heavy police presence. He told the BBC the gang had returned night after night to threaten him, before smashing a window.

"We're good at what we do," he told the BBC. "I've got no problem with black people, everyone is my customer - and they [black youths] don't like it. If they continue to do it, then the Asian youth will come out on the streets again."

'Them and us'


Guffraz Farid, manager of a large grocery in Lozells, said that the violence had hit takings in one of his busiest weeks of the year - the run-up to the Muslim festival of Eid.
Shock: Local people have been taken aback by the violence

The local traders' association had agreed to shut their stores for an hour on Saturday as a mark of solidarity. Then, he said, a gang of young black men started threatening shop keepers and that, in turn, had prompted young Asian men to go out on to the streets.

"I'm just not going to risk it," he said. "I have 17 people working here and it's not worth staying open late if lives are at risk. We will be shutting early."

Maxie Hayles says a "them and us" of economic success and failure in Birmingham has been "swept under the carpet for too long".

"Until we face up to these issues, we will not be able to solve them. The reality is that the African Caribbean community don't have the money - they don't have the corner shops, the newsagents or even the jobs in these places."

This is a view that you hear a lot. One West Midlands race equality official, Derek Campbell, told the BBC that some black people were saying they had been "re-colonised" by successful Asian communities, an allusion to slavery and empire.

"They see money going into Asian communities because, let's face it, the Asian communities have been good at working together to get it," said Mr Campbell. "Are we going to blame the Asians because they have got their act together? I think not. There are challenges that the black communities need to face up to."

[aroundtheworld]

If I were paranoid I would believe this riff was "created" to bring about this end result. If I were paranoid I would believe there was an ulterior motive such as passive ethnic cleansing and creation of hostile racial climate to justify further forms of segregation-and turning even more ethnic groups against blacks as a whole.

There was once a movie on the SciFi channel where they rounded up all "obviously" blacks from the world and horded them into a spaceship and flew them away. Why doesn't the World Government go ahead and just do that now. Get on with it and then everyone can be happy when the world is clean and sterile and peaceful with no blacks.