Rod Liddle has become the first UK blogger to be censured by the Press Complaints Commission for something he wrote. In December 2009, in aSpectator blog, he claimed that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community”.
I blow hot and cold on the subject of Mr. Liddle. He says some interesting things, but he often spouts bollocks: in 1992, while editor of BBC Radio 4’s Todayprogramme, he wrote a column for the Guardian in which he said that readers who had forgotten why they’d voted Labour five years earlier would have remembered if they’d watched the Countryside Alliance march against fox-hunting. The BBC invited him to stop writing for the Guardian or resign from the corporation. He resigned.
His other main fault (apart from having once been stupid enough to join the Socialist Workers Party and working as a speech-writer for the Labour Party) is that he sports a very silly hair-do for someone his age (see my previous postings on bad hair).
But while his opinions are sometimes quasi-deranged, he’s not a bad journalist, so I wondered why he’d got his facts on black violence wrong when he’d actually got them right in an article for The Times in June 2009 (he gets around, does our Rod). So I looked up the offending Spectator blog and it turns out it was written in a towering rage in response to the news that two 19-year old black “rappers” who had attempted to murder a pregnant 15-year old girl in a vicious attack which ended with them throwing her into a canal to die had been sentenced to a total of 32 years for the assault. (One of these vermin – the sperm donor – was convinced the girl was holding up his “career”.)
Liddle’s utter fury can be deduced from his link to the article about the case, in which he used the words “human filth” - very hard to disagree – and his sarcastic comment that what London had got in return for black violence was "rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks." Evidently very, very pissed off.
It seems to a fact young blacks are responsible for the majority of some violent crimes – robbery, mobile phone thefts and knife crimes. But, according to the Ministry of Justice, only 32% of arrests in London for what it describes as “violence against the person” and “sexual offences” were of blacks.
Three points to make here:
First, Liddle lost it and overstated his case in a journalistically unprofessional fashion. Naughty boy. But few of us haven’t been guilty of feeling the same way when hearing news of crimes which make us doubt that the perpetrators actually qualify as human beings. And, unlike newspaper columns, blogs are a very immediate form of communication - too immediate in this case.
Second, Blacks comprise 12% of London’s population, so young black men are disproportionately responsible to a grotesque degree for making London such a threatening, fear-filled place to live these days. And Liddle’s right – that’s a high price to pay for the “vibrancy” which liberals are always assuring us is worth the price the city’s traditional population has to pay to accommodate incomers.
Third, given we’re always being told that the police are too busy to do any real policing because of the amount of paperwork demanded of them, why aren’t comprehensive statistics for all crimes based on the ethnic origins of the perpetrator and the victim readily available and easy to find on government department websites? They‘d be of enormous interest to a lot of people. But Ministry of Justice presentation of statistics regarding the role of race in crime appears to be as obfuscatory as possible – check the Section 95 MoJ report on this topic and tell me if it doesn’t read like something deliberately structured to make the facts impenetrable.
Apart from Guardian readers and BBC employees, white people who live or work in areas where there are, proportionately, a high number of blacks, deserve to know the facts. Hiding those facts, glossing over them, spinning them, pretending they’re irrelevant, or losing them in a blizzard of incomprehensible statistics, or cloaking them in guff-riddled PC commentary is meant to help whom, exactly? Black communities? Many of them suffer horrendous levels of violence. White Londoners? How does it help us to pretend that there isn’t a massive black crime problem, of which we’re often the victims?
Surely the only organization which benefits from a decades-long cover-up – and, yes, let’s be honest, that’s exactly what it is - is the BNP. And how many journalists or politicians chose their profession so they could help an organisation as repellent as the BNP?
Londoners know from personal experience that black crime is a huge problem - for blacks as well as whites. I cannot begin to imagine how horrible, howmortifying it must be for the vast majority of decent, law-abiding, peace-loving, hard-working black Londoners to read or see a news report about a black gangs killing other blacks, or a white being knifed to death by black muggers, or the attempted murder of a pregnant teenager by two bestial black thugs. They must be even more sick of it than whites and Asians are.
And every time some PC-crazed political appointee decides to muddy the truth, or some painfully on-message liberal news editor decides to gloss over or soft-pedal a crime story because it might inflame racial tension, let them remember who gains from their dishonesty – again, it’s the BNP.
One of the most shocking yet liberating videos on You Tube features the blackAmerican comedian Chris Rock talking about how much “black people” hate “niggers” (his choice of words, I hasten to assure you). It’s a brilliant – if foul-mouthed - monologue because it goes straight to the truth of the issue: young, violent black thugs ruin things for black people. The near-hysterical response of Rock’s black audience - presumably caused by disbelief that an iconic black performer is actually saying what he’s saying out loud, coupled with a palpable sense of relief that someone finally said it – says more about the problem of the criminal black underclass than a thousand verbiage-strewn, fact-burying Ministry of Justice reports or an intemperate blog from an angry white commentator ever could.
Rock - who is more usually to be found castigating white people for their ill-treatment of blacks - showed real courage in choosing to focus on this incendiary issue, and for offering no excuses. (He imagines members of his audience disapprovingly telling him it’s the fault of the media for portraying blacks negatively. His response? “When I go to a money machine, I ain’t looking over my back for the media. I’m looking for niggers.”)
If only our ruling elite and their media pals would show one fraction of Rock’s bravery and stop - for once - sacrificing the safety of millions upon millions of law-abiding Londoners just so they can feel good about how liberal and understanding and compassionate they are. As Adam Smith put it, “mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent”.
We all deserve better. Let’s start with the truth.
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