SJWs are adept at language manipulation. Political correctness has for decades subverted language in order to cast doubt on commonsense and to advance its cause. Take seemingly innocuous terms like foreigner or migrant. The first has always referred to someone who is from another country, who looks different, often speaks another language. Yet it can also be made to sound pejorative, as in ‘alien’ or someone who is very strange, other, perhaps beyond integration. Migrant refers to one who migrates, moves or relocates. Bird species often migrate seasonally, and SJWs like to say that ‘we are all migrants’ or ‘immigrants’ — meaning that our common distant ancestors came from Africa or that the USA is a ‘land of immigrants’. SJWs love to say about illegal immigrants that ‘no-one is illegal’, meaning that shared humanity is beyond artificial borders and laws. Such language manipulation is emotive and tends to shut down further analysis and dialogue.
In the weaponry of SJWs are terms like unconscious, casual, passive, and institutional racism, microaggressions, and so on. In the CM view, the powerful white majority have no idea how much daily suffering they inflict on innocent non-whites or foreign-born citizens. Whites are wrong to think of the UK (or any country) as my country. We are wrong to want immigrants to adapt to longstanding British customs. Why should Travellers not go shopping in their pyjamas if that is their cultural norm (Yarwood, 2017)? Why should men not walk around town centres bare-chested in warm weather? All local councils must provide translations of official documents in dozens of languages so as not to discriminate against people who do not speak English. The expectation of integration is itself racist, and British culture has to change to accommodate multiple cultures and their preferences. This is the standard PC line of reasoning.
British Labour MP Ann Cryer was at the forefront of warnings about Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs going back some fifteen years; she referred to these as ‘culturally rooted crimes’. She experienced a backlash in which she was labelled a racist for drawing attention to this. Another Labour MP and Shadow Equalities Minister, Sarah Champion, said after the 2017 Newcastle convictions for sexual offences by such men: ‘I know in Rotherham I’ve met frontline social workers who, when … they were trying to report this crime, were sent on race relations courses, they were told they were going to have disciplinary action if they didn’t remove the fact they were identifying the person as a Pakistani male’ (Cryer, 2017). Very soon after this Champion was forced to resign by the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who objected that her statement about ‘Pakistani rapists’ ‘stigmatised entire communities’. Operation Black Vote also complained that she was disgracefully perpetuating stereotypes (Holloway, 2017). Soon after this, the Labour MP for Bradford West, Naz Shah, a Muslim woman, was found to have re-tweeted the comment: ‘those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere, they should have kept their mouths shut for the sake of diversity’ (Curtis, 2017). A prominent Jewish anti-Zionist and anti-racist blogger who had agitated for Champion’s dismissal compared Champion’s ‘racism’ with that of Enoch Powell. Actually, it turned out that the men concerned in Newcastle were not only Pakistanis but from a range of Muslim nations. Around this time a Muslim spokesman argued that the vile actions of these men axiomatically demonstrated that they could not be Muslims at all. As always, SJW bloggers disingenuously repeated the line that the majority (but not the percentage in this case) of sex abusers are white. However, former Labour Home Office Minster David Blunkett (2017) came to the defence of Cryer and Champion, describing these events as part of ‘a conflict between modernity and medievalism’. In November 2017 a further four men from Iran and Iraq who had entered the UK illegally and applied for asylum were found guilty of grooming and having sex with girls from the age of thirteen.
It took many years for the Rotherham atrocities to come to light, for the girls to be believed and the men prosecuted. Meanwhile young girls continued to be raped. Yet the culpable SJWs in such scenarios never face criminal charges for their complicity in facilitating and covering up serious crimes, as well as their persecution of whistleblowers. Another angle on these events is that in spite of the overwhelming responsibility of Asian perpetrators against these underage white girls, no accusations of racism have ever been brought against them. Yet quite clearly these men targeted white girls as ‘trash’. A further 12 Asian men were charged in 2017 with rape and sexual assault of eight under-age girls over a five-year period in Rotherham. Nor is this phenomenon as new as reported, Gohir (2010) noting that child sexual abuse has a longstanding history in parts of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim counties. Indeed, emerging evidence of links between Islamic culture, deep-seated misogyny, domestic violence, modern slavery, rape and recruitment to ISIS, must arouse serious consternation (Townsend, 2017). When a ‘theology of rape’ can be discussed in the 21st century, grave difficulties face us.
In 2017 a worrying rise in rapes by taxi drivers was being reported (Marsh, 2017). While traditional black taxis were driven mostly by white males, over half of all cabs and Uber cars were being driven by ethnic minority, and predominantly Asian men (Norrie, 2017). Media sources studiously avoided speculating on the ethnicity of the rapists concerned, but Kern (2013) listed many examples of convictions for rape against Asian cab drivers. Cab driving was also implicated in the grooming gangs scandals. It is reported that many such drivers use unregistered cabs and sometimes drive with no licence or insurance, or use false papers. Aware of an already growing suspicion in 2008, Sam Mason, a female employee for the BBC, had telephoned for a cab to collect her teenage daughter in Bristol, and asked for a non-Asian driver; as widely publicised, she was reported for this and fired by the BBC for racism.
Academics, SJWs and leftist journalists are mainly in accord that immigration is desirable and inevitable, and indeed that new cultural mixes and demographic changes are superior to any status quo. When Enoch Powell encountered political crisis following his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, surveys found that a majority of the public were in agreement with his views. This bifurcation is repeated in the results of the 2016 Brexit referendum, with a majority of voters wanting to reinforce sovereignty and control immigration, while a majority of academics, SJWs and other leftists show barely concealed contempt for the views of the ordinary public. This public probably consists of the white working class, older people, and those temperamentally and intellectually inclined to resist liberal conformity. The Brexit result — or the manner of its progression through Parliament — was challenged in 2017 by a High Court case brought by Gina Miller, a Guyana-born British citizen, and Deir dos Santos, a hairdresser of originally Brazilian nationality. Yet indigenous white British people were not supposed to have any ‘racist’ feelings about this. Many of us know from everyday experience that liberal tolerance of dissent has a very low threshold. One dare not voice objections to immigration and multiculturalism without risking SJWs’ wrath and rejection.
A topical example is the fire on 14 June 2017 at Grenfell Tower in West London. In this awful disaster, it seems one resident’s fridge caught fire at night and the conflagration quickly spread to the whole block, resulting in 71 deaths. The cause of the fire was rapidly attributed to cheap, flammable cladding that had been fitted in order (according to some residents and leftist critics) to save money, and to cosmetically enhance the building in an otherwise affluent area. Only days after this terrible incident, the Prime Minister was blamed for her inadequate response, the prominent Labour politician David Lammy prematurely called the event ‘corporate manslaughter’ and ‘social murder’ and demanded that police seize all relevant documents to prevent those allegedly responsible from hiding evidence of wrongdoing. Urgent rehousing was organised, which included buying up extremely expensive apartments in the area. Heads of the local authority were forced to resign. Adding to the atmosphere of blame, a Guardian article by left-wing musicians Lily Allen and Sam Duckworth (16 July, 2017) called for the authorities to offer translations of services in Arabic, Somali, Urdu, Tagalog
, Tigrinya, Farsi, Pashto, Russian, Bengali, Turkish, Polish, Spanish, Romanian, Hindi, Italian, Hungarian, Portugese, French and Japanese. A Guardian writer also borrowed Friedrich Engels’ 1845 phrase ‘social murder’ to accuse government austerity and deregulation policies of causing this terrible event (Chakrabortty, 2017). The group named Movement for Justice by Any Means Necessary, and other socialists and anarchist activists, led protests against capitalism and neoliberalism, claiming that the right-wing government and housing corporations put money before people’s lives.
What the Grenfell incident also revealed was that the building — in a fairly central, much sought-after part of London — housed mainly non-white and immigrant people. Although it included some private apartments, it was mainly social housing, and claims were made by residents that up to 400 people may have lived there whose corpses would never be found, and that the authorities should be blamed for downplaying the extent of the deaths. (The figure of 71 was later established.) It was known that some apartments were sublet by actual tenants for profit. By one account, there may have been as many as 40 people in one upper storey apartment, either fleeing the fire or many of them living there. The government was forced to reassure survivors that no-one who had lived there with irregular (illegal) immigration status would be penalised. The undeniable horror of such a fire made it difficult to raise questions about residency, immigration and pressures on housing in a densely populated city like London. However, the subsequent arrest of two people for fraud — one from Zimbabwe and the other Vietnamese-born, each falsely and distastefully claiming to have lost loved ones in the fire in order to obtain £10,000 from the victims’ relief fund — did little for positive community relations.
This was certainly not the time to recall a Daily Mail (6 July, 2010) article — which included anonymous claims by a London whistleblower housing worker (‘Chris’ speaking to journalist Eugene Costello) — that many immigrants were very fussy about the accommodation offered to them, knew how to manipulate the system to their advantage, and even how to use corrupt methods to get what they want. The Mail article says that ‘there are cliques in local authority departments — be they African, Indian, Pakistani, whatever — who “look after their own”’ either ‘as a favour or in return for a backhander’. Recall here too the case of Lutfur Rahman, the Bangladesh-born Mayor of Tower Hamlets who was found guilty of corrupt and illegal practices including making promises of housing for votes, in 2015. It is widely acknowledged and documented that many immigrants are happy to ignore laws on overcrowding and occupy flats and houses with multiples of normal tenancy restrictions. In one three-bedroom house in north west London, 35 East Europeans were found to be sleeping on mattresses, including some in a tent in the garden, and ‘exploitative landlords’ were accused of being the real culprits (Guardian, 20 September, 2017). In fact, the owner of this house, Sunil Hathi, threatened to sue over any such allegations against him. In another case, millionaire builder Gerry Fitzgerald was found to have built an unauthorised mini-village or shanty town on his grounds in an affluent London location, accommodating between 50 and 120 East European tenants, some of them living on state benefits (Campbell, 2017). No evidence of overcrowding can excuse the Grenfell fire but it is relevant. The vast majority of immigrants want to live in London or other large cities where an already chronic housing shortage exists (and local people in need are often passed over), and the situation consequently only gets worse. While it is true that property developers and landlords can exacerbate these problems, and many rich foreign investors also add to this problem, SJWs always play the victimisation game, or play the race card.
Take another angle on the housing problem. The Guardian asked disingenuously why the housing problem is ‘so much worse for black families’ (Osborne 2017). This article presents basic statistics and anecdotes to paint a picture of injustice and discrimination. Under 33% of black families are likely to own their own home compared with 58% of Asian and 66% of white families. Although some reports of outright or subtle discrimination in the rented sector are given, other problems are mentioned. The average age of black Britons is in the early 20s compared with the mid-40s for whites. This makes a very big difference. Blacks tend to live in inner city areas, especially in London, which is much more expensive. Blacks have a higher incidence of single-parent families and large family sizes; both these factors will have negative knock-on effects for cost and quality of housing. Social housing for large black families is sometimes extremely generous, as in the case of the Subes (see below) from Cameroon; and Muriidi Abati, his wife and seven children from Somalia, housed in an expensive Islington property (Wilkes, 2017). Whiting (2011) shows that 24% of both black and Asian groups in the UK have on average a family of three and over children compared with 8% for whites. The question of why Asians do much better for housing than blacks is not addressed, and the housing conditions of other non-black ethnicities is not mentioned but we know that many East Europeans live in overcrowded conditions. Poor whites are not mentioned here, yet it is obvious that in a competitive housing market poorer people will always have less choice. (One of the only remedies, but not mentioned here, is the abandonment or significant reduction of capitalism and deeper embrace of socialism.) The greater proportion of homeless blacks is mentioned but not analysed. One can easily speculate about possible causes of poorer housing among black Britons but to do so invites accusations of racist stereotyping, and so SJWs are free to imply that all black community housing problems must be due to racism rather than to other causes.
Liberal squeamishness about addressing real social problems head-on is itself now a cause of deterioration of the social fabric in the UK. It is perfectly understandable that the British have abolished capital punishment, recoiled from war, been tolerant of waves of immigration, and apparently embraced most liberal causes in the past few decades. But the agenda successfully pushed by the left, even when not in office, has become profoundly counterproductive. The left’s dislike of strong leaders is puzzlingly combined with a disdain for the expression of majority views, with the 2016 Brexit referendum result being condemned as bigoted populism. Cultural Marxists appear to like a weak, malleable public that can be cowed by its relentless propaganda. But the cost of CM progress by cultural appeasement is a debilitated majority population incapable of defending its core values and lifestyle. Phillips (2017) suggests that ‘Islamists are exploiting our chronic muddle of well-meaning tolerance and political correctness’. Assertions about immigrants’ economic benefits to the UK, erroneous population counts, the futility of trying to control immigration, the dependency of the NHS on immigrants, and so on, are not easy for the average person to evaluate, but see Migration Watch UK (2017c) for refutations of all such arguments.
I have focused on SJWs as if they are a uniform group but they are not. Just as the racist far-right has its unhinged, extremist violent members (for example, the proscribed National Action group), so the SJWs have theirs. You do not have to look far for evidence of seethingly angry anti-racists and SJWs who are aggressively dedicated to the cause of anti-anti-Muslim bigotry. Extremists of this kind hate the white man even if they are themselves white, they hate imperialism, capitalism, neoliberalism (or whatever the mot du jour is), and they constantly scan the media for traces of racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. It would be crass to suggest that they must all have had authoritarian fathers who they are still fighting with in their heads, but their tone and relentlessness has this quality of almost psychotic paranoia and hate. Just as I have suggested above that there are many shades of racism and quasi-racism, the SJW community comprises visceral Tory-haters, immature activists, sincere but naïve liberals, through to reasonable defenders of human rights.
The Nazi vision of a pure Aryan race, however mad in itself, could only have been effected by genocide, sterilisation and other measures indifferent to millions of lives. Stalin’s tyrannical agenda to establish far-reaching communism necessitat
ed indifference to millions of individual rights and lives. The Islamist jihad dedicated to the overthrow of infidel nations and the establishment of an Islamic caliphate savagely dispenses with the lives of all perceived as opponents. The transatlantic slave trade, while obviously brutal, dehumanising and often deadly, was commercial by nature and not in quite the same intentionally murderous category as these. Social justice warriors, mainly small-scale activists, leftist academics and keyboard warriors, are not usually involved in mass violence (although Che Guevara, to take one example, was not exactly a Gandhian model of pacifist protest). SJWs are, however, arguably guilty of propagating the fantasy of a harmonious, borderless, multicultural, egalitarian worldwide utopia that could only be effected by the kind of militant liberalism, emotional righteousness, attritional civil war, misinformation, trashing of reputations, suppression of free speech, and disregard for rational argument that we are now experiencing.
Excessive Immigration Page 19
