From The Herald Sun:
No, we are not racists
Neil Mitchell
June 11, 2009 12:00am
THERE'S no real point to worrying about being politically correct when that will aggravate a situation already dangerous and misunderstood.
It is fact that Australia's reputation for decency is now threatened by racial tension and the fear is that this could be a glimpse of the future.
The predicament is built around Indian students, the attacks on them, their response to those attacks and the ugliness the subsequent tension has provoked.
If there was any doubt about how seriously the problem is viewed, it was dispelled yesterday when the state's three most powerful people tried to quell the fears and end the stupidity.
The Prime Minister called for calm, but with a degree of passion not normally considered Rudd-like. He deplored racial attacks on any person - "Chinese, Indian, Callithumpian, Queenslanders".
He reminded the world that Australians are also bashed and die in India, which does not provoke parades of chanting ocker backpackers in the streets of Mumbai.
The remaining members of the power trio, the Premier and the Chief Commissioner of Police, met at a railway station and pledged a police campaign supposedly directed at street robberies, but really designed to reassure angry Indian students.
It was a stunt, albeit a worthy one, but let's put the spin aside and look to some basic truths.
It is true that there are gangs operating in this country. Some are racially based and racially motivated.
Some do attack particular ethnic groups.
It is also true that there have been attacks on Indian students described as "curry bashing", an awful term Indians themselves say is a motivation for the attacks.
But there have been far more attacks on Indian students motivated by brutality and theft.
In Sydney, there are dangerous racial undertones to the tension. On the streets at night it has been Middle Eastern versus Indian. That's ugly - and frightening.
The media in India has been hysterical about all this with little concern for the facts and less understanding of this country.
Australian political leaders have been quick to react and overreact, partly because they are concerned about Australia developing a reputation for racism and partly because the education of international students is big business.
And the final truth is that the Indian students have harmed their cause and there is no point pretending otherwise.
Student leaders have portrayed their members as docile, which in itself is a racist generalisation.
Some are gentle, some are not, and the aggressive protests have shown that.
Burning effigies of the Prime Minister makes for good TV, but it incites tensions and alienates decent people.
Worse, the protests seem based on the assumption that Australia's leaders and police somehow endorse this violence and could end it if they had the will.
That's rubbish, on both counts. It's unfair to blame the people and the leaders for the brutality of a few street thugs who are at times just as likely to attack fourth-generation Australians as they are visitors from the other side of the world.
Some of the students have had a rough time, and that is deplorable. But it is the fault of a few criminals, not the society, and not the culture.
Neil Mitchell broadcasts from 8.30am weekdays on 3AW.
Original article
The automatic assumption was that the attackers in these cases were European Australians. But it turns that a number of the attackers were actually of non-European origin, a crucial fact reported neither here in Australia nor overseas. Why is that? Because it doesn't fit the orthodoxy that only people of European ancestry are capable of racism.
As columnist Andrew Bolt points out, political correctness has prevented the public from being properly informed about which groups are actually committing these violent crimes.
Bolt writes:
IF we weren't so scared of seeming racist, we wouldn't now seem so, er, racist that even India is giving us lectures.
Amazing, that. India, which perfected the caste system and is plagued by Hindu-Muslim bloodfests, is telling us we're too prejudiced?
But we have only our own stupidity and grovelling self-hatred to blame. After all, which nation has spent so much apologetic cash and sweat to persuade the world we are vomiting with racism, and which has been, on the other hand, too militantly anti-racist to point out who is actually bashing many of these Indian students?
...
...what police and many journalists refuse to confirm or even discuss is what victims and their spokesmen repeatedly say - that many of their attackers are Africans, Islanders and, less often, Asians who are newcomers themselves, beneficiaries of our eagerness to seem kind and tolerant.
...
That's how the false perception is allowed to grow that these attacks on Indians are just another example of our institutional racism, when the reverse may well be true -- that we're so over-eager to seem not racist that we take in immigrants we perhaps should not, and refuse to admit when they go wrong.
Unfortunately, Australian society is engaged in mass self-deception when it comes to the downsides of immigration-induced diversity. Australian authorities and the Australian media would much rather excoriate the white Australian majority for their alleged "racism" rather than examine those fractious groups actually responsible for much of the ethnically-based crime now plaguing our major cities.
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