http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25656955-5000117,00.html
Copping a fair gobful
Andrew Bolt
June 19, 2009
UNTIL last week, when a black man and a white man bashed Sunny Bajaj, I thought
I could tell a racist thug from a good one.
Not that I thought the difference mattered much, to be honest. Broken teeth are
broken teeth, after all, and will hurt just as much if the bozo who broke them
has not a racist bone in his tattooed knuckles. Or so I figured.
But now I see that's just one of the many dumb things I've got wrong about this
new racism game.
It's so mortifying. Here I am, desperate to hate racists, but suddenly unsure I
could spot one even by the light of a burning cross.
My confidence was finally snuffed out just the other day, when Bajaj, a Deakin
University student now nursing bruises and a fractured finger, became the
latest unfortunate Indian to be mugged in Melbourne.
Here's the Times of India report:
"Bajaj is the latest victim of the racial attacks that have been unleashed in
Australia in the past two months and seem to be continuing unabated . . . "I
was returning to my car after shopping when two men accosted me and asked for
money. When I said I didn't have any, they began abusing me and then attacked
me without any provocation. One of them was white and the other seemed to be of
African origin." "
To my shame, when I first read of this appalling assault I didn't see at first
the Australian racism that the Times now informs me is plain to an honest eye.
Forgive this witless sinner, but I'd actually been relieved to read that a
white Australian and a black newcomer had worked together like brothers,
overlooking any trivial difference of race to focus instead on what truly
united them - which in this case happened to be a mutual desire to get ahead by
bashing people and stealing their stuff.
In my madness I even hummed a few triumphant bars of McCartney:
Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony
Side by side on my piano keyboard, oh lord why don't we?
Ha! I exulted. Even our sociopaths turn out to be committed multiculturalists.
Bajaj may have his bruises, but at least no man could call this proof of our
racism.
Oh, how stupid. You see my mistake, of course. I'd entirely overlooked the fact
that even when multiculturalists bash an Indian, it's racist. And now another
recent case that's confused me becomes clearer.
For some years in the poor Sydney suburb of Harris Park, gangs of mainly Middle
Eastern men were robbing even the staff of Wesley Mission. Gordon Moyes, then
the mission's head and now a NSW politician, said last week his staff weren't
the only victims: "I found that over a period of time many elderly Anglo-Saxon
women were attacked and robbed . . ."
But there were no cries of racism. In fact, I doubt you even heard this was
happening, so normal do we now consider such violence.
But then Indians started to move en masse into the suburb, and the Middle
Eastern youths attacked them, too. Boy, you've now heard of that. Indeed, for
three nights in a row this month, as you saw on television, there were protests
in the suburb's streets by Indians denouncing this "racism".
Deeply moved by the plight of these Indians and those in Melbourne,
Hark-the-Sydney-Morning-Herald professional angel David Marr again blamed his
eternal demons - John Howard and his racist Australians -- for yet more "ugly
breakouts of anxieties that are old and widespread".
So attacks on white grannies are not racist, but attacks by the very same
people on Indians are. There's the difference, made clear to me at last. That
may explain why it was not racist when three Asian criminals last month stabbed
to death Luke Mitchell in Brunswick after he tried to save a stranger from
attack, but why it was racist when some other men last month stabbed Sravan
Kumar Theerthala almost to death at a Melbourne party.
I THINK I'm getting the hang of it, but yet another stabbing still has me
stumped. Tell me, should I see racists at work in this alleged crime, as
reported this month in the Gold Coast Bulletin? With dried blood in his hair
and 11 stitches across his throat Gold Coaster Jack Donnelly considers himself
lucky . . . Mr Donnelly, who has a prosthetic leg, said he noticed he was being
followed by a group of men who he described as of "Asian appearance". . .
"They were yelling 'piss off Aussie' and 'good on ya Skippy' . . . They slashed
my throat with the bottle . . ." But now I'm in quicksand - unsure if I've
spotted a racist, or just made myself seem one. Boy, this is tricky.
You see, even I now dimly realise that in today's definition of a racist crime
it's not just the race of the victims that matters, but the race of the thugs.
How else to understand a baffling difference in the reporting of two Sydney
riots, one from only last week?
In 2005, largely white crowds of knuckleheads in Cronulla - sick of police
inaction against Lebanese thugs in their suburb - held a violent protest and
bashed several men. This, it was agreed, was racist. Just ask The Age, our
infallible guide to modern social sin, which thundered: "Racist furore as mobs
riot."
Last week, largely Indian crowds of knuckleheads in Harris Park - sick of
police inaction against Lebanese thugs -- held a violent protest and bashed
several men. But this was . . . well, just a protest by the understandably
aggrieved. Just ask the ABC, that other guide to correct thought, whose
right-on AM program described only a "commotion" at Harris Park caused by
"tensions". Not once did the report mention the R-word.
So revenge attacks by Anglos on Lebanese are racist, but revenge attacks by
Indians on Lebanese are not.
But I fear you may have had enough of such Wonderland attempts to tell a racist
bashing from the apparently more acceptable kind -- the kind that hurts the
victims just as much, but offends the good a great deal less.
STEADY, friends. That's where I went so wrong myself, not realising until the
bashing of Bajaj that not all punches are the same, nor all victims equal.
Observe. We've all known for years that our public transport is not safe at
night, especially on lines to our poorer suburbs. When my teenage boy got a
group of mates to meet in the city for an evening show at the Comedy Festival,
not one of the parents let their sons go home by train. We drove them.
No wonder. Did you see recent CCTV footage from one station showing three men
kick some small, unemployed guy in the head again and again, leaving him for
dead? Have you read reports of gangs bashing late-night commuters? Yet almost
nothing has been done to make the trains safer. No violence seemed so bad that
we couldn't be fobbed off with a politician's release or one or two passes of a
police patrol until the latest fuss died down.
You see, all that was good violence. But then we got the bad kind . . .
This time the man being kicked in the head was not a homeless man at the
station, but an Indian man on the train. And, since he was Indian, this was
"racist", of course, even though the security cameras seemed to show yet
another multicultural gang of ferals doing their business in harmony.
And that scream of "racist!" - heard all the way to New Delhi and London -
finally got the reaction that the bashing of mere locals never did. More police
were called out to stop the racists than had been called out to stop people who
just kicked in your head for cash.
Finally, we got the Premier scurrying to promise better security. We even got
the Attorney-General promising new laws against these "hate crimes", so much
worse than those bashings done out of . . . of . . . love?
AND finally we got from the new Police Commissioner the big police blitz - even
aerial patrols! - that we always wanted and all deserve. Because, really, it's
the violence that's the real problem, isn't it, and not the colour of the
punched or punching? Or have I goofed again, unable to see the thought-crime
through all the blood?
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