The moment on the video that really hurts, that really digs in — if you are a human being, rather than an ape — is when Marian runs to the prone and inert body of her grandfather and, bending down, distraught, implores him to move, pawing at his body with her hands. She is so small and ineffectual against this sudden new thing in her life, death. Her granddaddy will never move again. Marian is just three years old. Her grandfather is, was, Ekram Haque, 67 years old, a Muslim born in Calcutta who moved to this country almost 40 years ago, hard-working — spent his last years earning a living in a care home — and retired just recently. He was looking forward to taking little Marian on holiday to Pakistan and Australia, the money was all saved up, the flights booked. On that evening he was waiting with her outside their local mosque where he’d been celebrating Ramadan; they lounged on the metal barriers beside the road, chattering — you can see all this on the video — and then the human filth struck, so rapidly and devastatingly, like a swarm of insects. They ran at Ekram and savagely beat him about the head while Marian looked on uncomprehendingly. The thing happened so quickly, Ekram falling to the floor, the scum running away, Marian hurrying to her grandfather’s side, the scum coming back quickly to take a few more pictures on their mobile phones, the scum running like hell, out of utter cowardice, when a single person emerges from the mosque to help and to take Marian inside.
This was in Tooting, south-west London, last year. This week the kids who did it — yep, they were, in the main, kids — were sentenced to fantastically inadequate terms in prison for ‘manslaughter’. They’ll be out in a few months — maybe you’ll come across them in the not too distant future. Even if you don’t, you can watch them on YouTube already. They were members of the Park Lane Riders gang who recorded a video as they cycled about mouthing largely incomprehensible braggadocio to one another.
There’s loads of similar videos on there you can download, if the Park Lane Riders stuff isn’t enough, the Brixton versus Peckham Posse The Truth video, courtesy of a conduit called ‘Listen2DaStreetz’ — maybe you’re already familiar with their work. You can see the video of Ekram Haque dying, too, and his three-year-old granddaughter running over to his body, asking him if he’s OK. But that’s from CCTV footage, the camera on the side of the mosque — not mobile phone happy-slappy stuff. The perpetrators had run away too quickly to get that footage. The cctv film is horrible, but I’d urge you to watch it, to be angry, to be furious, to be angry and furious on behalf of Marian and her dead grandfather. And on behalf of everyone else living in Tooting — or Peckham, or New Cross, or Tower Hamlets, or Harlesden, or Tottenham — who has to put up with this risk every day of every week, to be angry at the cretinous liberals who tell you it isn’t happening.
Here’s a few points about the killers of Ekram Haque which will not remotely surprise you. In fact, you have probably already guessed all of them.
1) At least one of them was out on bail for a similar assault.
2) A few moments — 20 seconds in fact — before they killed Ekram Haque, they had attacked another Asian man.
3) They invariably chose Asian men — usually elderly or middle-aged Asian men — as their targets. They are cowards, they never choose people who can fight back.
4) No mention of racism was recorded in the court proceedings against them. This, on the face of it, is odd — but only, I suppose, if you live on another planet.
5) Because of course they were black.
This last fact will have been the least shocking to you, I suspect. You had guessed that ages ago, hadn’t you? Perhaps as a consequence of a subconscious racial prejudice within yourself, or perhaps because of a sad realisation of how things actually are, in the poorer quarters of London where black people make up at most 25 per cent of the population. As we now know the majority of street assaults, gun crimes and a disproportionate number of other crimes are believed by the police to be committed by young black males. Thirteen kids have been killed in London this year, again, from the information we have, the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators were black.
Do socio-economic factors play a part? Of course, but they are not the clincher, as you would understand if you just looked at the statistics; why don’t similarly deprived Bangladeshi, or Pakistani, or white British kids commit as much crime? The clincher is the culture in which these children are immersed. A culture of one-parent (that’ll be mum, then) families and a disinclination to education, and further inflamed by the mindless misogynistic, homophobic and self-pitying machismo of rap, ragga and da law of da streetz. Exactly, in fact, what stopped the black Labour MP Diane Abbott from sending her kid to the local state school, worrying all the while that he might be subsumed in a violent, criminally inclined gang culture. And yet if you are white and try to articulate this fact, you will be called a racist (probably by Diane Abbott, or the Guardian, or the hapless Press Complaints Commission), and people will point out that white people commit crimes too (no, really, are you sure?), as if this obviated the problem which we have before us — a problem which has been allowed to flourish directly as a consequence of the patronising and truly racist multicultural credo.
Here’s the thing. If poor Mr Haque had been black and his attackers white, they’d be cutting the turf for the commemorative community centre right now and David Cameron would be making anguished and impassioned speeches to the press, perhaps concluding by singing a verse of ‘Ebony and Ivory’. But this was a racist murder, like several others, which will not be allowed to live in the memory, which has less cachet. A disgrace to Mr Haque and his granddaughter.
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