LONDON RIOTS? BLAME TWITTER!

by Alex Kurtagic

Once again London has become a battlefield. On this occasion, the gunning down of an alleged cocaine dealer and gang member during a police operation in a vibrant multicultural area has been the trigger to several days of mayhem.

From 300 people massing in front of a police station to demand ‘justice’, we have gone to assaults on police officers, random property damage, and, of course, looting.

The looting is not even being done under the cover of darkness anymore. Having viewed the reports, Andrew Gilligan, from the Daily Telegraph, has observed:

On the television and YouTube pictures . . . most of the rioters and looters didn’t look angry. The ones making their way out of the smashed-up shops in Wood Green High Road with boxes full of other people’s property actually looked quite pleased. Here, at least, the quest wasn't so much for justice, more for free trainers. . . . You could see the expressions on the Wood Green looters' faces because by that stage it was daylight.

As Colin Liddell has already noted, the mainstream media has gone into damage limitation mode. They have been deploying every conceivable tactic to complicate a simple issue and deflect attention from the real problem.

Thus, the disturbances and the thieving are being blamed on poverty, idle youth, excessive urbanisation, overcrowding, the government’s austerity measures, the Summer heat, too many White policemen, unemployment, the city’s Mayor being on holiday, and a ‘tiny unrepresentative minority’ of thugs and criminals.

By far the most original tactic, however, has been the effort to blame the riots on Twitter and the BlackBerry messenger service.

Nowhere do proponents of this fascinating theory explain:

1. Why when the alleged criminal being gunned down is White, the city does not go up in flames, with White Englishmen taking to the streets to burn people’s cars and burn and loot people’s businesses.

2. Why burning and looting is not evenly distributed among Twitter and BlackBerry messenger users, as opposed to concentrated on vibrant multicultural areas in London.

The blaming of rioting and looting on Twitter and BlackBerry reminds me of the blaming of the theft of music over the internet on ‘technology’.

Is it not people, and their choices when using technology, what determines its effects?

When a thug smashes a Molotov cocktail on the parked vehicle, or applies his baseball bat to the shop window, or climbs into the off-licence or the electronics or shoe shop in order to grab as much booze, TVs, and trainers as he can hold in his arms or supermarket trolley, it is not because a 29-year-old geek in San Francisco had a bright idea five years ago; it is because the thug is out for a few days of joyous mayhem, knowing he will enjoy safety in numbers and get away with it.

Equally obvious to any thinking citizen is that were there no Afro-Caribbean ‘community’ in London, there would be no racial dimension and therefore no excuse for rioting, burning, looting, and attacking law enforcement officers.

Which takes us to how such a ‘community’ came to be in London in the first place, and why they see their neighbourhoods as loot as opposed to something that belongs to them and in which they all have a stake.

Rather inconvenient observations for proponents of immigration and multiculturalism.

On happier news, Civitas, a U.K. thinktank, has called for the Equality Commission to be abolished, arguing that it ‘contributes very little to meaningful equality’ and offers poor value for money.

A euphemism if I ever saw one.