In 2005, as displaced, disaffected and disillusioned immigrants were on their twelfth-consecutive night of rioting, which began in Paris then spread all over France, I felt moved to write “World Beware: French Riots Affects Us All,” The iPINIONS Journal, November 8, 2005.
In it I warned that the same social, political, economic and racial grievances that underpinned those riots were simmering in practically every other major city in Western Europe; even though the trigger that ignites them might differ from city to city:
[T]he riots in France should serve notice on other developed nations that have relegated the poor to ghettos where crime and every order of vice pervade… These riots demonstrate what little spark it takes for the simmering grievances that define ghetto life to set cities ablaze and terrorize an entire country… There but for the grace of God….
Then, sure enough, Athens and then London was burning:
‘What happened here’ – in the multi-ethnic London neighborhood of Tottenham – is that the police shot and killed a suspected black ‘gangster’ named Mark Duggan. This ignited a frenzy of rioting and looting the likes of which, alas, have become all too familiar…
[This is only the latest manifestation] of the prescient warning I gave in my first commentary on the riots that had Paris burning in 2005, which I reiterated in ‘Alienated Youth Masquerading as Grieving Students Still Rioting in Greece,’ The iPINIONS Journal, December 13, 2008, on the riots that had Athens burning in 2008.
(“Now London Is Burning,” The iPINIONS Journal, August 9, 2011)
Well, now Stockholm is burning:
Rioters have lit fires and stoned emergency services in the suburbs of Stockholm for the third night in a row after a man was shot dead by police…
Rami al-Khamisi, a law student and founder of the youth organisation Megafonen, told the Swedish edition of the online newspaper The Local that he had been insulted racially by the police. Teenagers, he said, had been called ‘monkeys.’
He said the crowd was reacting to a ‘growing marginalisation and segregation in Sweden over the past 10, 20 years’ from both a class and a race perspective.
(BBC, May 22, 2013)
Which only leaves me to reiterate the prescription I offered, in “Now London Is Burning” (cited above), for preventing these riots:
Notwithstanding the alleged police brutality that triggers them, the reason riots continue to erupt in London is that political leaders fail to heed the categorical imperative to address the chronic unemployment, racial/religious discrimination, and social alienation that are the long-simmering sparks that give rise to these periodic combustions.
It should come as no surprise to learn that Tottenham is a very impoverished neighborhood with the highest unemployment rate in London. Unfortunately, that Prime Minister David Cameron has rushed back from vacation and recalled Parliament – not to address these root causes, but to spearhead efforts to put out the fires – suggest that it’s only a matter of time before the next eruption.
Until the next one then: Because, instead of taking my prescription, the countries of Western Europe are merely segregating and marginalizing North-African immigrants today, the way the United States segregated and marginalized blacks in the first half of the last century. The latter led inexorably to the riots that erupted all over the country during the 1960s.
Meanwhile, don’t get me started on the hypocrisy afoot. After all, these are the same self-righteous Europeans who never missed an opportunity to condemn the United States for the root causes of its endemic racial strife..
White folks, they’ll never learn. I suppose this is why a second-rate (White) professional golfer like Sergio Garcia of Spain thought it was okay just days ago to taunt Tiger Woods, the world’s number-one golfer (who just happens to be Black), with a racist joke about feeding him fried chicken at a forthcoming pro-golfers’ banquet….
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Now London…