Harrys Place - Are They Waking up ?

An interesting comment on Harrys Place here ;



http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/09/28/right-wing-nutjobs-and-anti-muslim-bigots/#comment-392615


I’ll share an anecdote with you: since I returned to the UK over the Summer after a decade-long absence flitting backwards and forwards from the Mid East, I’ve moved away from London to a provincial town. I’ve been supplementing my main occupation here as a translator and interpreter, often with Kurdish Iraqis. Recently, there have been 4 serious sexual offences committed in broad daylight not far from the town centre. In each case, a group of Kurdish men was found to be involved and the victim, a native Briton. These attacks have led some people in the town to accuse ALL Kurds and by specious analogy, ALL Muslims of being the problem. There has been a suggestion that a demonstration, no doubt involving some ideogical racists and other anti-Muslim bigots alongside the genuinely concerned, would be held. Now, these attacks were not committed by Islam and nor were they committed by adherents to scripture or doctrine. Only twisted psychopaths would use justifications for rape and pillage in Muhammad’s biography to rape Britons. Nor is rape or serious sexual assault a facet of Kurdish culture. Therefore, in this case, and in others, it would be unethical and immoral to essentialise all Kurds and all Muslims.


That’s not to say that the attacks weren’t motivated by racism, because they most likely were; a Kurdish woman would not have been subjected to these attacks.

Neither should this prevent us from using our God-given faculties to induce that groups of young Kurdish men are more likely to rape or sexually assault non-Muslim women than Muslim women.

Experience tells us that Kurds in the UK are disproportionately involved in sexual crime and that the victim will almost certainly be a young, ‘white’ female.

Should I use this reasoning to extrapolate trends and ‘behaviour matrices’ for all Muslims or all immigrants and asylum seekers? Would the same be true if I replaced ‘Kurd’ with ‘Muslim’? No. Of course it wouldn’t. That would be a monstrous, and worst of all, inaccurate position.

When anyone claims that every member of a certain group possesses certain distinct characteristics that can be used to colour our perceptions about the entire group, you can almost certainly say that such a claim is based on shaky foundations and risks aping the committed ideological racism of others.

I understand where you’re coming from: you, like me, reject the myopia of much of the left in the face of dogged empiricism: yes, Nigerians in London are disproportionately involved in fraud, for example. Whole swathes of the left would object to you making such an assertion, even though it’s based in fact. Yet these self-same so-called anti-racists swallowed whole and memorised verbatim the Macpherson Report, possibly the most destructive document in British history and watershed for tickbox racists, colour-matchers and piss-poor-linguist, ill-informed pigeonhole racists everywhere. This despite the claims of ‘institutional racism’ being conconcted from the Marxoid witterings and slatherings of the far left, and not one wiff of statistical analysis.