← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · jeffersonian
Thread ID: 19245 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-07-21
2005-07-21 21:03 | User Profile
[URL=http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wobomb0721.story?page=1]http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wobomb0721.story?page=1[/URL]
Racial tensions rising in Britain's communities In Britainââ¬â¢s communities, things are growing tense between Muslims and their neighbors
BY LETTA TAYLER STAFF CORRESPONDENT
July 21, 2005
BEESTON, England -- It's barely noon on a recent day in this blighted Leeds suburb, but Gareth McCourt, a construction worker with the words "100 percent white" tattooed across his belly, is already thirsting for blood.
"There's going to be a lot of trouble," promises McCourt, 21, as he drains another pint at the Tommy Wass pub, a Beeston hangout for white men with shaved heads, abundant tattoos and little hope. "There's too many Asians around here. And what happened is too close to home, ain't it?"
Across town, where the Muslims live, a cluster of young Britons of Pakistani heritage cup their hands in a beckoning gesture to bring on the fight. "We can handle ourselves," says one, Shair Kaman, 28, a property manager whose perfect English blends cockney and Pakistani accents. "If they come at us, we'll come at them."
In Beeston and other British communities with Muslim immigrant populations, ethnic tension has soared since news broke that the four suicide bombers in London's terror attacks July 7 were British citizens or residents, three of Pakistani heritage and all followers of Islam.
Radical elements on both sides "want to provoke. They want to create division and discord," warned Shahid Malik, a Muslim member of Parliament, in a recent interfaith gathering in Dewsbury, a former mill town near here where one bombing suspect lived. "If you are provoked, they win."
More violence, Malik added in an interview, could lead to further militancy among disaffected Muslim youths.
Recurrence of race riots
Local officials are particularly concerned about violence in Beeston, Dewsbury and other communities in the West Yorkshire midlands where the four bomb suspects lived. Some fear the areas could be swept by race riots similar to those that convulsed three British towns for several days in mid-2001 after white youths attacked a South Asian man's home.
Those riots, in which mobs of white and South Asian youths clashed with police and each other as they trashed stores, pubs and cars, swept areas similar to the bombers' hometowns: former white, blue-collar enclaves that drew thousands of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other Muslim immigrants to mill jobs that were plentiful a few decades back. But the mills have closed, making work scarce for everyone. South Asians outnumber whites in some neighborhoods, and the groups live in virtual apartheid.
Already in Beeston and Dewsbury, attacks against Muslims are cropping up like boils.
Last week in Beeston, where three of the bombers lived or worked, a mob of about 60 white men descended on a pub and began insulting a couple with dark skin. Eight men were arrested for disorderly conduct.
That same night, a white man lunged at a Pakistani immigrant as he left a Beeston fast-food takeout joint and screamed between curses, "Get out of my country, you Muslim terrorist." In a stroke of luck, a passing patrol car stopped the commotion. "But I'm still terrified to walk the streets," the immigrant, Haw Nawaz, 44, told Newsday.
In Dewsbury, a Pakistani taxi driver trembled as he recounted how a white man tried to strike him in his cab last week while shouting: "You Muslims are all terrorists. I'm going to kill you."
"I thought I might die," said the cabbie, a father of five who was too scared to give his name. "In all my 29 years here, I've never had any trouble before."
Efforts to curb violence
Police and community groups are fanning through neighborhoods distributing leaflets in a half-dozen languages that give victims hotline numbers and the warning, "Harassment of any form will not be tolerated."
Multilingual fliers are necessary in Muslim sections of West Yorkshire, where halal kebab shops outnumber pubs, and most women dress in head scarves and saris or black, shapeless robes. In Dewsbury, many women also don a black veil known as the parda that covers everything but their eyes.
Such communities are rife with "Islamophobia," a government report on the 2001 riots warned. Whites "still look backwards to some supposedly halcyon days of a monocultural society," while Muslims "look to their country of origin for some form of identity."
BNP party gains popularity
In this environment, the British National Party, whose primary goal is to halt immigration, is flourishing. In March parliamentary elections, the party captured 13 percent of the vote, the second-highest percentage in the country, in the district that includes Dewsbury and borders Beeston.
Immediately after the London bombings, the party circulated fliers that bore a photograph of the bombed bus in which 14 died and the slogan: "Maybe now it's time to start listening to the BNP."
Nick Cass, the ruddy-cheeked BNP chairman for Yorkshire, supports the flier. "More immigration will lead to more suicide bombers," Cass said unapologetically in an interview last weekend. In a discourse that Muslim leaders note echoes the slurs of white supremacists against blacks or of Nazis against Jews, Cass sprinkles the conversation with lines like: "You no longer feel safe in your hometown because of the Islamics. It's gotten to the point where you feel like you've been dropped into the middle of Bangladesh." Cass also said, without offering proof, that Asian men lure white, underage girls into becoming concubines. "They call them 'white meat,'" he said.
Communities divided
Most people are just trying to go about their lives in Beeston, a rundown suburb of red-brick rowhouses where some young whites swill beer all day on their stoops and young Pakistani and Bangladeshi men openly smoke marijuana in narrow alleyways. And many from all creeds and colors appear to genuinely seek racial harmony. But even before the July 7 bombings in London, residents say, whites and blacks routinely squared off against South Asians.
Last year here, a gang of about 20 youths of Pakistani heritage cornered and killed a mixed-race teenager named Tyrone Clarke, beating him with cricket bats and metal poles before stabbing him three times in the back. Four of the attackers are serving life sentences.
"The Asians think they rule everything," said Clarke's mother, Lorraine Fraser, who says she still gets hate messages she believes are from South Asians, including a recent cell-phone text message that read, "Bang Bang."
"You've got it better in America, don't you? You've got the death penalty," Fraser said. "Here they get three hot meals a day and color television."
Richard Walshaw, 39, a white, heavily tattooed father of two who lives in Beeston Hill, a predominantly Muslim neighborhood where two of the suicide bombers grew up, counters, "I'm more scared of the whites, personally." White youths threw a cherry bomb at his wife as she walked home the other evening and are even more aggressive toward South Asians, he said.
Fraser moved from Beeston after her son was killed. Beeston relatives of at least two of the suspected bombers, including one who owns a local fish-and-chips shop, plan to do the same, saying they've been threatened and harassed since the blasts.
Back at Tommy Wass pub, McCourt hopes they do so soon. Otherwise, he said with a grin, "I can see a chip shop getting blown up."