A***@shaw.ca
2003-08-12 15:20:44 UTC
As the plague spreads northward...
BroJack
_______
Guns, gangs and race
By MARGARET WENTE
Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - Page A15
Yesterday, I opened my morning papers to read yet another dreadful
story about gunplay in Toronto. Late Saturday, a bunch of drive-by
shooters opened fire in a townhouse complex where a children's
birthday party was in progress. The people they were shooting at shot
back. Four men were injured. Luckily, no children were killed.
Black-on-black gun violence has been big news in this city for months.
So a curious reader might have wondered if this incident was more of
the same. Alas, the curious reader was left to guess. Neither The
Globe and Mail nor the Toronto Star included any information on the
shooters or their victims, or described the ethnic makeup of the
townhouse complex where the shootings happened.
This scrupulous omission of certain facts is not unusual. Last week,
an ugly street brawl broke out on Yonge Street in the wee hours of the
morning. Several people opened fire at random, and when the police
appeared the crowd pelted them with bottles and insults. Why was there
a big crowd on Yonge Street at 3 a.m.? Was the melee in any way
connected with the Caribana festival that weekend? Inquiring minds
were left to guess.
In fact, the townhouse complex is populated by Caribbean blacks and
East Africans, including a substantial number of Somalis. The angry
crowd on Yonge Street was largely Caribbean. But in these times of
excruciating sensitivity about crime, race and ethnic origins, certain
facts are deemed to be irrelevant. Or maybe it's that anyone who
mentions them will be accused of ethnic smears.
Jan Harder found that out the hard way. She's an Ottawa city
councillor who represents a middle-class suburb with a growing crime
problem. Teenage gangs from outside the neighbourhood have been
swarming the local kids and shaking them down for jackets, cash and
alcohol. They carry knives or baseball bats.
After a 23-year-old man was assaulted and slashed with a knife, Ms.
Harder decided to speak out. "The problem arises when a large group of
-- I'm going to say it -- non-whites comes into our community looking
to cause trouble," she told a local weekly paper. And with that, the
waste matter hit the rotating blades.
"Those remarks are racist, there's no ifs, ands or buts," fumed city
councillor Alex Cullen. "To categorize [gang problems] in racist terms
is misleading and counterproductive." A group called the Visible
Minority Action committee called for her resignation and reported her
to the police hate-crimes unit. The equity and diversity advisory
committee for the City of Ottawa declared that her comments "caused a
lot of pain and anguish," and demanded a retraction.
"I was asked to retract my comments, but I didn't, because they were
true," Ms. Harder told me. She has a lot of sympathy for Bob Runciman,
the Ontario cabinet minister being blasted for saying some black
activists have a "vested interest" in maintaining tensions with the
police.
Yet, in a way, Ms. Harder's comments shed more heat than light. What
did she mean by "non-white"? It was a mystery to everyone but her
constituents, who say teenage Somali males are to blame for the
swarmings. And so Ms. Harder, loathe to demonize one single ethnic
group, instead tarnished dozens of them.
Somali gang behaviour is a problem in both Ottawa and Toronto. What
are the root causes? Naturally, that depends on whom you ask. Some
people blame those old reliables, poverty and racism. But there are
other explanations. Somali kids come from immigrant families who
arrived as refugees, speak little English, and are unfamiliar with
Canadian values. War has left the families fragmented and often
fatherless. But because Somali women have low status, mothers often
can't control their sons, whose aggression and contempt for the law
are partly rooted in both culture and religion. "They feel that since
they're in Canada, they have open access to whatever they want,"
community worker Mohamoud Hagi-Aden told the Ottawa Citizen. "They
feel entitled to it, and they don't feel they necessarily have to work
for it."
In Toronto, we suffer from a similar linguistic vagueness. We have a
mythical "black community" that is said to suffer from racial
profiling and police discrimination, and also seems to have high rates
of violent crime. Yet the gang problem is not Ghanaian or Nigerian,
Trinidadian or Barbadian or St. Lucian. It's overwhelmingly Jamaican.
And despite a steady stream of grieving mothers pleading for leads to
killers who gun down their sons, no one will co-operate with the
police.
In fact, the gang problems in Toronto, Ottawa and other cities aren't
a race problem at all. They are an immigration-control problem, an
illegal-handgun problem, a drug-crimes problem, a fatherlessness
problem, and a problem of certain specific subcultures.
We're afraid to tell the truth because we don't want to demonize the
innocent. But unless we dare to speak up, solutions will remain very
hard to come by.
So the destruction begins. One the indigenous black population hitsBroJack
_______
Guns, gangs and race
By MARGARET WENTE
Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - Page A15
Yesterday, I opened my morning papers to read yet another dreadful
story about gunplay in Toronto. Late Saturday, a bunch of drive-by
shooters opened fire in a townhouse complex where a children's
birthday party was in progress. The people they were shooting at shot
back. Four men were injured. Luckily, no children were killed.
Black-on-black gun violence has been big news in this city for months.
So a curious reader might have wondered if this incident was more of
the same. Alas, the curious reader was left to guess. Neither The
Globe and Mail nor the Toronto Star included any information on the
shooters or their victims, or described the ethnic makeup of the
townhouse complex where the shootings happened.
This scrupulous omission of certain facts is not unusual. Last week,
an ugly street brawl broke out on Yonge Street in the wee hours of the
morning. Several people opened fire at random, and when the police
appeared the crowd pelted them with bottles and insults. Why was there
a big crowd on Yonge Street at 3 a.m.? Was the melee in any way
connected with the Caribana festival that weekend? Inquiring minds
were left to guess.
In fact, the townhouse complex is populated by Caribbean blacks and
East Africans, including a substantial number of Somalis. The angry
crowd on Yonge Street was largely Caribbean. But in these times of
excruciating sensitivity about crime, race and ethnic origins, certain
facts are deemed to be irrelevant. Or maybe it's that anyone who
mentions them will be accused of ethnic smears.
Jan Harder found that out the hard way. She's an Ottawa city
councillor who represents a middle-class suburb with a growing crime
problem. Teenage gangs from outside the neighbourhood have been
swarming the local kids and shaking them down for jackets, cash and
alcohol. They carry knives or baseball bats.
After a 23-year-old man was assaulted and slashed with a knife, Ms.
Harder decided to speak out. "The problem arises when a large group of
-- I'm going to say it -- non-whites comes into our community looking
to cause trouble," she told a local weekly paper. And with that, the
waste matter hit the rotating blades.
"Those remarks are racist, there's no ifs, ands or buts," fumed city
councillor Alex Cullen. "To categorize [gang problems] in racist terms
is misleading and counterproductive." A group called the Visible
Minority Action committee called for her resignation and reported her
to the police hate-crimes unit. The equity and diversity advisory
committee for the City of Ottawa declared that her comments "caused a
lot of pain and anguish," and demanded a retraction.
"I was asked to retract my comments, but I didn't, because they were
true," Ms. Harder told me. She has a lot of sympathy for Bob Runciman,
the Ontario cabinet minister being blasted for saying some black
activists have a "vested interest" in maintaining tensions with the
police.
Yet, in a way, Ms. Harder's comments shed more heat than light. What
did she mean by "non-white"? It was a mystery to everyone but her
constituents, who say teenage Somali males are to blame for the
swarmings. And so Ms. Harder, loathe to demonize one single ethnic
group, instead tarnished dozens of them.
Somali gang behaviour is a problem in both Ottawa and Toronto. What
are the root causes? Naturally, that depends on whom you ask. Some
people blame those old reliables, poverty and racism. But there are
other explanations. Somali kids come from immigrant families who
arrived as refugees, speak little English, and are unfamiliar with
Canadian values. War has left the families fragmented and often
fatherless. But because Somali women have low status, mothers often
can't control their sons, whose aggression and contempt for the law
are partly rooted in both culture and religion. "They feel that since
they're in Canada, they have open access to whatever they want,"
community worker Mohamoud Hagi-Aden told the Ottawa Citizen. "They
feel entitled to it, and they don't feel they necessarily have to work
for it."
In Toronto, we suffer from a similar linguistic vagueness. We have a
mythical "black community" that is said to suffer from racial
profiling and police discrimination, and also seems to have high rates
of violent crime. Yet the gang problem is not Ghanaian or Nigerian,
Trinidadian or Barbadian or St. Lucian. It's overwhelmingly Jamaican.
And despite a steady stream of grieving mothers pleading for leads to
killers who gun down their sons, no one will co-operate with the
police.
In fact, the gang problems in Toronto, Ottawa and other cities aren't
a race problem at all. They are an immigration-control problem, an
illegal-handgun problem, a drug-crimes problem, a fatherlessness
problem, and a problem of certain specific subcultures.
We're afraid to tell the truth because we don't want to demonize the
innocent. But unless we dare to speak up, solutions will remain very
hard to come by.
about 5%, the crime rate will have doubled, the white exodus will
begin, and Toronto & Ottawa will spiral downward into just another
bombed-out crime-ridden ghetto. You may thank the Liberal party (esp.
Shiela Copps) for that. They see immigrants as automatic liberal
votes. Liberals will stop at nothing to win, even it means the
complete destruction of the nation (which they've already been working
on for decades, btw.) I hope they are proud of their latest
accomplishment.