Racially aggravated criminology posted by Richard Seymour

Let me summarise the facts as follows. A farmer wieghed down with guns, and with a history of shooting them at people, shoots a 16 year old boy in the back as he runs away from the house, which the boy had been trying to burgle. All evidence indicates that the killing was deliberate, and not self-defense. The man was first jailed for life, having expressed no remorse, and then had his conviction reduced to manslaughter on account of diminished responsibility. The response: overwhelming sympathy, even among liberals, for the murderer. In fact, quite a few people who did not suffer - as Tony Martin, said murderer, apparently did - from paranoid personality disorder were full-throated in declaring that they would do the same. Whether some of this guff was motivated by the consideration that Fred Barras, the murder victim, was from a gypsy community, I leave to you to decide. In the case of Tony Martin, the murder was almost certainly influenced by his racist views. He had previously expressed a deep hatred of gypsies, and "had talked of putting Gypsies in the middle of a field, surrounding it with barbed wire and machine gunning them". He has since appeared on the platform of UKIP and has endorsed the BNP, calling for a "benign" dictatorship. But, whatever attitude people took to that aspect of the story, there was an extroardinarily noisy campaign of support for a man's right to carry out an extra-judicial death sentence against a petty thief.

Recently, another case of murder went down. The salient facts are as follows. Habib Khan stabbed his neighbour, Keith Brown, to death with a kitchen knife outside his home. This was the culmination of a violent row, the latest of several altercations, during which Keith Brown, a member of the British National Party, had grabbed hold of Habib Khan's son, Khazir Habib Saddique, by the throat. Saddique had confronted Brown when he saw him standing outside the house with a brick (more on that in a minute), and a fight broke out during which Brown was able to grab the young man's throat. Though Khan is ubiquitously described as a "mild and calm-mannered family man", he did have a sufficient fear that his son would be throttled that he attacked Keith Brown with the knife. The court accepted that he had not intended to kill and was genuinely attempting to protect his son, but nonetheless imposed a sentence of manslaughter for the unlawful death of Keith Brown. The altercations between the two families had begun some years before, when Khan had obtained planning permission to build on his property. Keith Brown began a campaign of racist harrassment, and aggression. The Khans' windows were smashed almost every day, they received regular death threats and were called "Pakis". Brown's son, also a member of the British National Party, had been convicted of assaulting Habib Khan the previous year.

Well, in this case, the energetic justifications for murder are in short supply. Strange to relate, those who slabber that it is appropriate to kill in defence of the VCR don't get similarly outraged on behalf of a man who kills protecting his son. If anything, there is a less-than-muted resentment that Habib Khan 'got off lightly', with the implication being that he is a beneficiary of a decadent multicultural liberal conspiracy against whitey. In fact, there is even a tendency in the media to give a respectful hearing to fascist councillors blithering about 'liberal politics'. This raises another issue. When it comes to crime, the first thing any reactionary is likely to do is get anecdotal on your ass. You're one of these PC liberal bleeding-hearts I keep hearing about. So what would you do if it was your house being robbed? What would you do if your wife was being raped? Well, now they have their answer: a normal person who, say, is watching his son being throttled by a long-time fascist tormenter might well be driven to bloody violence. But that's no basis for a criminal justice system.

Labels: bnp scum, crime, fred barras, racism, tony martin