Update 4 (May 27):

The more I research this, the more it seems there were some pretty vicious racially targeted killings, but they seem to have been directed not only at Indians, but at other groups – Chinese, for example:

“Killer was out “curry bashing” Ended up attacking, killing Dr Zhongjun Cao Judge says attack was “for pleasure”

A MAN who kicked a gentle university researcher to death for fun while out “curry bashing” to get a new mobile phone has been jailed.

Ringleader John Caratozzolo laughed after inflicting a vicious kick to the head of his prone and dying victim, Dr Zhongjun Cao.

Dr Cao, 41, was set upon and killed by a gang of seven youths as he walked home from Victoria University in Footscray, Melbourne, in January last year.

Supreme Court Justice David Harper said Caratozzolo, 20, suggested to his mates that they go “curry bashing” – meaning targeting and robbing Indians – because he needed a new mobile phone.

But when they saw Dr Cao walking alone the group attacked him without warning, assaulting him “for pleasure” without even asking for his phone.

One of the group dropped Dr Cao on his head during the attack and as he lay badly injured.

Caratozzolo launched a kick at his head as a parting gesture.

“You have become a laughing murderer,” Justice Harper said.

After the fatal bashing the group went on to attack another man, an Indian student.

Dr Cao’s widow Jingfang Zhou spoke of her love for her husband and the void his death had left in the lives of herself and their teenage daughter.

Justice Harper said Caratozzolo’s racially-motiviated actions struck at the heart of the entire nation.

“Everyone in this city, in this state, and in this country – everyone whatever their gender, race or beliefs, has the right to walk the streets without fear,” he said.

“You have diminished the quality of life of us all.”

Caratozzolo pleaded guilty to murder and robbery.

He was jailed for 15 years with a minimum of 10 years.”

Whether Indians were targeted disproportionately is difficult to say without studying the numbers much more extensively. But the very existence of attacks like the one I’ve cited suggests that Asian/African gang violence exists along with homegrown racial violence, perhaps exacerbated by the economic situation and increasing immigration from Asia (which is strange, because the Australian government is explicitly encouraging that immigration).

Update 3:

Good background here , with a brief history of Australian government policies on immigration, and some statistics about the Indians victimized.

Bolt’s writing is cited in that piece,  as well as in several other pieces. My point in posting Bolt’s piece is to show that “political correctness,” which is a form of speech code/coercion of free speech, has unintended consequences stemming from the inevitable distortion of truth involved.  In a way, it is fraudulent speech, and like all frauds, it undermines the target’s capacity to act freely. In this case, the false perception encouraged is that an increase in violence is necessarily solely racist/racialist…

Update 2:

I added this admission from the Victoria police chief that “some” of the attacks against Indians were in fact “racially motivated” and that Indians were over represented among victims of robbery, although not of assault.

Update 1 (May 26):

I need to add here that the author of the piece is regarded as having  “white supremacist” ties. Of course, so is the Lew Rockwell site….

More here, from the view point that the attacks were in fact racially motivated.

Professor Ghali Hassan (whose work I cited in “Language Of Empire”) notes rising Islamophobia, increasing distrust of Muslims, as well. I should also note that the rise in racial tensions follows a huge increase in the number of  immigrants to Australia in recent years.

ORIGINAL POST

There’s been an interesting development in a case that caused a furor in India – the violent assaults on Indian students in Melbourne.

The assaults were seen as part of an ongoing trend of “curry bashing” and it’s created such a stir in India that Australia is no longer on the list of preferred places to study, despite the Australian government’s explicit efforts to attract paying students. Indian students contribute $13 billion to the Australian economy, education being the country’s third largest export, after coal and iron ore.

Australian authorities insist that there was no racial motivation behind the attacks and that the Indians were targeted because they worked after school in disproportionate numbers at gas stations in areas and at times that were dangerous. The Indians have not been the only victims, they said, of a rise in violence in recent years that’s led to some horrendous crimes, like the murder of Matthew McEvoy in September 2008. The Indians insist that the attacks were deliberate and targeted them.

I haven’t followed the story closely, but it puzzled me a bit, and I thought (or hoped) it was anomalous. While I’ve never been to Australia, I have run into a number of young Aussie travelers around the world and they are invariably among the friendliest. Older Indians might be remembering the infamous White Australia policy, in effect from 1901-1973. It only ended in 1975. Younger Australians have gone a long way from that past, but it’s quite possible that media accounts about the assaults in India might still be colored by it. It doesn’t help that some Australian cricketers seem to have behaved in a racist manner toward some of their Indian counterparts.

Today, however, I ran across this piece in the Australian Herald Sun, which suggests that the attacks might have been the work of multiple ethnic gangs, some Asian, and that political correctness might have been one reason for the slowness in releasing the information (Note: we still don’t know for sure):

“NO wonder Victoria Police is furious that we yesterday published excerpts of a leaked police report on Asian gangs.

Some of the truth about Melbourne’s ethnic crime is out at last, you see.

Worse, police command must now talk about what it’s hidden for so long.

That leaked report in fact reveals little that a sharp-eyed reader wouldn’t have figured out over the years, with one news item after another about people chopped up outside nightclubs, stabbed in Springvale, arrested in their dozens for drug trafficking or chased to their deaths from Asian-themed events.

Let’s flick through its four brief pages.

As the Herald Sun reported, it says we have at least half a dozen Asian gangs with “extensive” membership. Check.

They can be incredibly violent, and favour machetes. Check.

They like to hang out at the “Asian” theme nights we increasingly see at inner-city nightclubs. Check again.

They’re getting worse and if police don’t crack down it’s “highly likely … that a person will be murdered”.

Actually, more people will be murdered. But check again.

See? Nothing new, and we kept secret sensitive details of the policing operations recommended by the acting sergeant whose report this is.

So why is police command putting it about that we were reckless in publishing no more than this bleeding – and I do mean bleeding – obvious?

Here’s one clue. We did also say this report called for an Asian crime squad – which is just what former chief commissioner Christine Nixon scrapped four years ago.

Time to cut to the chase. It’s Nixon in particular who foolishly got police to play dumb about precisely the kind of thing this report discusses.

Never mind that certain ethnic groups – Aborigines, Pacific Islanders, Sudanese, Lebanese and Vietnamese in particular – have imprisonment rates much higher than the average.

Under Nixon, ethnic crime became a topic the police did not discuss – and at times deceitfully denied. In my opinion, disbanding the Asian crime squad was in part a sign of that denial.

But Nixon also refused to release data on ethnic crime rates, and intervened in the last federal election to falsely claim “Sudanese refugees are actually under-represented in the crime statistics”.

She even banned the word “gang”, leading to this exchange with Neil Mitchell on 3AW :

Nixon: What we saw in that more recent incident was one of two gangs, which I gather was around two women, which started fighting.

Mitchell: But gangs are an issue.

Nixon: Well, we’re seeing some groups of people. I’m not describing them as gangs.

Mitchell: Well, you just did.

Nixon: Well, you know what I mean.

Mitchell: I thought the word gang was banned by your media people.

Nixon: Well, it is … it’s got connotations … These are groups of people who come together and just cause problems together.

Farcical. As if banning a word makes what it describes vanish.

Yet her police got the message. Take this Herald Sun report on attacks on Indian cabbies around Flemington: “Police will not officially acknowledge any particular ethnic group is a target, or that any other group is carrying out the crimes. But in every case the victims told police their attackers were African.”

Then there was the police “multicultural liaison officer” in Dandenong who in 2007 tried the Nixon method in waving away a spate of bashings by African gangs.

The Sudanese in the area were actually “doing quite well”, he claimed, and the real problem was merely one of perception: “People might see 30 or 40 Sudanese gathering in a group and think they must be a gang.”

Only after scared residents and cranky talkback hosts revolted at such flim flam did Assistant Commissioner Paul Evans concede his officers were struggling to deal with newcomers from a “culture” of violence and with a “tribe mentality”, and needed help.

And under new Chief Commissioner Simon Overland we’ve seen the same policy of denial.

He, too, has refused to release data on ethnicity and crime, and wouldn’t even say that many of the recent attacks on Indian students in Melbourne were by people from ethnic backgrounds – Lebanese, Maori and Pacific Islanders in particular. Not even when Indian papers railed at our “white Australian” racism did he set the record straight.

Indeed, you see this police culture of deception and dog-ate-my-homework excuses in a recent Victoria University study on those Indian bashings.

“Police interviewees … suggested that without being able to draw on specific data about offenders from the Victoria Police database, they could not speak with certainty about offender profiles … ” it said.

Then this dust in your eyes: “Police officers did stress, however, that anecdotal reporting suggested that where groups of offenders were responsible for assaults against international students, there was no evidence of ethnic or racial homogenisation within the groups, with the majority being mixed-race, mixed-ethnicity groups of offenders across the cultural spectrum, sometimes including but definitely not limited to young male offenders of Anglo-Celtic background, and sometimes not including Anglo-background youth at all … ”

Sound like word games to you?

Yet this same study pointed out that almost everyone else except the police knew just who was doing the bashing: ” … those who were known to be involved in crime are often relatively new arrivals to Australia themselves.”

You may excuse the police, saying they’re just being nice. They’re trying not to make newcomers feel unwelcome, or our racists feel licensed.

These are honourable motives. As the son of immigrants, I know many migrants, whether African, Lebanese or Anglo, are a blessing to this country.

Only this week the principal of Melbourne’s newest selective high school, Nossal High in Berwick, said more than 80 per cent of his students were of non-Anglo ancestry, having that wonderful get-stuck-in spirit you often see in the immigrating kind.

BUT Victoria Police’s secrecy has a price. We’ve seen ourselves damned around the world as racists, for instance, for the crimes of new ethnic minorities. Worse, we’ve seen crime fighting compromised.

I don’t just mean that police on the beat say ethnic gangs have little respect for a force they now take to be weak.

Consider also a recent police appeal for the public’s help to find an African man who’d tried to drag a 14-year-old Brighton girl into his car.

Our don’t-mention-the-race police once more refused to note the man’s most obvious characteristic, and described him merely as having a “dark complexion”. What, is he Greek?

All well intentioned, I repeat. But there’s one reason in particular we must at last be more frank.

We need to understand there’s often a risk in bringing in traumatised and badly educated people from war zones – Lebanon, then Cambodia and now Somalia – or from backward cultures and angry faiths.

Until we understand how much culture matters in helping – or hindering – assimilation, we’ll have many more humiliated newcomers here wondering how the hell they can fit in to a society as alien as ours, or at least get some respect.

We’ll also find more such bruised people seeking the company of others with their background – and their resentments. And no sweet lies from the police will help you then.”