Let's be tough on the real causes of crime

Link: The Home Counties boys who planned murder | Uk News | News | Telegraph.

This gentleman speaks directly to Toynbee, Blair and all those other Guardianistas who seek to excuse crime and terrorism by reference to its "social causes"

Omar Khyam's uncle told the Daily Telegraph: "You read in the papers, 'Ah, well it's because of lack of opportunities.' "Rubbish, what part don't you understand? What lack of opportunities? They had a reasonable education, they come from reasonable families, with very stable backgrounds, financially sound.

Thank you, sir. The twin "causes of crime" in Britain are (a) criminals and (b) Guardianistas who hold "society," not criminals responsible. As Theodore Dalrymple says (writing of an emerging Indian underclass in Britain)

In fact, they have assimilated to the local cultural and intellectual climate: a climate in which the public explanation of behavior, including their own, is completely at variance with all human experience. This is the lie that is at the heart of our society, the lie that encourages every form of destructive self-indulgence to flourish: for while we ascribe our conduct to pressures from without, we obey the whims that well up from within, thereby awarding ourselves carte blanche to behave as we choose. Thus we feel good about behaving badly.

The politicians cannot make people feel responsible for their own actions. All they can do is consistently treat them as if they are. Doing the opposite for decades has created the lie that Dalrymple describes. It will take decades of truth to reverse the damage done.

Yesterday, a British jury and a British judge ignored the excuses and special pleading. They held criminals responsible for their choices. Is it too much to hope for the politicians to do the same - and not just for those whose crimes are political?

Comments

[Lord Nazh]

It's amazing. If we didn't have society we wouldn't have criminals (/sarc)

Good piece.

[pommygranate]

Tom

Well said! I couldnt agree more.

[Tony]

I have to agree with you Tom. They made a choice not out of desperation, but out of hatred.

I knew one of the guilty men personally. Waheed Mahmood (bottom right corner of image). I got on fairly well with his brother Raheed when we were mid teens. Waheed was always a sullen and spiteful piece of work. He associated with troublemakers while at school, the ones who were doing dope, drinking and getting into fights. He committed assaults and got involved in petty crimes. The local police knew him very well indeed.

Then one day I heard he had 'gone religious'. He went orthodox almost overnight, growing a beard, wearing traditional dress and shunning those white kids he grew up with. He started attending the mosque regularly with a group of other young men and at about the same time Al Muhajiroun stickers appeared on lampposts and talking of going to Pakistan for 'instruction'. Many of them started martial arts and acted like a gang.

Waheed got a job with British Gas and continued with his outwardly pious lifestyle. But the character within him had not changed. It was merely channelled into hating for a reason.

When I heard about the arrests of people from Crawley, his was the first name that popped into my head. So when he was finally named it was no surprise. This is a pattern repeated up and down the country.

Those lads had opportunities. They were treated equally. The white kids and Pakistanis associated in their youth, playing football together and using the same facilities. It was the deliberate radicalisation of handpicked youngsters who thrived on trouble, by people who claimed religion would turn their lives around, that caused this. People who hate this country and the west nurtured the likes of Mahmood to attack it.

[Dave Petterson]

Interesting comment Tony. It very much sounds like a typical phase that youths go through. If they leave school and don't get a job where they can get 50K a year they are hard done too. Usually we just beat people up,mug them, scratch their cars or get drunk or stoned depending on how violent you are. This lot of violent hotheads get lead on a differnt path.

[Angel]

ah yes but its so much more fun to blame others eh?..great read!
Have a blessed Sunday :)