Anyone like to reconsider what they posted about the train attack on Saturday night?

[margegunderson]

There were (to my mind) some horrific posts claiming that it MUST be a terrorist attack, demanding information on the attacker’s race and motivations NOW, shouting about Starmer censorship and picking fights with anyone suggesting it might not be cut and dried and to wait for more information. Hideously racist as well.
If that was you - any reflections today? What will you do if there’s a next time?

That's ridiculous and completely impractical. Two opposite extremes: at my station there are no staff and no barriers, what purpose would arches serve? And at the opposite extreme: 53,000 people depart Waterloo station between 4pm and 7pm every day, there are four pedestrian entrances, and its on four different tube lines - how on earth, and where on earth, would you put detector arches?

I didn’t participate in the threads and I always think we should be aware that we can be wrong, early reporting is often incorrect, and that there may be deliberate misinformation.

But I also firmly reject the idea that recognising patterns is bigotry.

If there’s a reported murder-suicide with a family annihilated, it’s not bigotry to say that fits a pattern of male violence, even to say so on MN. If it turns out that grandma did it, or that the reports were wrong and it didn’t happen, that doesn’t make those commenters sexist bigots.

Reports of a coordinated attack by two black men wearing black sounds like an Islamist attack. It’s the explanation that best fits the facts as they were reported. The fact the reports were wrong doesn’t make the commenters racist bigots any more than in the grandma case above.

The alternative leaves us with bizarro world where we have to pretend that we don’t know anything about anything because it involves making inferences from past observation.

Mistakenly thinking it was a terrorist attack is not racism.

The racism on the threads at the weekend was racism.

Knife crime among certain groups IS a problem. This is from the Mayor of London’s website.

This Assembly is concerned that despite making up only 13% of London’s total population, black Londoners account for 45% of London’s knife murder victims, 61% of knife murder perpetrators and 53% of knife crime perpetrators.

This means black Londoners are disproportionately more likely to be victims and perpetrators of knife crime.

https://www.london.gov.uk/motions/knife-crime-black-community

Other European countries like Denmark have found that particular ethnicities are significantly more likely to commit violent crimes with men from Kuwait, Tunisia, Lebanon, Somalia, Jordan, Uganda, Morocco and Iraq committing far more crimes per capita than Danish men. This is not racism, this is fact.

This is a topic we need to get used to discussing without constant accusations of racism. I have been called racist on a previous by a PP who is on this thread for posting facts like those above. PPs got very angry at the facts I shared but readily available information from the office of Sadiq Khan, or the list of perpetrators of mass knife attacks is not racist.

I wonder whether PP throwing insults has donated to important causes like Baroness Nicholson’s charity for Yazidi women - still being held as sex slaves and their population murdered en masse - a genocide that few have even heard of. I am so horribly racist that I have.

I listen to Muslim people. The ones trying (on here and other places) to warn us of plans some parts of the Muslim community have for gaining political power in this country. PPs on here ignore those voices though. They don’t fit their narrative. Many Muslims have come here to get away from those people but we are silencing those who speak about them.

The political influence for Muslim people is already increasing. For a minority of only 6% they seem to have considerable influence. By the next election, large changes are predicted.

Our government is very keen not to upset them, Keir Starmer refuses to support the ban on first cousin marriage (repeated 1st cousin marriage currently causes thousands of babies to be born with significant congenital abnormalities which make their lives awful), he is proposing to make law a definition of Islamophobia which would outlaw discussion if first cousin marriage and have a chilling effect on discussion if the grooming gangs that comprise Pakistani Muslim men.

Jess Phillips is also trying to water down the grooming gangs inquiry. Her constituency is 45% Muslim - look it up. Has she got a conflict of interest?

PPs here running round throwing insults are part of the problem that sees Reforms support rising.

Since you’ve decided to move your propaganda from a dying thread to a fresh one,BundleBoogie I’ll transplant my post from the other thread too:

Assuming these statistics are credible, are black people in London involved in violence because it’s a nice way to pass the day? Do they just enjoy fighting, stabbing and shooting? Or is the violence linked to drug dealing and gangs fighting to control the lucrative drug trade?

The next point some racists make is along the lines of black people being inherently associated with antisocial behaviour like drug dealing, missing out the link to deprivation. The inference is that it’s something to with the genetics or culture of black people. Drug use is high in many deprived communities in western countries, regardless of ethnic make-up. While there is a lot of wealth in London, there is also a lot of deprivation. Black people are unfortunately not well represented among the wealthy but are among the deprived.

Many people in deprived communities, especially men, don’t have the role models to show them that it is possible for people like them to have a job with good financial rewards, not as financially rewarding as drug dealing but much safer. Instead young impressionable boys are dazzled by the idea of great wealth at a young age, with social media ramping up the desire to ‘make it big’.

These pressures are not restricted to black boys, though they do have to deal with additional issues like not feeling accepted by the wider community, causing them to turn inwards, and low expectations at school. In London, the example used by ThatJadeMaker and MissKitty0, because black people are underrepresented in the super-wealthy and high earning professionals category (the main people that can afford to live in London other than social housing tenants), the proportion of the black population that is deprived is much higher than the proportion of the white population that is deprived and there is therefore a greater involvement in the drug business and the associated violent crime.

From BungleBoogie’s link:

The analysis highlighted that the driving factors behind young people becoming involved in or a victim of violence are lack of opportunity, deprivation and inequality. This Assembly believes that it is therefore important to talk about and tackle structural inequalities and institutional racial discrimination across the country to tackle disproportionality in youth violence.

www.london.gov.uk/motions/knife-crime-black-community

Yes, it's instructive to read the whole link in context, not the cherry picking.

You’re accusing Sadiq Khan of propaganda?? I don’t like the man but that’s a desperate claim.

Assuming these statistics are credible, are black people in London involved in violence because it’s a nice way to pass the day?

Nobody has suggested that ‘it’s a nice way to pass the day’ but all your theories/excuses are pointless if no one can discuss the issue because they’ll be accused of being racist.

Quite a few other groups in the UK live in deprived areas and manage to not be disproportionately likely to commit knife crime.

Are you going to transplant your other posts claiming that it is perfectly fine to exclude boys from deprived areas from internships designed to combat deprivation if they are white? And I can point out that it is unlawful discrimination again.

We need to get better at talking about all this - shutting down conversations will not help. I’m not sure why so many are so resistant.

Sadiq Khan didn't write the page itself . But also, that is not what the PP is doing.

I don't understand why he wasn't caught after the attack in the barbershop. There were plenty of witnesses.
How did he slip through the net twice in 24hrs before the train attack?

I included the link so people could read for themselves. I’m not going to copy and paste the whole website.

As I said, other people in deprived areas manage not to have such a high rate of knife crime. We need to be able to identify and discuss the issues without constant accusations of racism.

The boy who was stabbed wasn't at the barber shop. The first barber incident was reported two hours after the event, the second the police came out and couldn't find anyone.

Are you going to transplant your other posts claiming that it is perfectly fine to exclude boys from deprived areas from internships designed to combat deprivation if they are white? And I can point out that it is unlawful discrimination again.

It’s not unlawful for internships to target underrepresented groups. I will happily transplant my other post.

piggy sorry, yes. I realise the boy wasn't at the barbers and that was a different location.

Tundeira · Today 06:55
There was a thread posted a few weeks ago decrying summer internships that try to improve diversity in some workplaces. The general theme was, ‘My white son can’t get a place so these schemes are bad and need to be abolished’. Do we want people from deprived communities to see these jobs as realistic options, reducing involvement in drug dealing and crime in general, or do we want to keep them as an underclass we can look down on and complain about?

I’m originally from an African country. I don’t have that mental block that many black people growing up in deprived communities in the U.K. do. All the top politicians, most of the senior management, the professionals, the music and film stars are all black in Nigeria. It never occurred to me that aspiring to be a doctor was ambitious because that level of social achievement is standard among the people I grew up with.

It was shocking to realise how some white Britons see me and how many black people growing up in the U.K. without roots elsewhere see their prospects in Britain. It was a white nursing sister who made the ‘ambitious’ comment when I turned down her offer of a permanent job as a healthcare assistant on her night team because I was going to university. It was the way she said it. She’d put me in a box and wasn’t too happy to see me climb out of it, though others were very supportive.

Representation is important. Young black kids from poorer communities need to see black people in those bog-standard professional roles that are much more achievable than footballer, actor or music star to begin to aspire to these careers in significant numbers, which is one reason these diversity schemes are important.

As an aside, it’s not just ethnic minorities that get put in a box. I was also dismayed to hear one of my two biology teachers at college tell a student that professions like veterinary medicine were not for people from colleges like ours. This was a further education college in leafy Surrey, for goodness sake! I wondered why he had to speak up and depress his students’ ambitions, even if he genuinely believed what he was saying.

Tundeira Today 11.07

Diversity isn’t restricted to ethnic diversity. Those schemes try to attract people from more deprived backgrounds too. Those complaining are from more middle class backgrounds. They say the schemes don’t pick up enough white working class boys and favour ethnic minorities so they should be abolished.

So the end result will be the maintenance of the status quo. White middle class people who come from high-achieving backgrounds will get most of the places. Some posters pointing out that there are usually a number of these internship schemes at the companies that offer them didn’t seem to convince these mums that their sons still have sufficient opportunity to get good jobs if they are good enough. You have at least one scheme that’s open to everyone and then others that target specific groups.

And racial discrimination is still unlawful. Why don’t white boys from deprived backgrounds deserve a chance too? If it is an initiative to combat poverty, why would you seek to exclude white boys that live in deprived areas? What about mixed race boys?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66060490?app-referrer=deep-link

The initial thread was dreadful, the one before there were any details about the attacker. So many people saying that this had to be illegal immigrants, one person even said that we should bomb the small boats crossing the channel. When it was announced that two British born black men had been arrested they went quiet for a while and then it turned into ‘well they aren’t really British are they’.

It was dreadful, however, I do see why HQ didn’t shut it down. If they had then there would have just been another thread. But I do think they should have come onto the thread and reminded people not to be twats.

WTF?!!!

I've just seen my post has been deleted. What on earth for?

Are we not allowed to mention even the existence of trolls on MN now?

I made not the slightest attempt to identify any. From what I can remember, I just reminded people that they are here and some seemed to have targeted that thread.

Oh, and was generically sympathetic to ordinary MNers who'd been caught up in the frenzy.

Was that a deletion error, MNHQ? I haven't even had an email about it, which I think are automatically generated? (It's not like I get deleted much, so not sure.)

I hope other posters can see that you haven’t even bothered to read my posts properly or you are deliberately misrepresenting them.

I didn't post earlier but I thought the perpetrator was someone with a serious mental health problem and possibly also a cannabis user.

As for travelling by train I still think it is safest way to travel - most deaths or injuries on the railway are of people taking their own lives. Think of the number killed or injured on the roads each year.

Well here are some more facts for you

Lee Rigby killers. UK born
Southport child murder. UK born
Manchester Arena bomber UK born
London bridge attack UK born
Shoe bomber. UK born
7/7 bombers UK born
Huntingdon Stabber UK born

Being UK born is not a free pass to commit mass murder on the streets, trains, planes, bridges, concert halls of this country.

I didn't post, but I sure was confused. There were a group of perpetrators/2 acting together/a lone attacker, they shouted "allua akbar" (sp?)/get rid of the demons/were silent, the perpetrators escaped/were arrested/were dead. I read or heard all of these, no wonder people were getting it wrong.

He appears to be mentally ill. Perhaps we need to provide better treatment for people with mental illnesses.

What has any of that got to do with my post?

Who exactly is claiming that British people have (or should have) a free pass to commit mass murder?