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Why I hate being called an “Asian”..

22 February 2012 270 views 7 Comments

From a news-report from Liverpool..

A group of 11 Asian men plied five girls, as young as 13, with drink and drugs and… (Caution: May not be suitable for work; strong and explicit content)

The clue to the identity of these eleven men is hidden in this sentence from another report:

One girl, who was 13 when the alleged abuse began, told police that the men she met were ‘friends’ who looked after her and ‘her number would be passed around amongst the Pakistani men in her area’.

“Asian” has long been a euphemism in British media but I am surprised to see an Indian news-paper falling for it..unless this is the result of some new editorial guidelines!

In a report published in Jan last year Sue Reid of the Daily Mail mentioned:

..how this exploitation (of young girls) — concentrated in communities across Northern England and the Midlands — has continued for more than a decade without serious public discussion and that the issue was often regarded as ‘taboo’ by police officers terrified of being accused of racism.

Unsurprisingly, she “was pilloried for suggesting that the ­cultural backgrounds of the gangs were relevant to the crimes.” Sigh.

On a related note, read: Pakistani men, white girls & a wee bit of self-censorship and Please, no “M-word” here

P.S. By the way, a similar euphemism was what triggered a series of posts on my blog on the “Great Joke that is Indian Media..” Here are the most recent two posts from that series: The Great Joke – Part 17 and In which some people are more “equal” than others

7 Comments »

  • 1. Digesting VEDA said:

    Rajeev Srinivasan[7] rejects the South Asian label for three reasons: 1) loss of brand name; 2) refusal to cater to American prejudice; and 3) refusal to submit to intellectual laziness. He points out that nations, like corporations, earn goodwill associated with brand names. Indians, by giving up the India brand name, suffer great loss in terms of brand name recognition and goodwill. Srinivasan reminds us that India has brand value dating back to millennia. The label “Indies,” sloppily associated with everything from India to Indonesia, marked products that came from India: India rubber, India ink, etc. India has both a sub-continent and an ocean named after it. Srinivasan fears that some use of the South Asian label by Western media to appease Pakistanis could lead to a movement to protest labeling everything Indian as South Asian.

    from .. It is India not South Asia
    http://ramesh-n-rao.sulekha.com/blog/post/2003/04/it-is-india-not-south-asia.htm

  • 2. K P Ganesh said:

    Supremist feeling of white skinned guys never ends, neither will the inferiority among a bunch of Indians end. Just that these guys, who are best example of being inferior, but want to show their superiority among fellow Indians (like the left ideologues who have filled the media) don’t realize this. They want to please their coloinal masters long after they have gone, just to showcase to the world their ability to communicate in English. Basically, this slavish mentality will end only when people genuinely feel for the country as it was before getting destroyed during the Western onslaught for 1000 yrs. Another disgusting eg of media’s slavish mentality is the headlines in ToI saying “Saffronization of text books” while the material in the text books genuinely seem to show the need for facts to be as they should be if one has to convey the vast historical culture in the students, in an endeavor to instill sense of pride among them. Else what are these youngsters. Nothing but edcucated slaves in a manner that enables the Western world to manipulate and ensure that they are dominated all their lives. The Left guys are surely doing a much more efficient and fabulous job of completing Macaulay’s plans of wanting to break the backbone of Bharata Varsha culture.

  • 3. RC said:

    Ofcourse “Asian” is a euphemism. It is also racially inaccurate. In western societies, Asian should really mean east Asian, as in Chinese-Japanese-Korean-Vietnamese.
    The stupidity of the label Asian is that no one in the UK will call an Iranian, as Asian, yet Iran is part of Asia.

  • 4. Umesh K Dubey said:

    A quick retort is to refer to all British / French / Italians / Poles and the like as European . Let the Indian press – say TOI start this – and I am sure all the bracketing etc will get rectified.
    It is again a colonial thing.

  • 5. Anil said:

    Shantanuji,

    I was discussing precisely this with couple of my friends that the it’s unfair on part of British media, especially BBC, to include whole of Indian subcontinent for the misdeeds of people from particular community (Pakistani, Bangladeshi?). I have requested my friends to write complains to BBC about this; it would be good if you as well as readers of this blog post could also please register their complains.

    Jai Hind

  • 6. B Shantanu (author) said:

    From Rochdale grooming: Race ‘cannot be ignored’:
    ..The racial ethnicity of the men involved in the sexual exploitation of children in Greater Manchester cannot be ignored, the chair of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has said.
    Trevor Phillips said it was “fatuous” to deny racial and cultural factors.

  • 7. B Shantanu said:

    ..Lady Warsi, who grew up in a Pakistani community in Yorkshire, told London’s Evening Standard newspaper: ‘There is a small minority of Pakistani men who believe that white girls are fair game.

    ‘And we have to be prepared to say that. You can only start solving a problem if you acknowledge it first.

    ‘This small minority who see women as second class citizens, and white women probably as third class citizens, are to be spoken out against.’ [source]

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