Why I hate being called an “Asian”..
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 Âcultural 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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
..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]
Excerpts from It Is Unfair To Call Grooming Gangs ‘Asians’ By G Ramalingachetty:
…The media’s blanket use of the term to describe these criminals risks branding all Asians as potential offenders and attributes this kind of behaviour to Asians in general. It is a lazy categorisation that is offensive to a large section of the law-abiding Asian community and borders on racism.
Why is it that the national press struggles to use the words ‘Pakistani’ or ‘Afghan’ when reporting about groups of sexual offenders? Or, more to the point, why is the word ‘Muslim’ so conspicuously absent?
Why is it in their efforts to be politically correct they must print headlines that not only twist and hide the truth but libel all people of Asian heritage with racial slurs?
The actions of the Rochdale gang, along with previous Muslim grooming gangs, owe much to a religiously-inspired cultural perspective that is incompatible with British society and is not shared by the vast majority of the Asian community.
Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Christianity all have an older religious and cultural tradition in Asia than Islam, each with a moral code that is compatible with British law and values. It’s disgraceful that the media should use such racial terms to link the sexual abuse crimes committed almost exclusively by Muslims with all Asians.
…
The use of the term Asian not only puts an undeserved racial spin on the story but demonises the whole British Asian community. British Asians are, unsurprisingly, disgusted with the racist slurs and reporting in the UK media. Why insist on introducing a racial element where there is none?
…
I myself have already complained to the press complaints commission about these continued references to ‘Asians’, and I urge all British Asians to do the same in an effort to put an end to these offensive and counterproductive racial slurs.
In the context of recent scandal at Rochdale:
Latest exmpl of BBC-speak, in which Pakistani men become “Asian†http://newsdiffs.org/diff/657896/657911/www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-28939089
***
Readng abt “politically inconvenient truth†& abuse of 1400 kids in Rotherham by men “mainly..of Pakistani heritage†http://j.mp/1pH7J41
A brief excerpt from: A Look Inside Britain’s Muslim Sex Grooming Gang Scandal By Janet Levy, April 6, 2016:
…
News coverage of the crimes has been mostly obfuscated by a complicit media that characterizes the overwhelmingly Muslim perpetrators as generic “Asians.†According to McLoughlin’s research, limited press coverage by mainly self-censoring journalists and lenient, if any, criminal charges have enabled the gangs to act with relative impunity since 1988.
Excerpts from Grooming gangs of Muslim men failed to integrate into British society by Steve Bird, The Telegraph, 9 DECEMBER 2017:
…
The failure of Asian communities to integrate into British society has led to gangs of Muslim men targeting white women with drink and drugs before raping and sexually abusing them, an anti-extremism think tank claims.
The report by Quilliam calls for greater support to help integrate British Pakistani people into modern British society.
It says that the gangs of mainly British-Pakistani men “have been influenced by the cultural conditions of their home country and a wider failure of British society to integrate these men into their adoptive culture.â€
…
Researchers, who analysed 264 convictions of grooming gang members since 2005, had initially expected to find Asians had been unfairly singled out.
However, they discovered that 222 of those convicted, or 84 per cent, were men of Asian origin. Only 22 were black and 18 were white with two offenders not having an identified ethnicity. The findings are in stark contrast to the fact Asians make up only seven per cent of the UK population, the report said.
A brief except from Nitin Pai’s post The unbearable silliness of calling yourself ‘South Asian’, 30th Aug 2010:
…The term ‘South Asia’ therefore is an attempt to appropriate the Indian subcontinent’s geography while denying its composite civilisational history. It is also an attempt to escape the negative connotations that some nationalities have acquired abroad?—?sometimes due to the faults of the countries of their origin, sometimes due to the prejudices of the countries of their residence and sometimes due to both. ….
In modern British usage”Paki” is typically used in a derogatory way as a label for all South Asians, including Indians, Afghans and Bangladeshis.” So what do you do if your fair name becomes a racial slur? Choose another one, of course. So in Britain, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and some Indians became Asians.
It’s unclear why, on the other side of the Atlantic, they became South Asian.
…
The diaspora’s need for identity apart, ‘South Asia’ is used by nice people in the nation-states created out of the former territories of British India, and also of Nepal and Bhutan, to do the “We are all South Asians, yaar!” thing. They do this thing to ignore, set aside or paper over the real causes of why they have to do the thing in the first place.