Al Jazeera Report on the #UK Riots
A few quick responses to Kenan Malik’s ‘Five Quick Points About the Riots’
He is right in part.
1. The riots are not about race but in that they mainly involve young people of colour they ARE about race.
2. The riots are not going to solved by recourse to ‘community leaders’ but in that ‘communities’ are being namechecked they will be made about the ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ and thus about so-called communities.
3. They are not a re-run of the uprisings of the 1980s, but the response will be more of the same: tougher policing and culturalised solutions. Already listen to impoverished black parenting being brought into the mix.
4. More state violence is not that answer. We agree.
When he writes on these issues, Zizek is always so anxious to deliver the killer, counter-intuitive reading that he frequently, well, less than gets with boring old empirical stuff. His reading of Pim Fortuyn here would be helped by actually reading what he wrote and said about liberalism, political correctness and the problem of tolerance.
Guardian is now reporting that the bullet lodged in the police radio, alleged to have been fired by Mark Duggan in an ‘exchange of fire’, is a ‘police issue bullet’, “These are very distinct as the Metropolitan Police uses dum dum type hollowed out bullets designed not to pass through an object.”
Belgium has a federal crisis but banned the burqa. Italy is in political-economic meltdown but ‘edges closer’. Glad they all have their priorities straight…
