We reproduce this address given at the University of Colorado, Boulder, on 12 October 1998 because of its relevance to the current world situation. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Jewish underground in Palestine was described as ‘terrorist’. Then new things happened. By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain liberal sympathy with the
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From Oldham to Bradford: the violence of the violated
From April to July 2001, the northern English towns of Oldham, Burnley and Bradford saw violent confrontations between young Asians and the police, culminating in the clashes of 7-9 July in Bradford in which 200 police officers were injured. The clashes were prompted by racist gangs attacking Asian communities and the failure of the police
The emergence of xeno-racism
A new racism directed at the displaced, the dispossessed and the uprooted ‘It is a racism that is not just directed at those with darker skins, from the former colonial territories, but at the newer categories of the displaced, the dispossessed and the uprooted, who are beating at western Europe’s doors, the Europe that helped
Poverty is the new black
The roots of this summer’s violence can be traced to the xenoracist culture of globalisation. Racism has always been both an instrument of discrimination and a tool of exploitation. But it manifests itself as a cultural phenomenon, susceptible to cultural solutions, such as multicultural education and the promotion of ethnic identities. Tackling the problem of
The summer of rebellion: special report
Youths in Burnley, Stoke, Leeds and Bradford have taken to the streets to defend their communities from racist violence. But it was in Oldham where rioting first erupted. CARF visited the town to report on a catalogue of police failures which never made it into the mainstream media, failures which led to the Asian rebellion
The Terrorism Act – embracing tyranny
On Tuesday 8 May, a crowd of a thousand ruptured the quiet of the street in St James’ where the Home Office has its headquarters. With drumming, dancing and chanting, with banners and placards, T-shirts, stickers and traditional Kurdish or Kashmiri dress, the demonstrators proclaimed their defiance of the ban on the twenty-one organisations, support
Licence to hate
Politicians are inflaming public opinion against asylum seekers. CARF reviews three months of racist campaigning and reporting and asks, what can be done? There are two racisms in Britain. The racism that discriminates and the racism that kills. But, whereas the racism that discriminates has long been outlawed through successive Race Relations Acts, criminalising the
Racial motivation: now you see it, now you don’t
We thought that, at long last, we were seeing change in how the system deals with racist attacks. Macpherson’s recommendations, we were led to believe, had set in place a systematic process through which racist attacks would now be taken seriously by the police, Crown Prosecution Service and courts. But now a judge has called
How anti-trafficking initiatives criminalise refugees
The right of refugees to seek protection in Europe is under threat from anti-trafficking initiatives. The context in which refugee policy is framed within the European Union has changed dramatically since the 1980s. From being an issue of human rights and cold-war politics it had, by the early 1990s as the number of asylum claims
Prison for asylum seekers
The government has been drawing up secret plans to increase the numbers of asylum seekers held in prisons. With Ann Widdecombe proposing to lock up all refugees in what are euphemistically called ‘secure reception centres’, Jack Straw is responding with the promise of new immigration detention centres. But in the meantime he has ordered the