Avec beaucoup de retard par rapport à notre blog, le Figaro s'intéresse à la détresse des Blancs pauvres en Afrique du Sud et révèle que, pour la plupart, ils sont les victimes de la discrimination positive. Un avant goût de ce qui nous attend ?

Afrique du Sud : voyage au coeur d'un ghetto blanc

C'est l'apartheid à l'envers. En Afrique du Sud, des «petits Blancs» laissés-pour-compte du nouveau régime croupissent dans une misère effroyable. Mis à l'écart dans des camps de fortune, ravitaillés par des Noirs, ils tentent de survivre tant bien que mal, parfois depuis plusieurs années.

Direction Krugersdorps, une ville située au Transvaal, dans la province de Gauteng. A une trentaine de kilomètres de Johannesburg, dans un township de Blancs dénommé Coronation Park, végètent dans une crasse effroyable quelque 400 Afrikaners ces Africains à la peau blanche d'origine néerlandaise, française, allemande ou scandinave, descendants des colons du XVIIIesiècle. Parmi eux, Anne Le Roux, 60 ans, est assise sur une chaise, les yeux rivés sur une photo. Ah... le mariage de sa fille... Il est bien loin ce temps où Nelson Mandela était le premier président noir du pays, où elle vivait avec son époux dans une maison à Melville, où elle travaillait comme secrétaire... Aujourd'hui, seize ans après l'accession au pouvoir de «Madiba», Anne partage une caravane déglinguée et une pauvre tente avec sept autres personnes, dont sa fille et ses quatre enfants, dans un campement pour Blancs. Anne Le Roux fait partie de ces 450.000 Sud-Africains blancs qui vivent en dessous du seuil de pauvreté (dont 100.000 peinent à survivre). Comment en sont-ils arrivés là ? Principalement à cause d'un renversement brutal de la législation, à la suite de la fin de l'apartheid:la loi de 1922, par exemple, qui fixait la liste des emplois réservés aux Blancs, permettant à des personnes non qualifiées de bénéficier d'emplois réservés dans l'administration et de logements sociaux, n'est plus qu'un lointain souvenir. Et la crise économique mondiale n'a rien arrangé.




Mara Udwesthuizen, 64 ans, entourée des maigres souvenirs qui lui rappellent des jours meilleurs... De 1948 à 1991, l'apartheid assurait aux Blancs la sécurité économique et un emploi. (Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters)
Lorsque son mari est décédé, Anne Le Roux a eu le malheur de prendre des congés. A son retour, on lui a annoncé sans ménagement que son poste avait été attribué à une autre personne:«Prenez vos indemnités, merci pour ces vingt-six années de bons et loyaux services, et bon vent!»Avec ses compensations, elle a d'abord pu un temps héberger certains membres de sa famille, qui se retrouvaient dans la même situation qu'elle. Mais le pécule a bien vite fondu, et avec lui les illusions d'Anne sur la nouvelle société sud-africaine. Désormais, elle vit dans ce camp de Coronation Park. Et comme tous ceux qui ont travaillé avant de sombrer, une question ne cesse de la hanter... «Comment ai-je pu tomber aussi bas?» La réponse, Anne Le Roux la connaît pourtant:«Ils ne me reprendront jamais à cause de la situation...», déplore-t-elle, le regard rivé sur la photo jaunie par le temps. Notre couleur de peau n'est pas la bonne, ici, en Afrique du Sud», ajoute-t-elle, venant grossir la complainte de ces milliers de délaissés.

Bien sûr, la majorité de la population blanche profite encore d'une bonne situation au pays de la Coupe du monde de football. Mais il n'empêche que le nombre des défavorisés n'a cessé d'augmenter au cours des quinze dernières années. Selon l'Institut d'études de sécurité d'Afrique du Sud, le taux de chômage des Blancs a ainsi doublé entre 1995 et 2005. Alors que l'apartheid protégeait les Blancs du chômage et les éloignait des non éduqués on promettait aux plus faibles qu'ils seraient soutenus par le service civil et que même les plus nécessiteux d'entre eux auraient droit à une maison, avec piscine ! , la donne a changé du tout au tout et la sécurité économique qui les entourait a disparu. Jusqu'à reproduire un apartheid à l'envers. A statut égal, c'est à présent le Noir qui prime sur le Blanc. Triste retour de balancier.




Dans une tente faite main rattachée à une caravane, Vernon Nel vérifie ses e-mails. Un modem sans fil alimente les ordinateurs. Ainsi, les six personnes vivant là peuvent-elles avoir accès à internet. (Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters)
Beaucoup de démunis, anciens travailleurs ou éternels accidentés de la vie, se retrouvent donc ici, à Coronation Park. Jouxtant la ville de Krugersdorps, le camp s'entasse derrière un espace vert où les familles des classes moyennes viennent pique-niquer le week-end. Entouré de petits terrils ocre jaune le fruit du travail de générations de chercheurs d'or , l'endroit fut d'abord utilisé par les Britanniques comme camp de concentration pour Afrikaners durant la guerre contre les Boers, au tout début du XXesiècle. Aujourd'hui, il accueille quelque 400 squatters issus des quatre coins du pays. Les chats et les chiens errants vagabondent entre les amas de détritus et les voitures abandonnées... Ici, on cohabite avec la saleté et l'on tente de faire face à la faim, au chômage et aux maladies. Pas facile, naturellement, de se faire soigner:un grand brûlé dans l'incendie de sa caravane qui avait pris feu après qu'il eut allumé des bougies, à la suite d'une coupure d'électricité en a fait récemment l'amère expérience : dix heures après son arrivée aux urgences, personne ne s'était encore occupé de lui...

A 29 ans, Lukas Gouws n'a ni travail, ni femme, ni enfant. Résigné, il fume cigarette sur cigarette, les yeux perdus dans le vide. Nombre de ces déshérités finissent dans l'alcool ou la drogue. (Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters)
Et pourtant, à un tel niveau de déchéance, on est frappé par la dignité que conservent la plupart des habitants du camp. Même dans la misère, ils tentent de soigner leur image et répugnent au laisser-aller. Ils se lavent avec des bassines qu'ils remplissent grâce à la quinzaine de robinets installés dans le camp, vont chercher leurs provisions, cuisinent, bricolent... Certains, comme André Coetzee, survivent grâce à de petits boulots. Lui distribue les journaux aux feux rouges et devant les supermarchés. Même à pied, même pieds nus, les enfants vont à l'école. Comment s'organisent-ils? Le chef du camp, Hugo Van Niekerk, s'occupe d'approvisionner les familles en nourriture. Il récolte des dons auprès des habitants des alentours, mais explique qu'il ne veut pas apporter les vivres sur un plateau d'argent:«Pour les motiver à chercher du travail et à améliorer leur situation, je leur crée un univers assez confortable pour qu'ils puissent vivre, mais suffisamment inconfortable pour qu'ils se remuent», lâche-t-il sans sourciller. Pour autant, les dégâts humains sont importants. Certains sombrent dans l'alcoolisme, d'autres dans la drogue. Face à cette situation, que fait le gouvernement?

L'an passé, durant la campagne électorale, le président Jacob Zuma a visité l'un de ces «camps pour Blancs», proche de la capitale, Pretoria. Il s'était alors dit «choqué et surpris» par ce qu'il voyait, dans un pays où «être blanc était jusqu'ici synonyme de bien portant». «La pauvreté noire ne doit pas nous faire oublier la pauvreté blanche, dont il est de plus en plus embarrassant de parler...», avaitil même déclaré. De là à dire que la situation s'est améliorée...

Des jeunes désoeuvrés jouent avec un vieux pneu sans doute récupéré dans la décharge voisine. Le président sud-africain Jacob Zuma s'est pourtant engagé à combattre «la misère blanche», silencieuse et taboue. (Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters)
«Les Noirs sont plus avantagés que les Blancs, maintenant... Et puis, on les a montés contre nous, déplore Denis Boshoff, l'un des habitants du camp. C'est si injuste. On nous avait dit que nous serions égaux... pas inégaux», soupire-t-il. Silence dans le campement. On fume, les yeux perdus dans le vide. Les Afrikaners se sentent abandonnés par les pouvoirs publics. Un sentiment qui a fait grandir en eux un certain fatalisme, un repli sur eux-mêmes, ainsi qu'un regain de ferveur religieuse. La Bible est présente dans chacune des caravanes de ces calvinistes, fervents nationalistes qui restent très attachés à cette terre africaine. L'un d'eux, faisant mine de s'interroger sur une éventuelle punition divine qui leur aurait été infligée, cite quelques versets à haute voix:«Dieu m'a mis une écharde dans la chair» (II. Cor. 12.7). «C'est pourquoi je me plais dans les outrages, les calamités, les persécutions, les détresses, car quand je suis faible, c'est alors que je suis fort» (II. Cor. 12.10). La foi aide à vivre.

Crime : opération vérité à Londres

Hier nous avons évoqué cet accès inattendu d'honnêteté du New York Times qui accepte de publier une tribune libre démontrant que la majorité des crimes commis dans la grande métropole américaine le sont par des criminels Noirs ou Hispaniques.

Le fait que les personnes de couleur soient davantage interpelées puis condamnées ne constitue donc pas une preuve du racisme de la police et de la judicature mais bien la conséquence d'un comportement plus crimonogène de ces populations.

Aujourd'hui, Andrew Alderson dans le Daily Telegraph publie les statistiques officielles révélant ce que les bien-pensants de gauche veulent céler, que les Noirs commettent la majorité des crimes violents à Londres. Dans le même temps, toutefois, des Noirs constituent également une fraction importante des victimes.

Aucun des papiers ne s'interroge sur les causes de cette plus grande criminalité des personnes de couleur. Pour le moment, le lien entre un QI (quotient intellectuel) inférieur à celui, par exemple, des Chinois, ou d'un niveau moyen de testostérone supérieur à celui, par exemple, des Japonais, n'est abordé que par des universitaires dont les travaux sont victimes d'un ostracisme absolu.

Les révélations anglaises ont été accueillies d'une manière positive par un homme politique noir conservateur et travailleur social, Shaun Bailey, qui en appelle à la communauté noire à un travail d'introspection pour tenter de trouver des solutions à ce drame social.

Sans suprise, la gauche bien-pensante représentée par Richard Garside a renvoyé toute la responsabilité sur le « racisme et l'impérialisme anglais ».

Qu'en est-il de la France ?

Violent inner-city crime, the figures, and a question of race


The reality of violent inner-city crime is indicated today by statistics obtained by The Sunday Telegraph. The official figures, which examine the ethnicity of those accused of violent offences in London, suggest the majority of men held responsible by police for gun crimes, robberies and street crimes are black. Black men are also disproportionately the victims of violent crime in the capital.



One prominent black politician said that the black community needed to face up to major challenges.
Shaun Bailey, a Tory election candidate in London and a charity worker, said: “The black community has to look at itself and say that, at the end of the day, these figures suggest we are heavily – not casually – involved in violent crime. We are also involved in crime against ourselves – and we regularly attack each other.”
The data provide a breakdown of the ethnicity of the 18,091 men and boys who police took action against for a range of violent and sexual offences in London in 2009-10.
They show that among those proceeded against for street crimes, 54 per cent were black; for robbery, 59 per cent; and for gun crimes, 67 per cent. Street crimes include muggings, assault with intent to rob and snatching property.
Just over 12 per cent of London’s 7.5 million population is black, including those of mixed black and white parentage, while 69 per cent is white, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The police figures also show that black men are twice as likely to be victims. They made up 29 per cent of the male victims of gun crime and 24 per cent of the male victims of knife crime.
The Met declined to comment on the statistics. However, some officers will see them as a justification for Operation Trident, a unit targeting black-on-black murder and violent crime.
Others will see it as justification for targeting a disproportionate number of black men under stop and search powers. Figures released annually have shown black people are at least six times more likely to be stopped and searched than their white counterparts.
On sex offences, black men made up 32 per cent of male suspects proceeded against, and white men 49 per cent. The statistics also suggest that black women are responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent crime committed by females.
Richard Garside, of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London, said: “Given Britain’s long history of racism and imperialism it should not greatly surprise us that black and minority ethnic groups are disproportionately members of social classes that have tended to experience greater victimisation and to be the subject of police attention.
“Just because the police treat black men as more criminal than white men, it does not mean that they are.” Simon Woolley, speaking as the director of the Operation Black Vote pressure group, but who is also a commissioner on the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said: “Although the charge rates for some criminal acts amongst black men are high, black people are more than twice as likely to have their cases dismissed, suggesting unfairness in the system.”
The Sunday Telegraph obtained the figures via a Freedom of Information request after Rod Liddle, the writer, caused controversy last year when he claimed in an online blog published on The Spectator website that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community”.
The comments led to claims that Mr Liddle was racist, However, Mr Liddle said: “I cannot think of anything more vile than racism. The issue here is not racism, it is one of multiculturalism.”
The statistics suggest that Mr Liddle was largely right on some of his claims – notably those on gun crimes, robberies and street crimes.
The figures suggest, however, that he was probably wrong on his claims about knife crimes and violent sex crimes.
The figures relate to those “proceeded against”.
This includes those prosecuted in court, whether convicted or acquitted; those issued with a caution, warning or penalty notice; those the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to charge; and those whose crimes were “taken into consideration” after a further offence.
Unsolved crimes are not included.
The figures do not take into account that any one perpetrator may have committed numerous offences .

Le New York Times ouvre enfin les yeux

Le titre est un peu trop optimiste. Le New York Times se contente de publier la tribune libre de Heather Mac Donald qui collabore au Manhattan Institute et qui a récemment publié Are Cops Racist? (« les Flics sont-ils racistes ? »).

Néanmoins il convient de marquer ce jour d'une pierre blanche. Le porte-voix du politiquement correct aux Etats-Unis a publié un texte contenant quelques faits bien têtus concernant les liens entre appartenance raciale et criminalité à New York.

Les ignorants qui sont légion de côté-ci de l'Atlantique citent souvent le fait que les Noirs et les autres minorités raciales sont majoritaires dans les prisons comme la preuve que la justice est raciste.

L'exemple de la ville de New York démontre que ce n'est pas la justice ou la police qui sont racistes. Simplement que les actes criminels sont commis principalement par des personnes pouvant se réclamer des minorités raciales.

Ainsi, à titre d'exemple, les Blancs qui représentent environ le tiers de la population de la ville, ont commis en 2009 1,4 % des fusillades, moins de 5% des vols et plus généralement, 5 % des crimes perpétrés avec violence.

En revanche, je suis tenté d'ajouter que les Blancs ont commis 100 % des délits de détournements de fonds dont le montant est égal ou supérieur à 100 millions de dollars.

L'exemple conjoint de Jérôme Kerviel et une visite dans les prisons de notre pays semble indiquer que la France n'est pas bien éloignée du cas nord-américain.

Fighting Crime Where the Criminals Are


THERE was a predictable chorus of criticism from civil rights groups last month when the New York Police Department released its data on stop-and-frisk interactions for 2009. The department made 575,000 pedestrian stops last year. Fifty-five percent involved blacks, even though blacks are only 23 percent of the city’s population. Whites, by contrast, were involved in 10 percent of all stops, though they make up 35 percent of the city’s population.

According to the department’s critics, that imbalance in stop rates results from officers’ racial bias. The use of these stops, they say, should be sharply curtailed, if not eliminated entirely, and some activists are suing the department to achieve that end.

Allegations of racial bias, however, ignore the most important factor governing the Police Department’s operations: crime. Trends in criminal acts, not census data, drive everything that the department does, thanks to the statistics-based managerial revolution known as CompStat. Given the patterns of crime in New York, it is inevitable that stop rates will not mirror the city’s ethnic and racial breakdown.

CompStat embodies the iconoclastic idea that the police can stop violence before it happens. The department analyzes victim reports daily, and deploys additional manpower to the places where crime is increasing. Once at a crime hot spot, officers are expected to look out for, and respond to, suspicious behavior.

Such stops happen more frequently in minority neighborhoods because that is where the vast majority of violent crime occurs — and thus where police presence is most intense. Based on reports filed by victims, blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crime in New York in 2009, including 80 percent of shootings and 71 percent of robberies. Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 98 percent of reported gun assaults. And the vast majority of the victims of violent crime were also members of minority groups.

Non-Hispanic whites, on the other hand, committed 5 percent of the city’s violent crimes in 2009, 1.4 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies.

Given these facts, the Police Department cannot direct its resources where they are most needed without generating racially disproportionate stop data, even though the department’s tactics themselves are colorblind. The per capita rate of shootings in the 73rd Precinct — which covers Brooklyn’s largely black Ocean Hill and Brownsville neighborhoods — is 81 times higher than in the 68th Precinct in largely white Bay Ridge. Not surprisingly, the per capita stop rate in the 73rd Precinct is 15 times higher than that in the 68th.

Crime rates are not the only thing that drives police strategy — so do requests for assistance from communities besieged by lawlessness. If residents of an apartment building ask their precinct commander to eliminate the drug dealing on their street, officers will likely question people hanging out around the building and step up their enforcement of quality-of-life laws, resulting in more stops. Requests for crackdowns on street sales come far more frequently from minority neighborhoods, because that is where most open-air drug dealing occurs.

Some critics charge that the more than half a million stops last year indicate that the department is out of control. But the ratios of stops to population and of stops to total arrests in New York are very close to those in Los Angeles, where last summer a judge lifted a federal consent decree under which the police department had operated for the last eight years. The police stop data in Los Angeles are as racially disproportionate as New York’s, yet the judge deemed them consistent with civil rights.

For several years, the ratio of stops in New York that resulted in an arrest or summons — about 12 percent of the total — was identical for whites, blacks and Hispanics, suggesting that the police use the same measure of reasonable suspicion in stopping members of different racial and ethnic groups. Just because a stop does not result in an arrest or summons does not mean that it did not interrupt a crime. Someone who is casing a victim or acting as a lookout may not have inculpatory evidence on him on which to base an arrest.

No public policy change of the last quarter-century has done as much for the city’s poor and minority neighborhoods as CompStat policing. More than 10,000 black and Hispanic males are alive today who would have been killed had homicide rates remained at the levels of the early 1990s.

Most minority-group members in the city recognize the enormous benefit from CompStat policing. A poll released last month by Quinnipiac University found that 68 percent of black respondents approve of the job Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly is doing, suggesting that the city’s civil rights activists do not speak for their purported beneficiaries on this issue.

The attack on the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk data is based on the false premise that police activity should mirror census data, not crime. If the critics get their way, it would strip police protection from the New Yorkers who need it most.

Heather Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of “Are Cops Racist?”

L'injustice raciale

Il n'est pas bon d'appartenir à une minorité raciale. Surtout quand on appartient à une sous-espèce peu encline à donner ses organes.

Les obscurantistes qui persistent à nier l'existence de groupes humains apparentés, et qui sont usuellement décrits comme les « races humaines », n'arrivent pas expliquer pourquoi la médecine doit tenir compte des caractéristiques raciales d'une personne avant d'en prendre soin.

Un des cas les plus frappants est celui des transplantation d'organes. En dehors du foie, l'acceptabilité d'un organe par un patient dépend étroitement de sa compatibilité raciale.

En d'autres termes, un malade noir doit attendre qu'un doneur noir soit disponible avant de bénéficier d'une transplantation d'organe.

L'ennui est que les doneurs autres que des Blancs sont rares.

Non seulement car le stock des populations est plus réduit, mais aussi parce que pour des raisons culturelles ou psytchologiques ces groupes humains donnent moins leurs organes que les Blancs.

Officiellement, par exemple aux Etats-Unis, les bons esprits expliquent que les Noirs n'aiment pas donner leurs organes car ils n'ont pas confiance dans le système médical « blanc ». En réalité, il semblerait que cette explication en occulte une autre : les Noirs donneraient moins leurs organes car ils ont peur qu'ils puissent bénéficier à un Blanc.

Les conséquences sont désastreuses pour les Noirs. Non seulement ils sont davantage victimes de maladies qui requièrent de transplantations, mais leurs frères de race n'offrent pas leurs organes. Ainsi, les Noirs composent 27 % des listes d'attente pour seulement 12 % des doneurs. Dans certains Etats comme l'Alabama la situation est pire : 66 des malades en attente sont noirs et seulement 21 % des donateurs.

L'affaire se complique pour les métis, par exemple blanc-asiatique, ou pour les mulâtres, blanc-noir, ou les niveau d'exigence génétique des malades sont tels qu'il est parfois presque impossible de leur trouver un doneur.

Cet article de Jerome Taylor dans les colonnes de l'Independent raconte le calvaire d'un jeune enfant du sous-continent indien qui ne peut trouver un doneur de moëlle osseuse au Royaume-Uni.

125,000/1 against: this boy's chances of finding a bone marrow donor...
...but were he white it would be a different story.


Amun Ali's chances of receiving the bone marrow that he desperately needs would be much greater than one in 125,000 were he not of Asian heritage
Ten-year-old amun Ali desperately needs a bone marrow transplant. If he were white, the likelihood of his finding a life-saving match would be one in three. But he is Asian so his chances are closer to one in 125,000.

The chronic shortage of ethnic minorities on Britain's various donor registries – be they blood, bone marrow or hard organs – means that the chances of survival for thousands of patients like Amun are drastically reduced.

Patients from South Asian or black backgrounds are three times more likely to need a kidney transplant as white patients. But once they get on to the list they usually have to wait twice as long, which in turn increases the chances of the kidney being rejected because bodies that have had to spend long periods on dialysis often have a harder time accepting new organs.

The sad truth is that for children such as Amun, the road to recovery is fraught with added difficulties simply because of their race.

Things become even more complicated for people of mixed-race backgrounds, where the blending of Britain's gene pool – considered by geneticists as something that will improve the overall health of our society – makes the search for a suitable transplant fiendishly complex.

Other than the liver, which is remarkably resilient, most donated organs need to come from donors that are both the same blood type and tissue type, otherwise the body's immune system will kick in and reject the organ. We inherit blocks of tissue type from both our parents, which means mixed-race children often have much more complex or rarer tissue types than the national average.

"Mixed-race patients tend to have the hardest time looking for unrelated donors," Professor Steven Marsh, the deputy director of research at the Anthony Nolan Trust, says. "If someone inherits a very common Chinese half of their tissue type from one parent and a very common British tissue type from another, then the only people who will really be matches for them are other mixed-race people with the same tissue types."

This disparity has profound implications for the way we treat our children in the future and how we go about ensuring our donor databases reflect the ever-growing ethnic variety of the British public. A recent paper from the Institute for Social and Economic Research showed that nearly one in 10 British children is now born to mixed-race parents. Taken as a whole category, "mixed race" is now the fastest-growing ethnicity in the UK and yet it is the least represented on all our donor registers.

The Independent recently highlighted the case of Devan Tatlow, a mixed-race four-year-old boy in Washington, DC who is undergoing treatment for leukaemia and desperately needs a bone marrow transplant. His body contains a multitude of genes from his parents, who are of Irish and Indian-Polish descent. When doctors searched the global bone marrow database of 14 million donors they couldn't find a single match. It took a mass campaign of emailing and pleading by friends, activists and celebrities alike before a potential match was found using cord blood, the stem cell-rich blood that remains in the umbilical cord at birth and is all too often thrown away. Devan's journey towards full recovery will still be fraught with difficulties, but he has at least found a match.

Yet even when both sets of parents are from the same ethnicity, finding matches can be heartbreakingly difficult for black and ethnic minority (BME) families.

Amun loves wrestling and playing basketball. But for the past six weeks, his home has been a sterile ward at Birmingham's Heartlands Hospital.

Amun was born with a severe immunodeficiency syndrome that leaves him painfully vulnerable to infections, and in the past few months his condition has deteriorated.

His only chance of long-term survival is a full bone marrow transplant which doctors hope will stimulate his body into creating enough white blood cells to fight off infections.

When his family were told that none of his relatives was a suitable match, they instantly feared the worst.

"We had already lost Amun's younger brother Ali to the same disease," said his father, Ashgar Khan, who has since given up his job to care full time for his son. "By the time we discovered his sister was a match it was too late. This time, none of us are matches for Amun."

The Ali family is aware that the only way they will find a saviour for Amun is to galvanise more South Asians into signing up to the various registries in the hope that somewhere out there is a match. Helped by Desi Donors, one of the only charities working with South Asian donors, they have held a series of "clinics" in and around Birmingham encouraging community members to become donors.

"We haven't found a match for Amun yet but both times we got about 70 people to sign up," Mr Khan said. "That might not sound like a lot but in the Asian community it really is."

Those working within Asian and some black cultures say organ-donating is still viewed with deep suspicion. Feelings tend to be more entrenched among older generations, where culture, customs and some religious communities remain vehemently opposed to the idea of meddling with the body before and, particularly, after death.

"Most of the time, I think it's just accidental ignorance," says Reena Combo, who co-founded Desi Donors after meeting Dean Sheikh, a seven-year-old who needed a bone marrow transplant but sadly passed away last year without finding a match. "If you don't know about something you tend to turn a blind eye to it."

Leila Molaei, who was involved in organising publicity for an NHS campaign earlier this year encouraging ethnic minorities to join donor registers, says religion is overly criticised for being the main stumbling block.

"It's more to do with culture rather than religion," she says. "People of Arab or Iranian descent, for instance, are more comfortable with the idea of becoming a donor than, say, Pakistanis. We tended to find that Hindus are the most relaxed about donorship, followed by Sikhs and then Muslims."

Professor James Neuberger, the associate medical director for Organ Donation and Transplantation at NHS Blood and Transplant unit, says changing mindsets will not happen overnight. "It's something we will have to continue working at from different angles over the coming years. But ultimately changing the culture will take a few decades before we start to see any major impact," he says.

Why does race matter?

What makes a transplantation successful largely depends on whether the recipient's body accepts the new organ. Those chances are massively increased if the donor has the closest tissue type as possible to the recipient. Race plays a crucial role in deciding our tissue type.

"The genes that are responsible for your tissue type are not there just to confound transplant surgeons," explains Professor Steven Marsh. "They are there because they have a role in immunity. These genes are constantly changing and mutating. As man has moved around the world, these genes have changed to help us deal with the various pathogens we encounter. The bottom line is someone in China will have a very different tissue type from someone in northern Europe."

If the tissue type of the donor is different from the recipient, the immune system of the transplant patient will attack the organ. Blood type also plays a crucial role. In Britain the most common blood types are O and A. In South Asia blood types B and A are far more common. Transplant patients with B-type blood in the UK statistically have a smaller chance of finding a suitable organ because their blood type is so much rarer within the wider population.

Religion: Faiths encourage the selfless act of organ donation

Faith leaders from minority religions have gone on the offensive in recent years encouraging devotees to register as organ donors.

Hindu and Sikh religious authorities have few problems with the process. Both view the body as a temporary vessel for the soul and emphasise the importance of selfless giving.

Islam has no qualms with live donorship, like when a parent donates a kidney to their child. But post-mortem organ donation is a little more complicated. Islam places immense importance on the treatment of a body with strict requirements designating how the dead should be washed and prepared for burial without interference. Cutting open bodies, even for autopsies, is sometimes frowned upon.

The majority of sharia schools, however, say organ donation is permissible because of the Islamic concept of al-darurat tubih al-mahzurat, the idea that the necessity of something sometimes outweighs its prohibition. The Koran says that saving one life is akin to saving the whole of mankind and the majority of jurists, including the Muslim Law (Shariah) Council UK, say organ donation is a selfless act that saves lives and should be encouraged. Other shariah schools, however, remain opposed, leading to much confusion.

Christianity emphasises selflessness and sacrifice for the greater good. Although there are no teachings against organ donorship, some church leaders in the developing world preach against it.

Transplants in numbers

1 in 3 The likelihood a white person can find a bone marrow match

1 in 125,000 The likelihood an Asian or Black person can find a bone marrow match

1 in 200,000+ The likelihood a mixed race person can find a bone marrow match

16.9m people on the NHS Organ Donor Register, but only 1.2 per cent of these are from the Asian community and 0.4 per cent of these from Black communities

7,800 patients are actively waiting for a transplant, of whom 1,521 are South Asians and 779 are Black

Between 1 April 2008 and 31 March 2009:

3,513 organ transplants were carried out, thanks to the generosity of 1,853 donors

977 lives were saved in the UK through a heart, lung, liver or combined heart/lungs, liver/kidney, liver/pancreas, heart/kidney or liver/kidney/pancreas transplant

L'unicité du peuple juif

Le peuple juif donne une bonne leçon au monde. Alors que les médias répètent l'antienne que les races humaines n'existent pas, que c'est le regard de l'autre qui fait la différence, les généticiens viennent d'apporter une nouvelle preuve de l'unicité et de l'altérité des Juifs.

Dans cet article du magazine juif de gauche américain Forward, on nous dévoile les résultats d'une enquête réalisée sur différents échantillons des grands groupes de population juive dans le monde.

Au sein de la race blanche, les Juifs forment un groupe relativement homogène. Un Juif italien est plus proche d'un Juif d'Irak que de son voisin de palier.

Ces résultats ne sont quelques uns parmi toutes les recherches sur la génétique humaine qui sont en cours de par le monde et qui démolissent un à un les mythes de l'antiracisme dit « scientifique ».

Pourtant, dans des pays obscurantistes comme la France, on sera les derniers à l'apprendre en raison de l'aveuglement idéologique de l'Université et des médias et des lobbies antiracistes.

We Are One, Genetically


The Jewish communal world is obsessed with the notion of peoplehood and how to define it, promote it, strengthen it — especially how to encourage younger, unaffiliated Jews to feel part of a sprawling but interconnected global family. A new scientific study may offer some help.

Turns out that Jews the world over share many genetic traits that are distinct from other groups and date to ancient times. We are, said Gil Atzmon, an assistant professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the study’s lead author, “identical by descent.”

Researchers have already shown the prevalence of, say, a Y chromosome shared by many kohanim, but Atzmon said that his study — published June 3 in The American Journal of Human Genetics — may be the most comprehensive study of genetic linkage to date. It examined three major groups of Jews in the Diaspora: Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe; Sephardim from Italian, Greek and Turkish ancestry, and Mizrahi Jews from Iraq and Syria. Participants were recruited from the New York region, Seattle, Athens, Rome and Israel, and must have had four grandparents from the same Jewish community.

The study did find some of what researchers call “admixture,” the mixing of Jewish genetic markers with those of non-Jews, through intermarriage and conversion. Still, “the Italian Jew is closer to the Iraqi Jew than to his Italian neighbor,” Atzmon told the Forward.

Scientifically, these findings are significant because they provide a context to further study the genetic origins of disease. While there are other people with genetic similarities caused by geographic isolation — the Amish and Sardinians are two examples — the Jewish genetic connection goes beyond geography, enforced by centuries of cultural and religious isolation.

Among Jews concerned about continuity, which these days means just about anyone in communal leadership, the findings of this study raise an uncomfortable question. If a similar genetic structure bound Jews together for centuries, provided concrete evidence of a tribal connection, of peoplehood, what will happen in the free-for-all that is America? “This is a very delicate question,” Atzmon acknowledged. “Assimilation can dilute the genomic sharing among Jews. It can take a couple of generations, but [at some point] the genomic is shuffled so much, it can’t be recognized.”

In an age when exclusivity is frowned upon and multiculturalism prized, some Jews may celebrate if the genetic distinctions fade away and are replaced by a more pluralistic definition of who we are — or at least, who our genes say we are. But breaking down the cultural and religious isolation that has characterized Jewish life since ancient times also contains risks. Science tells us that we have, indeed, been one people. Will we remain so?

L'Afro-Caraïbe et la haine de soi

La jeune et jolie Sarodj Bertin de 22 ans vient d'être élue Miss Haïti. La voici en photo après l'élection en compagnie des autres candidates. Cette image en dit plus sur la hiérarchisation au sein des communautés afro-caraïbes que bien des discours.

Le quotidien El Mundo rapporte les détails de l'élection.

Disparités raciales : un mauvais diagnostic

Voici un exemple parfait de mauvais diagnostic.

Il y a trop de Noirs en prison, c'est que la justice est raciste.

Les Noirs ont moins de patrimoine que les Blancs, c'est que l'économie est raciste.

Il fait plus chaud en Afrique qu'en Sibérie, c'est la faute au thermomètre.

Nous vivons dans des sociétés industrielles où un des critères clef pour expliquer le succès ou l'échec d'une personne est son niveau de Quotient intellectuel (QI). Cet outil statistique est simplement un prédicteur (néologisme inventé par moi) qui contribue à évaluer les chances d'un individu a monter ou à descendre l'échelle sociale.

Quand des individus ont un QI inférieur à la moyenne, ils dévissent. Qu'ils soient Blancs ou Noirs, en Europe, en Amérique ou en Afrique.

Des Blancs au QI inférieur à la moyenne en Afrique ?

L'autre constat de cette étude, est que les politiques de racisme à rebours imposées depuis plus de trente ans n'ont eu aucun effet sinon celui de précipiter la marginalisation de nombreux Noirs et de les transformer en assistés.

On peut méditer sur les implications de cet échec en Europe.

Il est impossible d'envisager une amélioration de la condition des Noirs aux Etats-Unis sans une prise de conscience que bien des maux qui affligent cette communauté trouvent leur origine au sein de leur communauté : familles monoparentales, disparition de l'éthique du travail, etc.

En revanche, les élites libérales blanches jouent un rôle crucial dans le maintien des Noirs dans un asservissement bénévolent. Par exemple, par l'institution de politiques sociales qui ont largement contribué à la destruction de la cellule familiale noire, ou encore par le sacrifice de l'éducation des garçons sur l'autel de l'idéologie égalitariste.

Les Noirs n'auront pas d'avenir en tant que groupe humain tant qu'ils ne se libéreront pas des chaînes qui leur sont imposées par le carcan idéologique de la gauche.


A $95,000 question: why are whites five times richer than blacks in the US?

A huge wealth gap has opened up between black and white people in the US over the past quarter of a century – a difference sufficient to put two children through university – because of racial discrimination and economic policies that favour the affluent.

A typical white family is now five times richer than its African-American counterpart of the same class, according to a report released today by Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

White families typically have assets worth $100,000 (£69,000), up from $22,000 in the mid-1980s. African-American families' assets stand at just $5,000, up from around $2,000.

A quarter of black families have no assets at all. The study monitored more than 2,000 families since 1984.

"We walk that through essentially a generation and what we see is that the racial wealth gap has galloped, it's escalated to $95,000," said Tom Shapiro, one of the authors of the report by the university's Institute on Assets and Social Policy.

"That's primarily because the whites in the sample were able to accumulate financial assets from their $22,000 all the way to $100,000 and the African-Americans' wealth essentially flatlined."

The survey does not include housing equity, because it is not readily accessible and is rarely realised as cash. But if property were included it would further widen the wealth divide.

Shapiro says the gap remains wide even between blacks and whites of similar classes and with similar jobs and incomes.

"How do we explain the wealth gap among equally-achieving African-American and white families? The same ratio holds up even among low income groups. Finding ways to accumulate financial resources for all low and moderate income families in the United States has been a huge challenge and that challenge keeps getting steeper and steeper.

"But there are greater opportunities and less challenges for low and moderate income families if they're white in comparison to if they're African-American or Hispanic," he said.

America has long lived with vast inequality, although 40 years ago the disparity was lower than in Britain.

Today, the richest 1% of the US population owns close to 40% of its wealth. The top 25% of US households own 87%.

The rest is divided up among middle and low income Americans. In that competition white people come out far ahead.

Only one in 10 African-Americans owns any shares. A third do not have a pension plan, and among those who do the value is on average a fifth of plans held by whites.

Shapiro says one of the most disturbing aspects of the study is that wealth among the highest-income African-Americans has actually fallen in recent years, dropping from a peak of $25,000 to about $18,000, while among white counterparts of similar class and income it has surged to around $240,000.

In 1984, high-income black Americans had more assets than middle-income whites. That is no longer true.

"I'm a pretty jaded and cynical researcher in some way, but this was shocking, quite frankly, a really important dynamic," said Shapiro. "This represents a broken chain of achievement. In the United States context, when we are thinking about racial equality and the economy we have focused for a long time on equal opportunity.

"Equal opportunity assumes that some people who have that opportunity are going to have pretty high achievements in terms of their jobs, their work, their income, their home ownership.

"The assumption in a democracy is that merit and achievement are going to be rewarded and the rewards here are financial assets. We should see some rough parity and we don't."

The report attributes part of the cause to the "powerful role of persistent discrimination in housing, credit and labour markets. African-Americans and Hispanics were at least twice as likely to receive high-cost home mortgages as whites with similar incomes," the report says.

Although many black families have moved up to better-paying jobs, they begin with fewer assets, such as inheritance, on which to build wealth. They are also more likely to have gone into debt to pay for university loans.

"African-Americans, before the 1960s, first by law and then by custom, were not really allowed to own businesses. They had very little access to credit. There was a very low artificial ceiling on the wealth that could be accumulated. Hence there was very little, if anything, that could be passed along to help their children get to college, to help their children buy their first homes, or as an inheritance when they die," said Shapiro.

Since the 1980s, US administrations have also geared the tax system to the advantage of the better off. Taxes on unearned income, such as shares and inheritance, fell sharply and are much lower than taxes on pay.

"The more income and wealth people had, the less it was taxable," said Shapiro.

There were also social factors, the study found. "In African-American families there is a much larger extended network of kin as well as other obligations. From other work we've done we know that there's more call on the resources of relatively well-off African-American families; that they lend money that's not given back; they help cousins go to school. They help brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, with all kinds of legal and family problems," said Shapiro.

La race blanche n'existe pas !

L'universitaire Nell Irvin Painter.

La race blanche n'existe pas. C'est seulement une construction de l'esprit.

Ce sont les stupéfiantes conclusions de Nell Irvin Painter, une universitaire noire américaine dans un livre qui suscite de nombreux débats aux Etats-Unis : The History of White People.

Voici un compte rendu très indulgent de Precious Williams (elle aussi noire) dans les colonnes du Independent qui n'hésite pas à dire des énormités. Par exemple, elle rappelle que l'ADN des êtres humains appartenant aux différents groupes raciaux est commun à plus de 99,1 %. Elle en conclut que l'universitaire a raison en affirmant que du point de vue scientifique l'la race blanche n'existe pas.

Ce qui est faux. L'ADN humain et celui de certaines espèces de singes est également identique à 99 %. Peut-on en déduire que d'un point de vue scientifique qu'il n'existe pas de différences entre l'homme et le chimpanzé ?

Je n'entre pas dans le détail des erreurs de cet article, mais vous invite à le lire pour avoir une idée plus précise du contenu d'un ouvrage qui est le reflet d'une dérive préoccupante d'intellectuels noirs américains.

Race under fire: Is being white something you can learn?

What does it mean to be white? An explosive new book by an American academic argues that whiteness isn't biological at all – in fact, it can be learned. Precious Williams disagrees
It is tempting to tell ourselves that we're on the verge of an inclusive, multicultural new age.

An era where colour doesn't matter all that much, where race doesn't define us. After all, society is changing. Radically. The Conservative Party's first-ever black female MP, Helen Grant, has just been elected. And across the pond, there is a black man in the White House. Or is there?

A controversial new book, The History of White People, claims that Barack Obama is, to all intents and purposes, white. Not because he had a white mother but because of his educational background, his income, his power, his status. The book's author, the eminent black American historian Nell Irvin Painter, has written a fascinating, sprawling history of the concept of race, looking specifically at the idea of a white race and at why and how whites have dominated other, darker-skinned races throughout recent centuries. The conclusion of Painter's book – which has taken more than a decade to research and write – is explosive. Race, she argues, is a fluid social construct, entirely unsupported by scientific fact. Like beauty, it is merely skin-deep.

Technically, she has a point. The $3bn Human Genome Project revealed in 2003 that every human being has a unique DNA sequence which differs from that of any fellow human being by just 0.1 per cent, regardless of ethnic origin. Thus, all humans beings are 99.9 per cent the same and, from a scientific viewpoint, there is no such thing as racial difference.

And now along comes this weighty history of white people, written by a 67-year-old black woman, telling us that the white race has never really existed. Unsurprisingly, America's far-right are furious. On the white supremacist group Stormfront's internet forum, one member complained that the book: "will likely win a Pulitzer – just look at how they patronise and indulge these negroes". Another member said Painter "is just jealous of our history and of the beauty of white women".

Painter remains unfazed by the criticism: our perceptions of race are expanding, she claims, and she herself is, she says, effectively white – by virtue of her lifestyle (she's a Harvard-educated former Princeton history professor currently pursuing a master's degree in painting).

Being "white" in America is perhaps like being upper-class in Britain, except in America a wealthy, well-connected black person can become "white" and a disadvantaged white person could lead a life that's "black".

Historically, the entire classification of 'whiteness', Painter argues, was in no small part a philosophical justification of slavery. The white-black thing was about economics. Whiteness came to represent freedom and nobility, while black-skinned peoples were now cast in the role of the underdog. Prior to the transatlantic slave trade, white-skinned people were not routinely held to be more elite than blacks. In medieval times, it was largely whites who were the slaves. During the 1300s there was a dearth of labour as a result of the Black Death, and Christian kingdoms in the Mediterranean enslaved more and more white-skinned people – hailing from Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria. It was another 200 years or so before the growth of the sugar industry demanded more and more slave labour. White-skinned Europeans began to enslave Africans to work their plantations. The transatlantic slave trade flourished. White-skinned slave owners, enjoying the financial fruits of this new slavery, started to deify themselves, self-identifying as inherently superior to blacks – morally, socially and intellectually. Suddenly blacks were held by their white 'owners' to be only three-fifths human. The widespread worship of 'whiteness' had begun; to date it has not ended.

Here in the UK we may be inclined to dismiss this book as the latest emblem of America's never- ending obsession with race. We might imagine we are so integrated here that we are beyond needing to discuss race and unpick it and re-examine it. But we would be wrong. Whiteness may only be a social construct but it is still a powerful one, and the concept of whiteness continues to represent a social holy grail. In her book, Painter presents the idea of non-whites moving onwards and upwards to become virtual whites as pure social progress. I beg to differ. I see this as quite a step backwards. In fact, it takes me back several decades.

When I was born in the early Seventies, my mother – an African-born black woman – decided to try turn me white. Not by bleaching my skin but by sending me to live with a white family, so that I would be fully immersed in white culture, pretty much from birth. My mother, who had grown up under British colonial rule in Nigeria, wanted to make me as white as possible so that once I was grown-up I would, she was sure, thrive and prosper in her adopted country, England.

The idea was that I would begin absorbing white privilege right from the start, before I was even old enough to talk. My mother wasn't alone in this way of thinking. At that time, thousands of other African-born, recently migrated parents were paying white families to raise their babies and children. They

presumed that white culture would rub off on us and open doors for us. To give us the best of starts in life, they felt it necessary to separate us from our blackness.

To hear Painter tell it, race is about "us" and "them". To be one of us is to enter the hallowed elite of 'whiteness'. Everybody else is one of them. In my case, I was the nobody caught in between, acceptable to whites to a degree simply because I was always there. I didn't feel black. When I looked in the mirror I saw nothingness reflected back at me, I did not see myself as black. I was praised (by my birth mother) for having such a white accent that anyone speaking to me on the phone would have no inkling I was black. Until they saw me in person.

In the end, as I began to grow up, race – even if it is merely a social construct – became the elephant lurking in every room. Supposedly, by becoming an honorary white I had arrived; but all I felt was a sense of loss. It was like I had had something stripped away from me. Later, in my mid-teens, I opened my eyes and found that society had now become my mirror, and I saw myself reflected back at me – a black person, whether I liked it or not. And I learnt to like it a lot.

Of her book, Painter says, "We think, or we used to think, until I wrote my book, that race was something permanent inside you, but ...[this concept] changed." She adds, "I am what my parents made me ... I am not my biology." I disagree. If I was what my foster parents had made me I would surely still be self-identifying as white.

Race as I see it is something you carry from your ancestors – it's your lineage and your cultural heritage; it's about where you originally came from. Even if you've not experienced the land your ancestors hailed from, or met the parents you were born to. I am African and I am also British. But no "enlargement of whiteness" is ever going to result in me being labelled English. And why should it? That race, or the concept of race, exists is something to be celebrated, not swept under the carpet.

Race is everywhere, lurking beneath the surface – or not. It's there in the silent assumptions we sometimes make. If we really are a post-racial society, why do we have Operation Trident, the Metropolitan Police unit set up in 1998 to investigate so-called 'black crimes'? Why do we have those higgledy-piggledy 'Black Interest' shelves in Waterstone's and WH Smith, bringing to mind the 'COLOUREDS ONLY' signs in pre-Civil Rights America and crammed with anything from gangsta-lit to Toni Morrison? I wonder if that's where Painter's book will be shelved.

The perception within this country and the perception of this country among other nations is that Britain is largely "over" race. An African- American friend recently told me he thinks the UK is fabulous and extremely liberal "because you all accept each other over there. There is no race." Actually, race has always been here. Historically, non-whites were referenced according to their creed or nationality. It wasn't until around 1625 that the word "black" in Britain came to be used when referring to a person of African origin. Before then, a white man with black hair might be described as "black" or "a black", while Indians were often labelled "hindoos" and Africans were frequently called "Moors" or "Ethiops" (Aethiopia was an early European word for Africa).

At a recent dinner party I mentioned that I was reading Painter's The History of White People. A friend sitting opposite me casually remarked that she feels very proud of her family history – and of her race (she is white). There was a stunned silence among those seated around the table. The subject was swiftly changed. Later, one of the other guests (also white) leant over and whispered to me, "I hope you're not offended. She's not usually such a bigot."

So, merely admitting that you like being white makes you a social pariah? What's wrong with liking being white? Or black? Or both? Or something else?

The incident reminded me, in reverse, of an episode from my childhood, when I was around seven or eight. There I was, still a black girl in an all-white environment. My foster family loved me and just wanted me to somehow, miraculously, fit in as naturally as they did into our white working-class surroundings. It was never going to happen and I think perhaps I'd just realised this. I'd heard, on a TV show, a man singing a mantra that both puzzled and delighted me: "Say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud". James Brown. I burst out with it, repeating his words to my foster mother. I watched the confusion and disappointment descend over her face.

I had been taught it wasn't the done thing to talk about being black. If I had to talk about my race at all (and I was largely discouraged from doing so) I was trained to refer to myself as "coloured". Any references my white peers made to my blackness were furtive and apologetic and usually prefaced with the phrase, "I'm not being funny or nothing...."

Today, you can talk about being black but when black is reflected back at you via the media, it is almost always in a negative light. Headline after headline reports that black people are more likely to knife each other, drop out of school, get STDs and fail to get jobs. Meanwhile, if you are white, and you like being white, it's considered taboo to admit as much. Unless you are a member of the BNP.

Is this progress? Race may not technically exist, but surely the last thing we should be doing as a nation is lulling ourselves into believing that the concepts of whiteness and blackness do not exist or matter. Must we chip away vital pieces of ourselves in order to be non-offensive? Denying the existence of differences inhibits us from celebrating our diversity in all its glory. Multiculturalism is surely about far more than merely enjoying a chicken korma or liking Dizzee Rascal. It's about not being expected to apologise for who you are, whoever you are.

Precious Williams's memoir, 'Precious', is published by Bloomsbury on 2 August. 'The History of White People' by Nell Irvin Painter is published in hardback by Norton (£19.99). To order a copy for the special price of £17.99 (free P&P), call Independent Books Direct on 08430 600 030, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk

Comment identifier un terroriste ?

Le candidat à la candidature républicaine au Congrès Dan Fanelli a trouvé un moyen très efficace de se distinguer des autres candidats républicains, il explique dans cette courte publicité télévisée comment identifier un terroriste.

Il est fort probable que son sens de l'humour ne sera guère apprécié par les ligues de vertu et les journalistes bien comme il faut, mais les Américains ordinaires qui sont exaspérés par les contrôles aux aéroports entendront son message cinq sur cinq.

GOP House candidate runs TV ad calling for racial profiling

You absolutely have to see this TV ad that a House GOP candidate hoping to take on Dem Rep. Alan Grayson (D) has run in Florida. It not only supports racial profiling, but urges it as a matter of policy -- and even suggests explicitly that darker people are more likely to be terrorists.

In an interview, the candidate, Naval and airline pilot Dan Fanelli, insisted that the spot wasn't meant to suggest that those with darker skin are more inclined towards terror. Watch the spot for yourself:

(voir l'écran publicitaire ci-dessus)

In the spot, which ran over the weekend on a Fox affiliate in central Florida, Fanelli stands between a middle-aged white man and a younger, swarthy fellow. "Does this look like a terrorist?" he asks, gesturing towards the white man. Then, pointing to the darker dude, he adds: "Or this?"

"It's time to stop this political correctness in the invasion of our privacy," Fanelli says, an apparent call for racial profiling in the searching of those deemed to be potential terrorists.

In an interview, I asked Fanelli if the message of the spot was that darker people are more likely to be terrorists.
He said it wasn't, claiming that the ad's point was that people from countries like Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Syria "require a higher level of security."

"You can be light and from those countries," he said, adding that the actor who played the terrorist in the commercial agreed with him.

Fanelli, who said he had piloted a flight bound for Washington on Sept. 11, when the city was attacked, added that Middle Easterners should want profiling for their own safety.

"If the people that were doing this kind of thing looked like me, even though I'm not the guy doing the terrorist thing I would want to be examined more closely," he said, vowing that he harbored no animosity towards Islam and that in Congress he would represent all religions.

Fanelli is one of a half-dozen Republicans running to take on Grayson. So it's unclear if he'll ever ascend to Congress. But this ad deserves to be entered as an exhibit in the larger argument over the Arizona law, terrorism, and racial profiling.

La tragédie des Afrikaaners

Aucune ONG européenne ne veut venir en aide aux Blancs pauvres d'Afrique du sud.
Ils n'ont probablement pas la bonne couleur de peau. Un superbe exemple de racisme très politiquement correct.

Vae Victis !

Le sort s'acharne sur ces vaincus qui ont mis bas les armes. Pour répondre aux questions posées par les nombreux visiteurs intéressés par les informations concernant les Blancs en Afrique du Sud, voici quelques liens qui méritent le détour.

Une association caritative qui vient en aide aux Blancs pauvres :

SOLIDARITY HELPING HAND FUN






Des informations en direct d'Afrique du sud

Ce site rassemble des informations sur les violences sont sont victimes des Afrikaaner. On est bien loin de la « nation arc en ciel » tant vantée par les thuriféraires de Nelson mandela.

Afrique du Sud, la face cachée du Mundial

Ida Nel, épouse d'un agriculteur, apprend à ses servir d'un fusil d'assault pour défendre son foyer.

L'Afrique du sud s'apprête à accueillir en 2010 la coupe du Monde de football. Mais la vraie situation dans laquelle se trouve le pays est trop éloignée des idées fixes de la gauche européenne et des médias pour qu'elle soit exposée. Mais, parfois, un journal anglais raconte les choses sous leur vrai jour.

A lire dans le Daily Mail cet excellent reportage d'Aidan Hartley. Dans nos banlieues ça commence déjà.

Le quotidien de gauche espagnol Publico rend compte de la situation des joueurs et des futurs visiteurs. Mais il ne dit mot des meurtres racialement motivés.



South Africa World Cup 2010... and the shooting's already started
Only 70 miles from a 2010 World Cup football stadium, a farmer's wife and a boy aged 13 learn to defend themselves with lethal weapons. They say thousands of white landowners have been killed by Zimbabwe-style marauders; their black rulers accuse them of belligerence and right-wing tendencies. Aidan Hartley reports on the war of words you won't read about in your World Cup holiday brochure.

Bella wakes. She hears a strangled, gurgling sound. It’s the dog, she thinks.

‘Peter, there’s something wrong,’ she says to her husband. Noises emerge from the room of her mother-in-law, who’s 98 and confined to a wheelchair.

It’s 1am. Bella gets up and walks out of the bedroom. In the hall she sees a young man who at first she thinks is her son. Except he’s black, wears a balaclava and is pointing a gun at her.

‘He comes for me,’ says Bella, her hand before her tear-stained face.

‘He’s going to shoot me! I trip as I run back to the bedroom. Peter comes to the door but he has nothing in his hand, no pistol. I hear a gun go off. I hear my mother-in-law screaming. I lock the door and telephone my son. I tell him: “I think they shot Pa!”’

Two men are outside the bedroom window with a rifle. She loads the pistol Peter keeps by the bed.

‘I take the gun and say, “Come on! I’ll shoot you!”’

Back in the hall she finds Peter dead, a trail of blood across the kitchen floor. Her mother-in-law Gerda is bruised and beaten.

‘I can’t tell you how hopeless I felt,’ Bella says. ‘I will see it in front of me for weeks, months, years.’

Days after Peter is cremated, the attackers return. The survivors are sleeping elsewhere by now, so the gang finds only the dogs in the house. They torture the animals with boiling water before soaking them in petrol and setting them on fire.

I ask Bella for a motive and she says a group of black South Africans who are squatting on their farmland have repeatedly threatened them.

After the family find the dogs, Bella’s son Piet calls the police. Weeks later the attackers are still at large; police arrested one man in connection with the killing but he was later released.

I am in her home. The bullet holes are still clearly visible. I ask her what she is going to do.

‘If we stay here they will kill us. You can’t say this was a dream, or rewind what happened. They want our land.’

This is Bella’s account of an attack that happened last month in South Africa, in the north-east of the country. Her home is a long way from the vineyards and beaches of Cape Town, but South Africa is to host the 2010 World Cup and five of the centres for players and the hundreds of thousands of tourists who will come with them are here in the north.

Preparations are in hand but this is against the backdrop of a country gripped by ultra-violence. Officially there are about 50 murders a day, and three times that number of rapes. Most victims are poor blacks in South Africa’s cities: reported deaths last year totalled more than 18,000.

But among the casualties of the violence are white farmers, whose counterparts in Zimbabwe are singled out for international press coverage; here in the ‘rainbow nation’ their murders, remarkable for their particular savagery, go largely unreported.

There are no official figures but, since the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, farmers’ organisations say 3,000 whites in rural areas have been killed. The independent South African Human Rights Commission, set up by Mandela’s government, says the number is 2,500.

Its commission’s report into the killings does not break down their figures by colour; but it says the majority of attacks in general - ie where no one necessarily dies - are against white people and that 'there was a considerably higher risk of a white victim of farm attacks being killed or injured than a black victim.'

It states that since 2006, farmer murders have jumped by 25 per cent and adds: 'The lack of prosecutions indicates the criminal justice system is not operating effectively to protect victims in farming communities and to ensure the rule of law is upheld.'

La carte de la violence contre les fermiers en Afrique du Sud avec les sites des futures rencontres.

I have lived and worked in Africa for 20 years, reporting from countries all across the continent. I know that the truth is very hard to find here. Stereotypes are everywhere. Blacks give no credit to successful white businesses. Whites give no credit to the black populace, refusing stubbornly to acknowledge that they themselves are physical reminders of a brutal colonial past.

What is certain is this: since the mid-Nineties, 900,000 mainly white South Africans have emigrated from South Africa - about 20 per cent of the white population - most of them due to soaring crime rates. In an eerie parallel with Zimbabwe, farms have been reclaimed by unqualified workers.

The police say don't fight back. You must fight. It's the bullet or be slaughtered

Commercial agricultural production has taken a massive hit where land reform has occurred. And as the attacks on white farmers continue, the police seem increasingly powerless and ineffective, and farmers are turning to vigilante behaviour as their way of life comes under violent assault.

The ANC government's response to this has been largely defiant. As Charles Ngacula, Safety and Security Minister under the previous administration of Thabo Mbeki, said: 'They can continue to whinge until they're blue in the face, be as negative as they want to, or they can simply leave this country.'

Ida Nel is learning to shoot an AK-47 and a pistol on a 'farm protection weekend'. The course is being held only 70 miles from the 2010 World Cup venue of Polokwane. Ida is married to farmer Andre. They farm guavas and macadamia nuts near Levubu in Limpopo province.

Sonette Selzer a violinist, on her farm near Ermelo. She is trained to use a variety of guns and always carries a rifle over a shoulder and a pistol on her belt

'I'm used to guns,' she says. 'My dad taught me how to use one when I was a kid but I need to get confident and to know what warning signs to look out for in a farm attack.'

On the course with her are farmers, and their wives and children. Among the children is 13-year-old Barend Harris, the son of a vet, who brought his family 9mm gun. Those taking part in the weekend courses for about 50 people at a time learn to leopard-crawl with a gun and are taught self-defence (with knives and guns), how to look for signs that their homes are being targeted, bush tracking and how to shoot from a moving vehicle. They are given target practice with AK-47s, pistols, R4 and R5 assault rifles and 308 hunting rifles.

Driving around Mpumalanga Province, east of Johannesburg, in what used to be the Transvaal, I found myself called by the farmers to a string of grisly murder scenes. In some the blood was still drying on the furniture or the street. In others, witnesses gave me accounts of killings involving rituals of extreme brutality: of victims boiled alive, forced to kneel and shot execution style and tortured in ways so unimaginable they are too horrendous to print. The same goes for the many pictures I have been shown of the barely identifiable corpses and horrific crime scenes.

Sonette Selzer, who lives on a forestry holding with her husband Werner, has made sure that she and her two boys are weapons-trained. At home in Mpumalanga province, Sonette, who is a trained medic, claims she usually gardens with a pistol at her side and a rifle strapped to her back. She is fully armed as I arrive - rather conveniently, I think.

'It's very tiring but even in the garden you have to be alert to what's happening around you all the time. You can never, ever relax your guard,' she says.

When she hears of a man who got into a gunfight with three robbers she shakes her head: 'I'd hate to get into that situation. You need to finish it quickly.'

She gestures to her vicious-looking Ninja knives and I realise the chilling intent behind her words - you need to finish 'them' as quickly as possible.

She says she and Werner sleep in separate beds at either end of the house, with their guns and knives within easy reach. Their children Francois, 18, and Jaques, 16, are at boarding school in the nearby town.

'When they were very small they learned how to use guns and how to reload,' Sonette says of her boys.

Each dawn and evening the Selzers check in on the VHF radio with other members of the Farm Watch organisation, neighbours whom they find more reliable than the South African Police Service (SAPS). The couple are heavily armed, but what good will that do them if a group of attackers assault the house in the dead of night? The home is an ill-fortified outpost 40 minutes' drive from the nearest Farm Watch neighbours or SAPS station that could respond in the event of an attack.

'You must carry your gun and your Bible together at once,' says Werner Selzer.

And at the farmers' houses I visited, when grace was said at table, a semi-automatic rifle or pistol with extra magazines was prominently on display. (Once again, it's hard to say if they are just placed there for effect.)

Werner is adamant that only he can protect his family: 'The police say don't fight back. But you must fight back. It's the bullet or be slaughtered. If you're going to rape my wife and kill my children you must understand I have nothing to lose. But you can run away. And if I shoot back you will run away.'

Since the 19th century, Boer farmers were organised into farm militias known as Commandos. These defended rural communities from assault and, just over a century ago, they formed the vanguard of the rebellion against the hated British Empire.

'We kept the British busy until they killed our women and children in the concentration camps,' one man told me. The two Boer wars were as much of a catastrophe in their minds as the crisis now facing them.

'The Afrikaner Boer doesn't like war but we will fight if we have to - and the Africans are scared of us.'

Such right-wing sentiments have done the Boers no favours under the ANC, which suspected them of links to white extremist groups such as the neo-fascist AWB. In recent years the government has moved to disband the Commando units as part of a security plan to improve policing nationwide.

The Commandos had been accused of brutality towards black farm workers; indeed, there have been reports of belligerence and abuse by white farmers, leading to a sense of reciprocity about some of the recent attacks.

Danzel Van Zyl, a senior researcher at the Human Rights Commission, says: 'There is a feeling among black people that many white people have not come to the party yet. Reconciliation has only come from one side, and this is felt especially with regard to the farming communities. They are perceived to be conservative, with a block of them voting right-wing and for parties like (the ultra-right wing) Freedom Front Plus.

'Old ways still play out in a lot of rural South Africa, where you will see farmers keeping the seat next to them in their truck for their dog, while workers sit in the back. A lot of farmers were killed by disgruntled farm workers who had been maltreated by them.'

Even in the garden you have to be alert to what's happening around you

He adds: 'The increase in farm murders is also due to the removal of the Commando system. They were notorious and feared by farm workers. But the problem is, nothing came in place of them.'

He insists there is no concerted political campaign to drive out white farmers; but all parties agree on one thing: land ownership is the burning issue.

Twenty years after the end of apartheid, whites still own about three-quarters of the country's agricultural land. The ANC has sought to redistribute land to black South Africans by legal means. In this it has followed a radically different path to that of Robert Mugabe in neighbouring Zimbabwe, where the rule of law collapsed in the last decade as gangs of state-sponsored thugs drove off 6,000 white families.

In Mpumalanga, black South Africans are lodging hundreds of legal 'land claims' in which they must prove their rights to property based on family historical records. The land claims are adjudicated in court and, if successful, the state buys out white farmers at what the property owners themselves told me was a fair price.

But as a tribe of farmers, the Boers are resisting the loss of their land because, they say, it spells the end of a way of life for a community.

And this is what they claim has sparked bloody violence that they say is politically motivated all the way to the top of the ANC. The TAU, or Transvaal Agricultural Union, draws a link between land claims and attacks.

'When there is a farm claim I say "Look out!" because attacks may follow to scare the farmers,' says TAU regional director Piet Kemp.

This after all is the country where the President, Jacob Zuma, used as his election campaign song an old war chant from his days in the ANC's military wing, Mshini wami - 'Bring me my machine-gun'. And where YouTube posts include footage of Mandela singing another song, 'Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer'.

Mugabe may be a pariah across the world but in South Africa he has long been given standing ovations and rapturous applause at ANC events.

Widow Tracey Pemberton is 41 but looks 20 years older and appears to be malnourished. She dreams of emigrating to the UK but her British husband died five years ago and she lives on a 200-hectare farm in a ramshackle cottage. The area, set among huge forests of planted pine, is so dangerous that on the main road outside Tracey's gate there are big signs that warn CRIME ALERT - NO STOPPING!

'I'm stupid to stay but I don't know where to go,' she says. 'It's awful to have to say "Who's that over there? What's that noise?" I definitely want to go. Because you're a woman and alone they take advantage of you. My husband had a British passport when he passed away. He'd had enough of struggling and failing in this country...'

By the eve of the elections that brought Zuma to power earlier this year the family had already been robbed six times over the years. Then one night Tracey was woken by noises from her mother Yvonne's room. She found a man sitting on top of the 65-year-old woman. 'I can't get that picture out of my mind.'

The attacker stabbed her mother 17 times, but miraculously she survived. Sonette Selzer rushed to the scene to help save her. But, insists Tracey, the harrassment continues. 'They switch on all the taps outside in the middle of the night to try to persuade you to go outside.' And she thinks they climb about on the roof, although it could be the branches from the oak tree brushing against the tiles.

My visit to Mpumalanga came immediately after crossing the frontier from Zimbabwe and what struck me was how similar the landscapes were after redistribution had taken place. Once productive maize fields now grow only weeds. Citrus orchards are dying, their valuable fruit rotting on the branches. Machinery lies about rusting. Irrigation pipes have been looted and farm sheds are derelict and stripped of roofing. Windbreak trees have been hacked down and roads are potholed.

Few of those being resettled on former white farms are qualified to work them. Commercial properties are becoming slums where the poor live a hand-to-mouth existence in mud huts, surrounded by subsistence patches of maize. Meanwhile, black workers are put out of their jobs without compensation.

'Now we are in big trouble,' says Messina, a black foreman at what was Figtree farm.

He says his employers had to sell, 'because their lives were in danger, definitely. This place is not safe any more.'

Messina says the land resettlement on his employers' property was orchestrated by black elite figures from town, not people close to the land.

'If you look at them they are driving smart cars. They want to look big in their four-by-fours. They say they will help us - but nothing. No job. We are suffering.'

For all South Africa's aims to be following the rule of law, there are comparisons here with Zimbabwe and other calamitous reforms under the banner of 'Africa for the Africans'.

'I saw people with heads cut off, horrible things,' says farmer Ockert van Niekerk as he sits his toddler daughter on his lap at home.

Cops tracking cases lack experience. Dockets vanish and criminals get out

'The aim is to scare white people. The attacks are not just crimes. They're political. You don't wait for a farmer for eight hours, kill him and steal a frozen chicken. In warfare you learn to soften the target, and the aim is to break us mentally and spiritually.'

But he then tells, in alarming detail, how he would respond to an attacker: 'I will cut in seconds all the main arteries: the neck, gut and groin.' He whips out two knives from either pocket. 'I feel quite safe with these.'

What the farmers dub 'hit squads' are well armed with AK-47s, deploy in gangs and if they are ever arrested they are allegedly found to be from outside the district - 'recruited', the farmers say, from cities hundreds of kilometres away.

At a farmers' day, or Boerdag, in a marquee tent surrounded by maize harvesting machinery, I meet a string of farmers with attack stories. One elderly man too scared to be identified tells me how a gang broke in at five in the morning, tied him and his wife up, then got an angle grinder from the workshop and sawed into the flesh of his legs with the blade, demanding, 'I want money! You must talk!'

One of the gang picked up the couple's mobile phone and inadvertently called their daughter, who then had to endure hearing the robbery unfold in screams and shouts.

The more brutal and incredible the stories, the more doubt creeps in: are they over-egging this for political impact? Are they perhaps deeply racist at heart? But then I remind myself: I have seen the pictures and read the local newspaper reports. I've been to the funerals.

It is said that the signs always lead down a road to the farmstead: bunches of long grass knotted like corn dolls, the strands of wire fences twisted into cat's cradle configurations, and stones, tin cans and plastic bags stacked in circle and arrow patterns.

These 'attack signs', which can supposedly warn if trouble is coming to your farm, are a macabre coded language. Farmers widely believe in their existence; they have been decoded by Special Forces veterans.

At first I wondered if the 'attack signs' story was a result of mass hysteria. But the hairs on the back of my neck stood rigid when I began to see what appeared to be sets of signs outside farms near where attacks had already occurred.

Each sign is said to mean something: a forked stick signifies a woman in the house, the corn dolls map out the farm buildings and signs dubbed 'triggers' are set to either 'off' or 'on' - meaning 'attack'.

White farmers read these runes and arm themselves because they have nothing else. New police units promised to substitute the old Commando system have yet to be formed. And people isolated on remote properties are worried by the fact that licenses for their firearms are not being renewed.

As a South African Police Service (SAPS) officer, Derek Jonker investigated 52 separate farm attacks and he says, 'There has been a decline in the abilities of the police. There is a power struggle in the police and investigators are not qualified.

'Crime prevention has collapsed totally,' he adds. 'And cops tracking cases lack experience and resources to gather evidence and arrest oenders. Dockets vanish and criminals get let out of jail.'

In the provincial town of Ermelo, I meet a policeman who's tired and angry. He says SAPS can't be bothered to fight crime any more. Only four out of 16 police vehicles at the station are still in working order. I ask what happens with the vehicles that are in working order. He shrugs and points across the street to Ermelo's main supermarket. And there they are: four police prowlers parked in a row. The police are inside doing their shopping while at a street corner crime scene that we've just come from, the blood still glistens wetly in the sunshine.

And at that murder scene I met another police officer who dismisses the idea that the ANC was involved in a conspiracy against white farmers.

It is much worse than that for South Africa as a whole, 'It's worse among the black people - all those rapes and killings,' he says. 'I feel sorry for these people. Everybody suffers, not just white people.

'You can buy an AK for a bag of maize meal. This causes hatred between blacks and whites - and this is boiling up to what? Every time it's very emotional because it's black against white, but you must think with your head and not your heart.'

As we talk I'm looking at the blood on the ground. It's the policeman's brother-in-law who just got shot.

'The whole criminal system is a balls-up for white and black people,' he says. 'We just don't need this.'

South Africa's proposed new law and order plans include better policing for those urban areas expecting visitors during the World Cup next year. It will be the most heavily policed World Cup in history, with 200,000 specially recruited officers and equipment ranging from surveillance cameras to water cannon.

But it will remain unnerving for those who travel that these brutal killings are happening within just a couple of hours' drive.

Cohabitation raciale

La Martinique, pour Noirs seulement ?

Voici quelques jours, au micro de France Inter, un universitaire martiniquais a déploré l'arrivée massive de Métropolitains (blancs) qui transformaient l'équilibre racial de certaines parties de l'île : « les Martiniquais [noirs] ne se sentent plus chez eux». Lire une critique de France Inter, ici.

Ce discours xénophobe est très répandu là où des populations noires sont majoritaires. Rien de neuf sous le soleil. En revanche, le silence des interlocuteurs de l'universitaire sur les ondes de la radio la plus politiquement correcte de France m'a laissé pantois.

Cette mansuétude contraste avec la sévérité dont a fait preuve la justice dans le cas de propos tout aussi xénophobes d'un béké cette fois. Le 9 février, le parquet de Fort-de-France a ouvert une information judiciaire pour "apologie de crime contre l'humanité et incitation à la haine raciale". rien de moins.

On peut en conclure tristement que les propos xénophobes et racistes sont autorisés quand ils sont tenus par des Noirs ou toute autre minorité « visible ». En revanche, les Blancs n'ont droit qu'au silence.

Avec cette politique du deux poids deux mesures, les Antilles vont au désastre.

L'avenir racial des îles dans l'hypothèse d'une future indépendance n'est pas rose pour autant.

Voici un intéressant papier publié par le site du Manifiesto qui révèle les tensions raciales dans l'Afrique du sud « arc en ciel ». Edifiant. Voici un extrait.

Los políticos negros propugnan hoy en día una nueva política que expropie a viejos y nuevos granjeros blancos de las tierras que sus ancestros europeos ocuparon e hicieron productivas. Robert Mugabe, que ha hundido en la absoluta miseria absoluta a Zimbabue, expropió de sus fincas a miles de pequeños y grandes granjeros, mientras que la sangre de aquellos que se negaron riegan de ignominia el suelo que habitaron. En Sudáfrica, país de paralelismos estremecedores con la antigua Rhodesia, la sangre no ha llegado al río, si bien la demagogia y la corrupción de los nuevos políticos del Congreso Nacional Africano (CNA), que jamás supieron estar a la altura de dos hombres vestidos de pragmatismo político y mano izquierda, que no de izquierdas, como fueron el afrikáner Frederik Willem de Klerk y el príncipe xhosa Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, pudiera encender una mecha que sumiría al único país africano que supo torear al caos en la miseria.

La Nación del Arco Iris votará el próximo mes de abril entre seguir por el mismo camino a la perdición que inició el CNA tras retirarse Mandela y De Klerk de la política activa, con un candidato con causas abiertas por corrupción –Jakob Zuma−; un pastor protestante, candidato del nuevo grupo surgido tras la reciente escisión del CNA en dos –el llamado COPE, Congress of the People–; Hellen Zille, alcaldesa de Ciudad del Cabo, candidata por la Alianza Democrática, a priori la más capacitada, pero la que menos opciones tendrá por ser blanca.

El CNA tiene su principal fuente de votos en los guetos negros de las grandes ciudades, donde millones de personas viven hacinadas en chabolas, sin trabajo y con la plaga de una enfermedad como el Sida que se está llevando lo mejor –y lo peor– del país. El populismo de sus dirigentes y el uso de la memoria, enarbolada como trofeo, de Madiba Mandela hace que en guetos y zonas rurales –sobre todo en estas últimas– sea difícil que un cambio profundo se manifieste… salvo la posibilidad de que los pastores adoctrinen a sus ovejas en sus iglesias para que voten al nuevo partido, COPE, con un fuerte componente cristiano-protestante.

Lo cierto es que la radicalización en el discurso del CNA y la soberbia zulú de candidato y seguidores, capaces de derramar sangre si Zuma es procesado por corrupción y no alcanza el ansiado trono presidencial –tal es el caso de las continúas declaraciones del presidente de las juventudes del CNA, Julius Malema, instando a matar por la elección de su presidente−, podrían sumir a Sudáfrica en una total devastación tras la marcha del mundialito, similar a la de Mr Marshall, si se repitieran y se acrecentaran los salvajes ataques xenófobos ocurridos el pasado mayo, en los que se quemaron vivos a inmigrantes y hasta a verdaderos ciudadanos sudafricanos de la zona de Limpopo, provincia fronteriza con Zimbabue, cuyo color de piel es más oscuro que el prototípico sudafricano y no hablan zulú.

No en vano, entre exaltados y desesperados, ya se dice que tras la muerte de Mandela, respetado hasta por las alimañas, todo cambiará, y a los blancos que en su día vinieron del norte −como los propios zulúes hicieron, conquistando con sangre toda la zona oriental del país– se les despellejará su piel rosada.