Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

We are all victims of institutional anti-racism

Rod Liddle says that the story of the disgraced Met commander Ali Dizaei shows the pervasive and pernicious influence of our obsession with ethnicity

issue 13 February 2010

I don’t suppose that anyone is about to build a community centre in commemoration of Waad al-Baghdadi, but maybe they should. There’s one for Stephen Lawrence, constructed as a token of our disgust at what Sir William Macpherson called the ‘institutional racism’ of the Metropolitan Police. Lawrence’s murder was not competently investigated by the Old Bill at least in part, Macpherson argued, for institutionally racist reasons, borrowing the phrase from the borderline psychotic black American activist Stokely Carmichael. Mr al-Baghdadi, meanwhile, was not killed by anyone, but he was smacked around a bit by a copper. He showed great bravery in pursuing that policeman and eventually seeing him convicted — and revealing to the world a no less corrupting philosophy, the sort of mulatto bastard offspring of institutional racism, or maybe its anti-matter twin — institutional anti-racism. A child begot with the best of intentions, for sure, but which has now reached a rather problematic adolescence.

By ‘institutional anti-racism’ I do not mean people not being racist — that, we might all agree, is a good thing. I mean the state of mind which connives in wickedness, which is in a perpetual state of denial, which turns the other way, which does all this stuff because of the terror, the career-ending calumny, the shame of being accused of being ‘racist’. It’s certainly rife in the Metropolitan Police, but way beyond that too.

The Met commander Ali Dizaei was a corrupt copper, a bully, a liar, a thug, a swaggering braggart and, most importantly of all, a criminal. He is, at last, behind bars and likely to remain there for a couple of years. Astonishingly he has not yet been sacked by the force which employed him and which, time and time again, overlooked serious evidence against him because it feared that Dizaei would immediately play the race card, would accuse them all of being racist.

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