Riots and diversity

Pat Buchanan on the riots in Britain:

Thousands of hoodlums, thugs and criminals have firebombed buildings, looted stores and stripped, beaten and robbed people for no reason other than that they were white.

Overwhelmed cops virtually surrendered the city for three days. By the fourth night, the rampage had taken on a multiethnic cast as Asians and white trash appeared to join in the festival of criminality.

Asian and black store owners, too, are victims. In Birmingham, three Pakistani men defending their neighborhood were run over and killed by a truck reportedly driven by a black rioter.

In a country-and-gospel tune recalled often in the '60s, the one that gave James Baldwin the title of his polemic, this couplet appears:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign,

No more water, the fire next time.

A half-century after the long hot summers of the 1960s and two decades after the worst riot in U.S. history since the New York draft riots of 1863—the Los Angeles riot of 1992, in which blacks and Hispanics attacked Koreans and whites—the "next time" may have arrived.

In Europe, the harbinger of the new century came a half-decade ago when North African youths in the Paris banlieues went on a days-long rampage of firebombing cars and attacking police and firemen, many of whom drove off and let the fires burn out.

This week, it was London's turn. And when the fires burn out, we shall hear anew the old liberal litany about poverty, despair, inequality and unemployment, the excuses that long ago ceased to persuade.

For poverty existed in far greater measure in the Depression. Yet our parents and grandparents did not form mobs to burn, beat and loot.

The West is in decline because the character of its people is in decline. In Europe, Christianity is dead. The moral code it gave men to live righteously is regarded with mockery. The London riots were the work of moral barbarians with no loyalty to the people in whose midst they live and no love for the society to which they give nothing, only take.

In America, millions of fatherless young seek out in gangs the familial ties they never knew. Those gangs are now almost always formed on the basis of ethnicity or race.

What were the British thinking when they threw open their doors to mass immigration from the Third World?