Defending Themselves

"We Turkish people are not warmongers, we're Londoners, too, but we will defend. I don't want to take on a hundred kids, but by standing there with something in your hands, it will be a deterrent. I put 11, 12 hours a day into my business. I employ four people. If anything happens to my shop, that's four families that are on the dole."

It's come to that. That London's Metropolitan Police cannot manage to counteract the insane behaviour of common thugs on the streets of the metropolis. Leaving innocent people to fend for themselves. To defend their lives and their property from the pillaging mobs who stream through neighbourhoods, expressing their defiance of society's values and their disdain of the restraining efforts of the police, overwhelmed and undermanned; impotent.

"I don't want there to be any more trouble, anyone getting hurt. I don't want any of you to fight. My son died defending the community he lived in. We're part of this community, so please go home."

Tariq Jahan, mourning the death of his son, Haroon Jahan, whom hooded cretins driving a vehicle through the streets of Birmingham - where a group of 80 people carrying weapons to defend themselves, and their property were assembled - deliberately plowed through the crowd, killing Tariq Jahan, and two brothers, Shazad Ali and Abdul Musavir.

"This used to be a good country, a fair country. Now it's getting like the Third World, there is no respect for the law. I used to rely on justice but there is no justice any more. These yobs are just ignoring the law, they are just ruining the country, ruining where they live, rubbishing their own country."

And that was Ghazanfar Ali, the father of the two brothers who had been run down and killed.

There is an online petition that 78,000 people have signed on to, calling for looters and rioters to have their state welfare payments cut off. People are white-hot with anger, bitter with dismay that those living among them, dependent on social welfare, but spurning the values of the society that supports them, have been rioting and having "fun" proving to the world around them that they can have whatever they want, and no one can stop them.

Certain it is that among the thugs that ran amok bringing chaos to the streets of Britain - torching cars and stores, and apartments with people unaware of the danger they were in, frantically jumping from open windows, trying to escape the violence with whatever belongings they could put hands on before fleeing with their children and their pets - there were young, unemployed welfare recipients.

But among the hundreds arrested there were university students , at least one social workers and other employed people - and pre-teens as well.

The Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner appealed against vigilantism. Asking people not to assume they could represent the law; that they leave that to the police. In the face of police incapacity more than adequately demonstrated when five police faced off against several hundred marauding, pillaging goons as an example, it was obvious that his request was absurd.

"Why should I be a sitting duck? fumed a Greek shopkeeper. She had at her command a thick wooden bat behind the counter of her shop. "If they come in here, I will bash them. Better bash them than let them bash you. We have to defend ourselves", she said defiantly.