In a time of universal deceit, as Orwell said, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Well folks, we indeed live in a time of near-universal deceit. Not least that the people who pose as revolutionaries are really the Establishment – and the one thing they really hate is people who tell the truth.
Especially the truth about those noble “People of Colour”.
A bitter row has engulfed some of Australia’s most senior criminologists and lawyers, with accusations of racism thrown at an academic who published a study pointing to high levels of violent crime by Sudanese-born youths in Victoria.
Stand by for the M. Night Shyamalan, Alfred Hitchcock plot twist:
The attacks have been all the more incendiary because the author of the paper, Swinburne University researcher Stephane Shepherd, is an African-Australian.
So, what did this wicked black-hatin’ black man do?
He told the truth about other black people.
Dr Shepherd is a Fulbright scholar, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, a member of the Eastern Regional Advisory Committee of the Victorian Multicultural Commission and author of dozens of academic papers on race and crime.
Last September he and co-author Benjamin Spivak published a peer-reviewed work in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology that in recent days has become the subject of acute controversy.
The authors argued that higher rates of African-Australian youth imprisonment were most likely because of an increase in violent activity by some members of that group rather than because of police profiling.
The study found there was a significantly higher rate of “crimes against the person” — such as robbery and assault — by South Sudanese-born youth compared with Australia-born youth.
Well, duh. I’ve been writing about this for more than two years. Publicly-available data shows the alarming truth: Africans in Victoria alone are 30 times more likely to commit assault than any other group; 50 times more likely to commit “motor vehicle offences” (in other words, carjacking); and a staggering 86 times more likely to commit aggravated burglary (home invasion).
It must be borne in mind, too, that those numbers are solely for African-born offenders. Australian states do not publish data on crime by ethnic groups. So, an ethnic African born in Australia is classed only as “Australian”.
Nonetheless, Dr Shepherd has demolished the Establishment lie that “racist” police are disproportionately targeting innocent Africans.
If police were unfairly targeting young African-Australians, lesser public order and drug offences would also have been expected to climb, but rates for these less serious crimes have remained stable and relatively low for South Sudanese-born youth.
The authors explicitly noted that “the overwhelming majority of Sudanese-Victorians are law-abiding” and their findings “should prompt concerted efforts to better address specific community needs”.
While the data shows that, yes, the majority of Sudanese-Victorians are law-abiding, it’s a far smaller majority than any other immigrant group. 1 in 12 Sudanese-Victorians has committed at least one crime. Less than 1 in 75 Australians has done the same.
Naturally, the left-Establishment is not about to let such inconvenient truth-telling go unpunished.
Melbourne Law School senior fellow (Indigenous programs) Amanda Porter demanded the editors and editorial board of the ANZJC “do something about the racist trollop (sic) that appears on the regular in your not-so-academic journal”.
I’d rather suggest that Dr Porter do something about her poor grasp of English. I believe the word she was looking for might be “tripe”, not “trollop” (a promiscuous woman, especially a prostitute).
Porter also tried, rather desperately, to discredit the study’s methodology, but other academics have rebuffed the criticism.
But honest academics are worryingly few. As is standard for today’s academic bullies, the first resort for most of them is the modern-day lettres de cachet.
Melbourne University criminologist Alison Young, a member of the journal’s editorial board, suggested Dr Porter should write an open letter about her concerns and invite people to sign it.
The Australian
For centuries, the bedrock principle of academia has been freedom of inquiry: freedom to ask difficult questions, no matter how much that might upset the powerful.
But, for all the leftist blither about “speaking truth to power”, the reality is that the left-in-power are resolutely speaking lies to everyone else and stamping out the truth wherever they find it.
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