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January 7th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
By
David Jones
Last updated at 12:22 AM on 7th January 2012
Among the many bouquets that were laid this week on the pavement where Stephen Lawrence’s life ebbed away, one rain-sodden tribute card caught my eye.
Written by a nameless well-wisher who compared the murdered teenager with iconic black figures such as Martin Luther King and Barack Obama, it contained the following words: ‘Because of you so many changes have come about. You gave black people hope. You gave us an equal chance in life, Stephen, thank you. You have changed Britain and opened her eyes.’
Was the writer being dreamily optimistic, I wondered, even though he qualified his comments by adding that ‘there is still a long way to go’, or is post-Lawrence Britain really the tolerant, egalitarian new nation he portrayed?
Poignant pilgrimage: Doreen Lawrence at her son’s Memorial Stone in Well Hall Road Eltham looking at all the flowers and cards left by the public
Doubtless some will argue that only a ‘black man living in white Britain’, as the writer described himself, is qualified to assess this question; not a white, middle-aged journalist.
For anyone, however, regardless of their skin colour, the legacy of Stephen’s death and the long social justice campaign that it precipitated is a matter of enormous importance and warrants close scrutiny.
On the one hand, the unabashed prejudices that Stephen’s parents, Neville and Doreen, encountered on arriving here from Jamaica half a century ago have been consigned to history.
Whereas their modest ambitions were thwarted at every turn, there is little doubt that — had he lived — their son would have been afforded the opportunity to achieve his dream of becoming a respected architect, and their surviving children, Stuart and Georgina, are now pursuing successful careers.
Notwithstanding the disgraceful racial insults for which a Liverpool footballer apologised this week, one no longer attends matches where bigoted terrace chanting and banana-throwing is the norm. In contrast, 20 years ago I sat among West Ham fans who wouldn’t accept their team had won because the goal had been scored by a black player.
Remember: Are times very different in Eltham from when Stephen Lawrence was tragically murdered?
There are no ‘Paki bashing’ mobs of roving skinheads as there were when I was a teenager; one sees far less racist graffiti and hears far fewer gratuitous insults; indeed, it is fashionable for white youths to adopt the language and appearance of black people.
Then, of course, there is the Metropolitan Police, which has done much to purge the ‘institutional racism’ identified by Sir William Macpherson during his inquiry and now advises forces around the world on the best methods of ‘colour blind’ policing practice. And yet, and yet . . .
One only needed to pick up a newspaper this week to realise that, beneath the surface, divisions remain, whether they result from a black MP’s recklessly ill-judged comment on Twitter or the alleged racial hatred of the self-styled Salford ‘psycho’ accused of shooting an Indian student.
Disturbingly, even Neville Lawrence — who raises race awareness by speaking in schools, and believes great strides have been made in the 18 years since Stephen’s death — was briefly jolted back to reality before the Old Bailey trial.
As he approached a young, white, female counter assistant at a building society in Ipswich, he told me, she began to recite the rhyme ‘Eeny, meeny, miny moe’. Though she stopped before the ‘n’ word, he was so shocked and upset that he made a complaint about the incident, which was witnessed by a friend.
Was Neville, entirely understandably given all he has gone through, seeing a looming racial taunt where none was intended? Or was this every bit as crass and vile as he insists?
The very fact that the question can still be asked shows how potent these issues remain.
And what of Greenwich, the South-East London borough where Stephen was slain, and which even before his death had become synonymous with violent white racism, by dint of many other attacks, including two chillingly similar murders?
More specifically, what of Eltham, its most notorious white enclave, where the gang that killed Stephen ruled by fear, and where the Acourt brothers, Luke Knight and Gary Dobson’s parents still live?
If race relations have improved in this insular bastion of bigotry, I reflected as I returned there after Dobson and Norris were sentenced, then there really is cause for hope.
Yesterday, Doreen Lawrence visited the spot in Eltham where her son died. While she took in the bouquets laid by well-wishers and read the heartfelt tributes, passers-by both black and white, went up to her to shake her hand and embrace her.
In 1993, when Stephen was murdered, ethnic minorities accounted for just six per cent of Eltham’s 80,000 population.
Moving: A child lays some flowers at the Stephen Lawrence memorial – the murdered teenager has been compared to icons like Barack Obama and Martin Luther King
It had been that way since World War I, when council housing estates were built for weapon factory workers at nearby Woolwich Arsenal, then handed down to sons and daughters through a policy known as ‘kinship’.
It meant that when Asian and West Indian migrants such as the Lawrences began to arrive in large numbers during the Fifties and Sixties, to fill London’s menial jobs, they were directed to surrounding areas, and a siege mentality developed.
In the early Nineties, after the Arsenal and the vast gasworks that had been the area’s other major employer closed down, and the recession bit, many young disaffected whites aligned themselves with the BNP, whose HQ was in nearby Welling.
Eltham was then, as Woolwich council leader Chris Roberts puts it, ‘a desperate place’, and the hostility towards anyone who was not white and English had spread beyond the grimmest estates to the smart, mock-Tudor houses in more affluent areas.
The year after Stephen died, a team of London University researchers reported that they were ‘surprised at the level and ubiquity of racism we encountered’, describing it as ‘open and wall-to-wall among adolescents’ in some neighbourhoods.
They also heard many groundless ‘lurid stories of black people attacking white people — rapes, muggings, burglaries’, and it was commonly accepted that Aids had been brought to Britain by a black immigrant who had sex with a monkey.
After Stephen’s murder, Greenwich council belatedly set about disinfecting Eltham and purging this incredible ignorance.
Well-wisher: Many members of the public have shown their support for the Lawrence family
They drew up a ‘Stephen Lawrence Action Plan’ of economic, social and cultural initiatives, and down the years this has been superseded by other projects. The statistics suggest they have been very effective.
Though Cllr Roberts says there has been no deliberate attempt at social engineering by allocating council houses to minority groups, the number of non-white residents has multiplied five-fold to 34 per cent.
Reported racial incidents have halved in five years, so that among London’s 32 boroughs, Greenwich now ranks 15th best for race and religious offences, whereas it was 27th in 1993.
At Crown Woods School, where black pupils ran a daily gauntlet of fear when the Acourts and Dobson stalked the corridors, almost half the pupils are now black or Asian. When Ofsted inspectors last visited, in December 2009, they were particularly impressed by the way pupils ‘got along and respected each other’s cultures and traditions’.
Walking around Eltham and talking to its residents this week, I saw heartening signs of progress — but also disturbing flashbacks of its brutally racist past.
On the Brook estate, a virtual no-go area for non-whites 18 years ago, the local newsagent told me how eight black and Asian families now inhabit his street, compared with just one when the Acourts lived there.
While we spoke, one of these incomers, Trinidadian mother Linda Baldeo, 32, came in to the shop, and a young, shaven-headed white neighbour (who declined to be named) affectionately ruffled the hair of her toddler son, and inquired about her health.
The scene seemed to personify the new spirit of racial harmony — but then the man claimed he had been mugged by a local black gang. ‘The police didn’t want to know,’ he told me, implying that matters would have been different had he been black and the attackers white.
Wending through the warren of flats on another tough estate, the Flintmill, I met Nathan Bailey, an 18-year-old black youth. In bygone years he would have been taking his life in his hands to venture there, but he said he felt ‘totally chilled’.
Another young black man, canvassing for subscriptions for the World Wide Fund for Nature, told me had knocked on more than 100 doors that evening without ever being insulted. But a mother from Sierra Leone complained of being racially abused by white youths.
In the Moonlight, an Indian takeaway beside the Well Hall Roundabout that was a video shop when Stephen and his friend Duwayne Brooks fatefully waited for a bus just yards away on the night of his murder, I had another puzzling conversation.
The owner, an articulate 40-year-old Bengali called Azrof Khan, said he was regularly branded a ‘Paki’, and worse, and had had bags of chips — and even a live frog — thrown at him by white youths.
Taken its toll: Doreen Lawrence, pictured being embraced my a member of the public, has finally got some kind of justice following her son’s murder
However, one of his customers, a 23-year-old white office worker accompanied by his black best friend, insisted Eltham’s racist reputation belonged to the past (adding, by way of proof, that he believed Dobson and Norris deserved to be hanged).
We must hope he doesn’t repeat that view in the Old Post Office pub off Eltham High Street — where Dobson and Norris used to meet the others in their gang and where the flag of St George hangs above the front door.
Last Friday, as the jury deliberated, the mood there turned ugly. ‘I dunno why they’re even bothering with the court,’ one gruff voice intoned to nods of approval. ‘We all know that black bloke was a wrong ’un. He weren’t all sweetness and light.’
Here were the types who formed white vigilante groups to ‘protect’ Eltham from supposedly black rioters last August, and who subscribe to dubious Facebook sites such as one, to which several of the girfriends of the gang members who killed Stephen Lawrence are linked, called ‘Support Our Eltham MEN’.
Though the BNP’s organisers were driven out of Welling many years ago, as a result of local protests, they have not abandoned their activities in the area, according to anti-racism campaigners, and the English Defence League is also a menacingly subversive presence.
Strive as they might to undermine the progress that has undoubtedly been made in Eltham, however, these bigoted forces seem to be fighting against the tide. That much was clear in the Mecca bingo hall, where I met Audrey Watt, aged 50, a redoubtable Jamaican mother of two sons, the youngest of whom was born a month after Stephen was killed.
In memory: There has been a large outpouring of support for the Lawrence’s following the conviction of Gary Dobson and David Norris for Stephen’s murder
Some 20 years ago, when her family moved into Rochester Way, just around the corner from the murder scene, they were the only blacks on the street, and almost every day brought threats and insults.
A nadir was reached when her oldest son, Dwight, now 27, was nine, and a gang of white youths barred his way as he tried to board a bus. Thereafter she insisted he travel to school in a taxi, and did so until he was 16. ‘It cost me a fortune,’ she laughs.
But they stuck it out and by the time her second son, Danny, now 18, started school the ambience was different. ‘He made lots of white friends and they are still his mates now,’ she says. ‘Whereas Dwight still doesn’t feel totally at ease here, Danny wouldn’t be anywhere else but Eltham. He loves it. The change in the half generation between them is incredible.’
It would seem so. For later, as I walked past the bus-stop in Well Hall Road where Stephen was ‘swallowed up’ by the gang almost 19 years ago, another young man was standing there. Like Stephen he was a bright student. Like Stephen, he was waiting for a ride home late at night. And like Stephen he was not of British descent. The only difference was that Sagar Bhandari, 21, a slightly-built Nepali, was alone on the deserted, rain-swept street.
Jail: Gary Dobson, left, and David Norris, right, have been found guilty of Stephen Lawrence’s murder this week
When I mentioned the Lawrence case and asked if he was afraid, though, he looked nonplussed.
‘Sorry, who is this man, Stephen?’ he asked, adding, as he jumped aboard the 161 to Plumstead (where the Lawrence family also once lived) that he often caught the late bus there and felt perfectly safe.
There was a time, not so long ago, when everyone in these parts knew about Stephen Lawrence, and the terrible fate that befell him.
If we have come so far that a young Asian man had never heard of the case, I reflected, perhaps Stephen’s untimely death really was the catalyst for hugely positive social change.
A change none of us could have envisaged when he was so cruelly cut down — and one that should give us all hope, just as the writer of that soggy note on the bouquet believes.
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Unfortunately I don’t think they ever will. One can always wish ! What a nice site to see Stephens mother smile.
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RIP Stephen. I hope the police get the others!
In answer to the head-line, NO! they come in all races and professions. Some are even MPs!?
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“Back to the streets of hate: At the site of her son’s murder, Doreen Lawrence was greeted by both black and white well-wishers. So have the bigots been banished at last?”… Evidently not – we still have the likes of Diane Abbott to contend with.
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Good to see that there are still kind hearted people in this world. However, I would have liked if DM didnt use ‘black and white well-wishers’ and just used ‘well-wishers’. I just wished I was there to give Doreen a big hug.
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“Back to the streets of hate: At the site of her son’s murder, Doreen Lawrence was greeted by both black and white well-wishers. So have the bigots been banished at last?”
Not according to a BBC reporter who witnessed racists hurling abuse from their cars and vans at mourners and reporters at Stephen’s memorial on Tuesday.
They’re still alive kicking and breeding.
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Lets put things in perspective, British people are not fundamentally racist, fact that some unscrupulous elements in the society decide to kill people out of ignorance should not condenm a whole country. I think this issue of racism is being over played by the politicians and the media to digress from the fundamental issues affecting both white and blacks in this country, issues that affect the overall existence of all british people.Afterall we all bleed red blood.
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What is all this rubbish you reporters write about Eltham. It IS and always HAS been a quiet decent South London suburb which has been my home since before Lawrence was killed. My daughter was friends with both one of Lawrences cousins and one of his killers and the races mixed as freely as anywhere else in London.
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As far as I’m concerned this is not about racism. This is about a police force that deliberately protected five murderers and is still protecting them. Whether the victim is black or white should not be the issue
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Was this article wrote by Diane Abbott? Why is it so surprising that a white person can give their sympathies to a Black person? The vast majority of white and black people are not racist, and a tiny minority or white and black people are.
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