Nonwhite man set fires that have killed 200 people in Australia

(Note: In another post, I explain why I write racially frank headlines such as the one for this entry.)

(Also note: According to Australian blogger Mark Richardson, the man pictured in the composite photo in the Telegraph is suspected of starting only one of the many fires that have been raging.)

Howard Sutherland writes:

Police in Victoria have released a composite photo of a suspect in the setting of the bush fires in Victoria that have killed almost 200 people.

An adept of the Religion of Peace? Looks like he might well be, if one permits oneself to indulge in visual stereotyping. It will be interesting to see how the story is covered if the arsonist is caught and does, in fact, turn out to be a guest in Australia.

UPDATE: SUSPECT HAS BEEN ARRESTED BUT POLICE ARE CONCEALING HIS IDENTITY.

And, according to the London Times story, the reason the police are concealing his identity is not, as in the case of the murder-beheading of Patrick McGee in Manchester, England, that the suspect (who in the Manchester case was initially identitied as Filipino until the Filipino reference was removed from the later version of the same news article) has been “sectioned” as mentally ill. No. the police are concealing the suspect’s identity because of their “fears of a backlash by victims seething with grief and anger.”

Backlash? Who ever heard of “backlash” against an individual suspect? Sure, sometimes a suspect has to be protected from community anger. But that’s what jails and protective custody are for. The word “backlash” plainly implies a reaction, not against the suspect as an individual, but against the group or community to which he belongs.

But then the Times has this supremely strange passage:

There are fears of an enormous backlash by mourning members of the Churchill community, angry over the fact that one of their own has been charged with the fire that devastated 36,000 ha of land, destroyed hundreds of homes and killed dozens of their friends and neighbours. [Italics added.]

As a result, the court hearing was closed and a suppression order was imposed on all details of his identity. The man was secretly transferred to Melbourne on Friday afternoon where he is expected to face court again on Monday.

“… angry over the fact that one of their own has been charged”? That makes it sound either as though the people of the community are angry at having been betrayed and hurt by a member of their own community, or that they are angry at the police for charging a member of their community with the crime. Both of which are absurd. If the suspect were in fact a member of their own community, against whom would the feared “backlash” by the community be directed? It makes absolutely no sense to say that the police fear a backlash by a community against itself.

Therefore my guess is that the Times writer, Sophie Tedmanson, has deliberately obfuscated. When she says that the members of the Churchill community are “angry over the fact that one of their own has been charged,” she is actually saying that the suspect resides in Churchill, but she is trying to make it appear that the suspect belongs to the same community or group as the victims in Churchill, which (I am guessing) is in fact is not the case. She is covering up the fact that the suspect is not a member of the Churchill or the Australian community, but is a member of some immigrant group or ethnic minority. Otherwise, the fear of a backlash would make no sense at all.

Thus, when Tedmanson wrote,

There are fears of an enormous backlash by mourning members of the Churchill community, angry over the fact that one of their own has been charged…

She was concealing and misdirecting readers’ attention from the truth, which is:

There are fears of an enormous backlash by mourning members of the Churchill community, angry over the fact that the deaths were caused by a member of ethnic minority X…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 13, 2009 08:14 AM | Send