At a more visibly heroic level we were treated to bold action by Turkish and Kurdish shopkeepers in their immigrant neighbourhood of Dalston. They didn’t need police protection because they stood up to the hoodies directly. And they defiantly kept their shops and cafés open through the worst of it.
Pakistani and other “immigrant communities” in Birmingham and elsewhere were likewise proactive. They made all England proud, by their spontaneous vigilantism, and one good effect of the riots was to remind all ethnic factions, native and foreign – Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Jew; believers and unbelievers – that they are all in this together. An attack on one is an attack on all, and so long as that is understood, the devils cannot triumph.
But the Turks, Muslims, after all, will definitely get a bump. Indeed, over at NRO’s The Corner, Andrew Stuttaford makes what strikes me as rather much of the “Turkish” defenders, even as he fails to note the reportedly “predominant” identity of the rioters. “Now, that is what I call a community,” he writes.
But not exactly an English community — at least according to this comment by a Turk explaining his role in London’s streets: “This is a Turkish Kurdish area. They come to our shops and we fight them with sticks.”
