BRITAIN’S RACE CARD: QUENTIN LETTS
http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/10/race-london-police-ali-dizaei-opinions-columnists-quentin-letts.html?partner=daily_newsletter
Britain’s Race Card
Quentin Letts, 02.11.10,
British policing has just been through a sorry little episode that has exposed the dangers of responding too quickly to those in senior positions who play the racial grievance card. Maybe that is true of our country as a whole.
London police commander Ali Dizaei was given a four-year prison sentence after abusing his position. Dizaei, 47, was born in Iran and came to Britain for private schooling in the early 1970s. He was the most visible Asian “copper” in the country, the son and grandson of Tehran policemen, and soon took over Britain’s National Black Police Association. He even held a university doctorate on police racism. Dr. Dizaei!
But now this showy, highly political officer is cooling his heels in custody, having been found guilty of trying to frame a man after an altercation in a London restaurant.
The story of Dizaei’s rise and fall is littered with personal arrogance and establishment appeasement. Here was an immigrant who was repeatedly given tremendous opportunities by the British state, a man who surfed to success on his minority background–and repeatedly cried “discrimination” when he encountered obstacles.
At the same time he was swaggering and boasting and generally behaving like an ostentatious bully, posing for photographs with his police cap pushed back on his head and showing off his beefy triceps. What is startling is how obvious it all was. You did not need a Ph.D. in race studies to realize this bloke was out of control. So how did he get away with it for so long?
The conviction of Dizaei this week was greeted with the popping of champagne corks at New Scotland Yard, headquarters of London’s Metropolitan Police. Dizaei had for several years been a divisive figure there, playing ethnic grievance for all it was worth. He once took issue with a senior officer who had dared to give him an order. “I take orders only from Allah,” Dizaei allegedly replied.
Rather than stand up to this outrageous bombast, the officer meekly swallowed it. Dizaei knew the British elite were terrified of multicultural cries of white prejudice.
From 1999 to 2001 his misbehavior started to run out of control, and a police corruption unit–and, say some, the security services–started spying on him. They monitored Dizaei making contact not only with criminal low-lifes but also with members of London’s diplomatic world. He was involved in the sale of the Ethiopian embassy, drove around town in a car with Liberian diplomatic numberplates and maintained a series of contacts with the Iranian embassy. The whole thing was incredibly brazen in a Third World sort of way. Yet still he prospered. Still he rose up the ranks. He claimed to be making contact with Iranian diplomats simply to discuss visas for his family. Yeah. Sure thing, commander.
The newspapers did their best. London’s tabloids reported allegations that the libidinous Dizaei consorted with “vice girls,” took drugs and misused his police credit card. This would have finished off most senior cops, but Dizaei just shrugged and said that the stories were the work of racists.
There was a tale about him queue-barging at a gas station, while off-duty, during a petrol shortage. Time and again one heard anecdotes attesting to Dizaei’s high-handed manner, his contempt for normal concepts of police behavior. He had a circle of lurid acquaintances, including a crime suspect who was said to have paid Dizaei for help. Yet on he rode, ever onward up the career path of public life.
Then the anti-corruption lot swooped, and Dizaei was suspended from his police duties in January 2001. Up went a tremendous hoo-hah from the Left about police racism. This was not long after a high-profile inquiry had found the Metropolitan Police operating a culture of “institutional racism.” Dizaei became the poster-boy of the political class’ self-mutilation about race. Hey presto, he was cleared of wrongdoing–to the astonishment of colleagues–and was paid 80,000 pounds in compensation.
Now he has gone to prison after a row with a younger man at a restaurant in west London. The man approached Commander Dizaei and sought payment of an outstanding invoice for some personal Web site work he had done for Dizaei. The commander was outraged that he had been interrupted at his dinner, and an argument ensued. It ended with Dizaei summoning police colleagues and having the young man arrested and charged with assault. Doctors later said that some alleged wounds on Dizaei’s body were self-inflicted and had not, as he said, been caused by the young man.
On the last day of his trial he arrived at the courthouse in Southwark accompanied by his wife, Shy. Great name! What made it more perfect was the fact that Shy was all glammed up like a girl going to paint the town red. To her and Dizaei’s surprise, the verdict came in “guilty,” and that night out on the town had to be canceled.
Andy Hayman, who used to run Britain’s anti-terrorism squad, said this week that Dizaei was “a violent bully and liar who abused his position of trust.” Hayman urged his former colleagues in the police to be “less frightened about dealing with racially sensitive issues. It is no longer the case that the default position of a jury is to assume that the police are racist.”
No one is going to pretend the British police force was once spotless. The abuse of Irish terrorism suspects in the 1970s showed us that. But the Dizaei case shows how a weakened institution crumbled in the face of political correctness. Dizaei has an explosive temper. Evidence not presented to the court, but since published, included a tape of a profanity-laden telephone call he made to a former girlfriend in which he was heard threatening her and her family in a vile manner. Dizaei’s bosses at new Scotland Yard must have known what sort of man he was. So why was he repeatedly promoted?
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that it was simply out of a wet-palmed fear of being accused of racism–an allegation that, even if untrue, is enough to destroy reputations in these times of liberal witch hunts.
Quentin Letts is political sketch writer and theater critic for London’s Daily Mail newspaper. A former New York bureau chief for the London Times, he is the author of Fifty People Who Buggered Up Britain
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