Daily Mirror April 26 BRICK LANE BOMBING - BRITAIN WILL NOT GIVE IN TO RACISTS By OONA KING, Labour MP for Tower Hamlets TWO weeks ago a letter arrived at my office at the House of Commons. The minute I saw the stencilled lettering on the envelope marked "private and personal", I almost knew what it would contain. Inside it said: "Notice is hereby given that all non-whites and Jews must permanently leave the British Isles. When the clock strikes midnight on 31-12-1999 the White Wolves will begin to howl. When the Wolves howl, the Wolves hunt. You have been warned. Hail Britannia." As a black, Jewish MP I took the threat seriously and passed the letter on to Scotland Yard. I've had letters like this before, but I never thought such threats would be carried out in such a way. First Brixton and now Brick Lane, which is in my own constituency. Yesterday, I was meant to be travelling to Kosovo. Instead, I was witnessing a crude attempt at ethnic cleansing on my own doorstep. The shock I felt is turning to extreme anger. But although the bomb shattered property it has not ripped out the heart of the community, home to Britain's largest Bangladeshi population. This affects me not just because this is my constituency. It's also my home. I have friends here, I go to the restaurants, I drink in the cafes. Who knows what is going through the minds of the perpetrators, but I believe it's a backlash against the Lawrence report, an effort to prevent any good coming out of the inquiry which was a watershed in British race relations. We must not let these people intimidate us. We have to act as one community and to accept that community is a melting pot of cultures. Our finest hour was against Nazis. The home-grown variety must not get away with it either. The response from the police to Saturday's events has proved they are now taking the issue of racism seriously. We've had assurances that the security of ethnic groups within our community is now a priority of the Met, and there will be more police in ethnic minority areas. This affects us all, black and white. Bombs don't discriminate. ------------------------------------------------------- RecOzNet2 has a page @ http://www.green.net.au/recoznet2 and is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/ To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED], and in the body of the message, include the words: unsubscribe announce or click here mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20announce This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." RecOzNet2 is archived for members @ http://www.mail-archive.com/
