Posted on 12/04/2012 2:30:03 PM PST by nickcarraway
A video of a French girl being told to “speak English or die” by fellow passengers on a bus in Australia has led to condemnation by local press and politicians.
The unnamed girl was coming back from a day at the beach with friends in Melbourne when a few of the passengers on the bus, notably two men, started shouting at her for singing popular French songs.
Another passenger, Mike Nayna, filmed the whole incident, admitting afterwards that he himself had been the victim of racial insults on public transport before.
One man shouted “speak English or die” to the French girl, and following jaunts from other passengers he said: “everybody on the bus wants to kill you, and you’re going to have to get off eventually, bitch”.
While speaking on his phone, he also described the girl as fat and “as ugly as f**king sin”, and threatened to cut her breasts off.
The Prime Minister of the state of Victoria, of which Melbourne is the capital, has called the incident “absolutely shameful, and has called upon other to “give these people up so they can be brought to justice.”
Australian media has largely responded by criticizing the actions of the other bus passengers.
In an editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald, a journalist fiercely criticised the behaviour of the “idiots” on the bus and explained the incident as “mass hysteria, (due to) a deficient education or an unhappy past”.
I played the hell outta that album in high school! But even I knew then that S.O.D. Was nothing more than Anthrax having fun playing punk.
Man Bites Dog!
We Anglo-Saxons are a mean lot, aren’t we.
The French have a national policy in the books against English. Kettle calling pot black.
Really? When my sister was living in Oz, she said that the attitude of a lot of australians towards ‘abos’ was shocking, and much more socially acceptable than being racist in Britain is.
Mind you, in Britain, ranting against working-class ‘chavs’ is considered almost universally acceptable, which makes sense since snobbery and classism is the social sin that defines us more than racism ever has...
My experience living in both the UK and Australia, is that racism is no more of a problem in Australia than it is in the UK, but it’s not a particularly major problem in either country. If you go to the area of Australia where there are lots of Aboriginals, you might well see more racism but those places are not indicative of Australia as a whole.
I take anti-Aboriginal feeling very seriously - my mother was an activist during the freedom ride days of the 1960s and I was one myself (or as much as a military officer could get away with) during the land rights era of the 1970s and 1980s and I honestly don’t think it’s a major problem here anymore. We used to be almost as bad as South Africa until about 1970, but things have changed dramatically especially over the last twenty five years. There are still issues to be resolved and even if the racism totally vanished, a lot of damage still needs to be repaired but overall we’re doing pretty well now.
Classism is actually an issue in this recent case as well - the people who were responsible for the abuse directed at the French women have been categorised in the media as ‘bogans’ which is a very similar group to British chavs in terms of background and outlook.
I still remember the day we got to Montreal as EVERY canadian who applied for green cards are herded to the city when there’s a US embassy in almost every major city in canada. Go figger’..
Just remember kiddies, if you are in any Quebec city, they speak English as a courtesy to you but once you are out of the city limits, no one will bother speaking English.
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