Racist’, ‘sexist’ and ‘phobia’, the last one with various prefixes, are the lexical building blocks of leftist discourse. Three little words and their variants, but eliminate them from the vocabulary and the Left would have nothing much to say. It would have only its riots and assaults to make its voice heard and express what passes for its opinions.

But since those words do exist, they are played for all they are worth as a means of shouting down non-leftists. This means that social problems that the Left refuses to recognise as such, usually because they suit its purposes, go undebated, because to discuss them is invariably labelled ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ or something-phobic. It’s like the Mafia’s omertà. Enormous social damage is being done in this way right under our noses.

Take ‘racist’. This is at the heart of a classic case that’s arisen in Victoria with the emergence of ethnically definable ‘gangs’ of Somali and other African origin who roam the streets of certain Melbourne suburbs breaking into houses, smashing up parked cars and generally tearing down whatever thin veneer of civilised life can still be found in those districts. The state’s flaccid Liberal opposition, with an eye to the next election, roused itself to produce a flyer promising action against ‘gangs hunting in packs’. On cue, the Left went into overdrive, pressing the ‘racist’ button, launching an avalanche of criticism against a ‘nasty and bigoted’ attempt to ‘smear’ and ‘negatively stereotype many innocent young people’.

But ‘stereotyping’ isn’t what was intended at all. The ‘innocent young people’ aren’t the ones being complained about. They’re not out marauding, they’re playing basketball or at home doing their homework with a mug of Ovaltine. But note the disingenuous leftist technique in distorting the argument. No leftist denies that the gangs exist. Nor that Sudanese immigrants are 57 times more likely to commit aggravated robbery than anyone else. The leftist trick is to create a row about terminology to avoid discussing why this is so and what can be done about it. This is because the Left doesn’t care how much destruction the gangs wreak, since as ‘refugees’ they are a protected species, hallowed by multiculturalism. And the whole point of multiculturalism is to dilute the Anglo-Celtic monoculture Australia has inherited and ‘reconstruct’ our country in accordance with leftist prescriptions.

The accusation of ‘stereotyping’ came from an Anglican bishop who also thought the Liberals’ phrase ‘gangs hunting in packs’ was unfair because it ‘intentionally makes them sound like dangerous wild animals.’ Philip Huggins, an assistant bishop in the Melbourne diocese, has a long leftist track record and is a former (unsuccessful) Labor candidate. If he is consistent he’ll be equally disapproving of some of the animal comparisons the founder of his religion made about people He disapproved of – ‘generation of vipers’, ‘ravenous wolves,’ etc. Bishop Huggins didn’t say what he thought would be an acceptable metaphor for gang activity, but he did have a terrific idea for solving the problem. He had ‘written to’ the Liberals’ leader ‘asking him to meet a deputation of Sudanese and South Sudanese church leaders and commit himself to promoting social cohesion through multicultural harmony.’

Is this disingenuous or just plain dumb? Does it never occur to leftists that ‘multicultural harmony’ is not only turning into an oxymoron worldwide, but is clearly what these particular gangs don’t want, otherwise they wouldn’t become gangs and rampage around destroying the ‘harmony’ of their local community. Further, why would anti-social kids, whose transfer to this country and its moral minefield has too often wrenched from the control of parental or other discipline, take a blind bit of notice of anything their ‘church leaders’ might say?

Bishop Huggins was almost trampled in the rush as other lefties weighed in to cloud out the facts by bandying words. Shen Narayanasamy, ‘human rights director’ for GetUp!, gave it as her opinion that the use of the word ‘gangs’ was ‘clearly designed to dehumanise African Australians.’ Dehumanise? Isn’t that just the kind of rational helpful comment you’d expect from someone like Shen with a long history of troublemaking, sorry, advocacy, from ‘organising a student walkout against One Nation’ at her posh private school to a stint at tainted Oxfam as ‘economic justice advocacy coordinator’?

A snide device much employed by leftists is to pretend that when a conservative objects to something it’s the conservative at fault. This is the ‘if you don’t like ABC bias or bad language it’s up to you to turn your set off’ approach. Roj Amedi, a ‘senior human rights campaigner’ at something called ColourCode, denounced the Liberal flyer as ‘not just targeting adults, it’s also targeting kids, which means that young African Australians will be far less safe walking down the street.’ Presumably it’s all those householders cowering in their homes they’d feel scared of.

And don’t ask Roj and Shen and the rest what they would recommend as a racially-just way of solving the gang problem. Leftists would prefer to leave problems unsolved as long as they’re a convenient stick for bashing conservatives. Nor could leftists care less about the individual welfare of the young people in the gangs. If they cared, they would realise that unless these teenagers are rescued from that way of life their future is bleak indeed. No proper jobs, little education, perhaps a life of deprivation and petty crime. It is not ‘racist’ to formulate social policies that will save the Somali kids from that.

By the way, it’s remarkable what wonders a couple of house smash-ups will work if instead of being in the usual far-off ghetto suburbs the gangs strike in Age-reading, ABC-watching places like gracious Hawthorn. When that happened the leftists who rule Victoria snapped into action with a law to curb teenagers ‘associating’ with ‘other teenagers who’d been convicted of an offence’. Yet such is their fear of the Ros and Shen brigade that no sooner was the legislation mooted than there was a waffly denial that it was aimed at Somali gangs at all.

The West risks paying a high price for this terror of being thought ‘racist’. Somali gangs are small beer, but Islamic expansionism is not. Whole districts in Britain and Europe are now effectively subject to alien law because it was and is thought ‘racist’ to insist that all immigrants integrate with the host society. That’s the writing on the wall for parts of our own country too, if we let ourselves be silenced by the Left’s three little words.