Mate, wheres all your worldly experience?

On what basis do you provide all these assumptions?

Dont try and reverse engineer satire and humour, youll find there is no dark side to it nor dark intentions, we love to laugh at ourselves and others.

Every monority group, ethnic group and type and class of person has a long list of jokes about them. Absolutely everyone.

I know plenty of aussie jokes, queensland jokes and kiwi jokes, country people jokes, the list goes on and noone is spared when it comes to humour.

2 mates come to mind when i think of racist jokes. A mate at uni was lebanese and was one of the funniest blokes ive met, he had more lebo jokes than anyone, and he laughes his guts out at them. See, when your comfortable with who you are in your own skin, you can laugh at things that are meant to be satire. I also went to school with (along with being Koori myself) plenty of Kooris that loved the jokes about aboriginals, and whilst the odd joke may have been in bad taste, you dont feel very targetted when almost every group, minority and the like have a whole bunch of jokes associated with them.

Do irish people get upset that they are stereotyped in jokes as being dumb? no. Do most groups realy get upset and take it personal? lets be honest here, unless they are exremely insecure with themselves jokes are just cheap laughs that 99% of us love.

Was this a uni assignment or something, or a debate where you where forced to be the negative? Why would you bother otherwise? I hope you do more with your time mate, like pull apart some real issues, instead of looking for cheap angles.

Civic Engagement at local levels is a key to developing community safe communities.

The Realist needs to look deeper. We are not talking about the jokes as much as the harm of labels and the way minority groups and citizens who are different, are as you said Ryan;

"stereotyped negatively and excluded on a social level".

This is because;

"Words operate as actions holding influential power over the social conscience".

We will never clean up the violence on the street until we clean up the structural violence.

In this case the violence of government administrations, such as a police force, that minimise people’s issues or concerns through labels and perceptions based on negative stereotyping the profiles of our citizens.

Improving our awareness on these issues is critical if we intend to become an inclusive rather than an exclusive society.

Many people don’t trust the police because of the way they are treated or percieved.

While I respect the work of police, I find they do not engage at a local level with citizens, unless there is a crime… meaning; the police at community levels often lack the research, depth and understanding necessary to profile the complex relationship that culture has in local community affairs.

This breeds apathy and a double faced profile on fear. ie: People are scared of a/the perpetrators and scared of police. They often become Jammed or Trapped between Two Worlds. A Twight-lite Zone.

Worse still, many might feel Powerless and become Disconnected from those who might BE ABLE to assist them solve problems the most.

People are often vitamised because they don't always go to the police.

It also means the police end up working at crisis levels (after a crime has occurred) more often, than with crime prevention itself.

Dam good article Ryan, keep up the good work.

This character would have us believe that racial jokes come only from people who are NOT Middle-Eastern or Australian aboriginal. Nonsense of course: there is abundant stereotyping of Caucasians by middle-easterners and aborigines. And there is a lot of hatred directed against ‘mainstream Australians’ by Middle-Easterners and aborigines.

Natour himself is doing a bit of stereotyping by writing this pathetic, bleating article.

I heard people of ‘Caucasian appearance’ (read white Australians) mentioned several time last night on the news with regard to people the police were looking for in connection with offences.

Get a grip, sonny, and get that huge chip of your shoulder!

This subject is old hat – done to death. No substance to it whatsoever.

While the article may be overstating the case, I do wonder about the usefulness (or otherwise) of those descriptions you see in media reports of various crimes.

For example, when that Sudanese refugee was bashed (and later died) outside a hotel in Parramatta, the report said that the suspects were "some of middle eastern and some of pacific islander appearance". How unhelpful is that? How many people in Sydney answer that description?

And here's an even better one: about 6 months ago a man tried unsuccessfully to assault a couple of young girls in a park in Sydney. The description in the media was of a caucasian man in his thirties or forties wearing an orange t-shirt. Again, how useless is that? There could be half a million people in Sydney who would fit this description if they put on an orange shirt.

So I often wonder whether the media just puts these things in to create the illusion that they are providing useful information, when in fact it is nothing but "filler".

Cheers!

“We only need to consult statistics to find Aboriginal people have unacceptably high incarceration rates when compared to mainstream Australia.”

The only valid test is to compare the “participation rate” to the "incarceration rate". If female pensioners were as reckless and willful as aborigines they would have similar “high incarceration rates”.

However, I bet anything you will find the far fewer a proportion of female pensioners are involved in the execution of felonious acts than aborigines.

As for profiling, it is a cost effective way of managing social risk. Again, why would we expect police to squander their time on a social profile which is inherently known to be comparatively “criminal free”?

I want the police to spend my taxes, prudently. Focusing their attention on apprehending criminals, not apprehending non-criminals.

Beyond that, Realist and Leigh has already answered all that I would wish to say.

Middle Eastern muslim males are not Milquetoasts; try and steal a bit of their footpath and you’ll understand what I mean.

An incident at Auburn where police tried to detain some Middle Eastern males may have shaped the way police respond to encounters with Middle Eastern people. In that incident the males used their mobile phones to call for ‘support’ and before too long a crowd of Middle Eastern people had formed. A muslim lady even turned her garden hose on the police. I wonder why police now call for back-up when dealing with testosterone-charged Middle Eastern males.
Mr El-Masri, adopting the hairy-chested Middle Eastern muslim male demeanor, declined to volunteer a DNA sample during a police investigation a couple of years ago. He became indignant and said that as a good muslim he was in his motel room during the time of the alleged incident. Juxtapose his reaction to the reactions of the males living at Wee Waa, NSW. When a lady was raped in that country town the police asked males to volunteer DNA samples. In the spirit of cooperation the males of the town volunteered and I don't recall any white males of anglo Australian appearance running to the newspaper crying about discrimination. The same cooperation was evident on Norfolk Island. Not so long ago there was a murder on Norfolk Island and police asked for males on Norfolk Island to volunteer DNA samples. Did any white men of anglo Australian appearance run to the media screaming discrimination?

As a muslim (for the next 6 hours) it hurts me to say that as a group muslims with a Middle Eastern background are immiscible with Western culture.