tAKEN FROM tRU-pRINCIPLES THREAD "UPDATE ON NAPOLEON" IN NAPOLEONS FORUM
Give up your guns or face the music
Simon Kearney says policing and a campaign against the message of gangsta rap may cut crime in Sydney's suburbs
July 01, 2006
MUTAH Beale may not be familiar in mainstream circles, but to the Muslim gangs of western Sydney he is a music star. Better known as Napoleon, the offsider of slain American gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur, Beale, 29, is coming to Sydney later this month on a mission to convince notoriously violent gang members to give up their guns.
He is seen as a modern-day Cat Stevens. Until last year, Napoleon was singing about carrying his Glock pistol and praying to Allah while holding his "loaded 45"; but, like Stevens, he has recently given up music in deference to his Islamic faith and hopes by example to turn others from a life of crime.
"I come from the lifestyle where we was preaching gangsta music and also we was really doing most of that stuff," he tells Inquirer.
"The kids on the street they want to go do it, they end up in jail, or killing someone, or on drugs, something like that."
His visit is part of an effort by a Muslim youth group in Sydney's west to do something about gang violence that earlier this year led to three deaths in a spate of drive-by shootings.
The murders of two men, Bassam Chami and Ibrahim Assad, on a Granville street on March 29 led to the creation of a permanent police squad targeting Middle Eastern crime and a policy of zero tolerance.
"You've got to hit (the people responsible) at all levels," says the Middle Eastern organised crime squad's commander Ken McKay. "The blokes that are criminals have a total contempt for the law; (when) they're not doing the high-level stuff, they're driving around without licences. In the first month we've arrested over 55 people, everything from disqualified drivers to murder, drug and gun matters."
McKay rates his squad a success but it is early days. His intelligence tells him the criminal networks he's up against are unlike anything else operating in NSW.
Not everyone in the Muslim community agrees with the squad's approach. The death of Chami hit Muslim youth leader Fadi Rahman hard. He knew the promising young boxer, who he believes was putting his chequered past behind him.
Rahman believes police heavy-handedness cannot change people such as Chami, who had served a prison term for manslaughter.
"Taskforces are the totally wrong approach. What you're doing is taking a minor criminal, putting them in prison with hardened criminals, (and) when they come out they're more hardened than when they went in," Rahman says.
Beale was raised amid horrific violence, witnessing at the age of three the murder of his parents and, at 19, the 1996 drive-by killing of Tupac in Las Vegas. Later that year, his childhood friend and fellow rapper Kadafi was shot and killed in a drug-fuelled accident.
He agrees with Rahman that a tough police approach will not diminish a propensity towards violence. "The police can do anything they want, they don't stop nothing," he says. "It's really up to the people in the neighbourhood to start with one person to change, then somebody might follow him, and then somebody will follow him."
Rahman hopes more than 2000 people will turn up to hear Beale speak on July 14 at Sydney's Homebush Sports Centre. The message is simple, says Beale: ignore the music, return to your religion and look to others setting a good example.
"There's people in my neighbourhood, they used to be criminals, they used to be bank robbers, they used to be killers. They became Muslim and nobody would even hear a cuss word coming out of their mouth," he says.
"Music glorifies everything that is totally against Islam. It glorifies lying, stealing, murder, raping. They're feeding this stuff to our kids. If you listen to this stuff, you get brainwashed into believing it."
In the community the influence of artists such as Tupac is well known.
"This is all because of listening to Tupac," a middle-aged father said at the scene of another western Sydney murder in April, that of 22-year-old Iraqi Ashor Audisho.
University of Sydney academic Ian Maxwell, who has studied the influence of hip-hop music in Australia, says gangsta rap gives alienated young men an identity and a philosophy that fits neatly with their situation and beliefs.
Maxwell says gangsta rap has links with the American Nation of Islam movement and glorifies a violent life, and deaths such as Tupac's.
"It's a redemption through living violently, this idea that there's a kind of authenticity and truthfulness in living in a violent way," he says.
But former NSW detective and University of Western Sydney academic Michael Kennedy says gangsta rap is a "grossly inadequate explanation" for violence.
" (Violence) is about jobs, it's about housing, it's about public health," he says.
Unemployment among first-generation Lebanese in Sydney is high: 39 per cent of men between 25 and 44 are jobless, a Monash University study found recently.
"When the opportunities to get out of the mess are limited, they turn to crime," Kennedy says. And crime means guns.
"It's just part and parcel of being a good crook. They carry them because other people carry them. They fire them because they're worried other people will fire first or to retaliate," he says.
That is the rationale behind McKay's strategy and why members of his 108-strong squad are out on Saturday nights searching hotted-up cars up and down strips popular with young Middle Eastern men, looking for guns and drugs. And it is likely the men being searched will be wearing chunky gold jewellery and baseball caps, and listening to their American idols, gangsta rappers such as Tupac and Napoleon.
(FYI, I know three people personally that converted from Islam.... But I am sure you know better, and this isnt a religious debate, refer back to my first paragraph and learn to read.)
