Lozzels, Birmingham

There is no stone plaque for Isiah Young-Sam aged just 23 when he was murdered. There is no swish library named after him, no eponymous charitable trust, no enobled grieving parent.

We all know of Stephen Lawrence but why not Mr Young-Sam? Is the reason that the murder of this young man slipped into the collective memory hole is not because of the way he died, which was similar to Stephen Lawrence, but because of who killed him?

While searching for something else, I found this article from a counter-jihad blog called Justify This from 2005 about disturbances in Birmingham.

The disturbances occurred when what the Guardian newspaper of the time called an ‘inflammatory rumour’ about a teenage black girl being gang raped by a group of Pakistani Musims in a shop. At a public meeting another woman piped up that she had been sexually assaulted at another ‘similar premises’ and so kicked off nights of rioting. Two black men were killed, one Mr Young-Sam was stabbed and another unnamed youth was shot dead.

Mr Young-Sam wasn’t taking part in any disturbance, he was just on his way home from the cinema when he was attacked by what has been described as ‘three carloads of Muslim men’.

Is this why Mr Young-Sam is not remembered as the innocent murder victim that he truly appears to be, because he was murdered by Muslim men? Is there a hierarchy of racist murders with White on Black at the top and Muslim on Black much further down the scale? If so then that is another example of how moral relativism is damaging our society. Where there are different standards of justice, different information disclosures, differences in how vigorously offences are investigated, depending on what ‘category’ you come into, then is there is no way this system could be described as equal justice

Mr Young-Sam appears to have been murdered for no other reason than the colour of his skin and the fact that he was considered as ‘other’ by those who attacked him. Is it just that one racist murder victim is remembered whilst others, like Mr Young-Sam, are forgotten?