The appearance of a muted handful of opinion pieces today about the rioting in Birmingham last weekend merely serves to highlight the fact — as Alice Miles in the Times actually says —that so few people have said anything about it at all. Indeed, there has been a striking near-silence about these events. What happened was that a rumour spread by pirate radio stations went round the Afro-Caribbean community in the run-down Lozells road area of the city that a 14 year-old black girl had been gang-raped by between three and 25 Pakistani men. Reports of what happened next are confusing and inadequate, but in the disturbances that followed a black Christian was set upon by up to 11 armed youths and stabbed to death as he walked home from the cinema, a mixed-race man was shot dead and an Asian taxi-driver was attacked.

By any standards such occurrences are deeply disturbing. If this had been white on black violence, there would have been a media feeding frenzy and the newspapers would have been full of reconstructions, analysis and instant opinions and recriminations. Instead, there has been near silence. The reason is obvious. The cult of multiculturalism holds that all minorities are victims of the majority, and therefore minorities must always be blameless. When two minorities start beating each other up, therefore, politically correct Britain is paralysed. By definition, it cannot divide up the actors in the drama into good guys and bad guys. There can be no minority bad guys. It dare not investigate what actually happened, who started it and who was to blame because no minority can ever be blamed without incurring the dreaded labels of ‘racism’ and ‘prejudice’. Furthermore, the fact that Pakistanis were involved adds a further radioactive dimension. For Pakistani, read ‘Muslim’ —and that’s a road down which the media’s finest refuse to travel, for fear of what they might be forced to discover and the consequences for them that might follow.

The result is that a serious and dangerous breakdown in community relations has not been investigated or analysed, the murder of two innocent people has been treated with near-indifference and the implications for multiculturalism all but ignored. Moreover, it may well be that the Pakistani Muslims have actually been traduced. For there is no evidence that this alleged gang-rape actually occurred. It may have done; but equally, it may simply have been an unwarranted rumour that spun out of control. But because of the absence of journalistic inquiry, we do not know. In the Telegraph, Theodore Dalrymple — whose work as a prison doctor in Birmingham means he knows what he is talking about — points out what contemporary self-censorship prevents us from facing up to: the tensions between our multicultural communities.

Relations between the two "communities" (which themselves are hardly monolithic in their composition, attitudes or conduct) are far from warm. It is the complaint of some blacks that the Pakistanis do not treat them with the respect that it is every man's due, a respect that, in the minds of at least some young men, is indistinguishable from fear. And it is certainly true that people from the Indian subcontinent are hardly free from racial prejudice, and that for many of them a black man is several rungs below the top of the human ladder - at the very bottom, in fact.

On the other hand, you don't have to speak to many shopkeepers in Lozells, or areas like it, to hear of experiences that disincline them to a favourable impression of black youth; and, like most people, they generalise from one or several bad experiences, and make assumptions about everyone who physically and culturally resembles those of whom they have had those bad experiences. The Pakistanis may not believe that the 14- year-old girl was serially raped, but they will have no difficulty at all in believing that she shoplifted.

Such are the joys of multi-culturalism. The situation has, in my view, been inflamed by years of reflex political correctness on the part of the authorities and the authors of official reports that coin phrases such as "institutionalised racism" - a blood libel, in the sense of being impossible to disprove, if ever there was one. We now live in a political culture in which a sense of grievance stands as its own justification: you are wronged if you think you are.

And Dalrymple reflects on the irony of what he thinks may have been a multicultural ‘blood libel’ — the term used for the lies spread about the Jews by Christians in the Middle Ages or in Tsarist Russia — in the unsubstantiated rumour of the gang-rape:

Of all the paradoxes of the situation, none is greater than that the Muslim traders of Lozells, among whom an unthinking anti-Semitism is probably widespread, should now find themselves in the position of the petty-trading Jews of Tsarist Russia, Moldavia and Romania.

Such indeed are the joys of a multicultural society.