PEI: A nice place to live, as long as you're white.

Of course I'm talking about this:

Teen mobs disrupting lunchtimes
Last Updated Mar 21 2005 06:41 AM AST
CBC News
CHARLOTTETOWN – Crowds of rowdy teenagers are causing problems at lunchtime in the University Avenue area, and one couple says it might drive them from the province.

Tommy and Lila Ko have operated the Noodle House restaurant since they came to Canada from China 13 years ago. They are now considering selling their business and leaving town.

The teenagers are coming from two nearby schools, Queen Charlotte Junior High and Colonel Gray High School. Every lunch hour for the past month the Kos say crowds of up to several hundred young people have surrounded their restaurant.

On March 16, Tommy Ko says hundreds of snowballs started flying into his plate glass windows, disturbing lunch customers. When customers tried to stop them, the kids verbally threatened them.

The incidents are beginning to frighten Ko and his wife. He's having trouble sleeping because images of the youthful mobs haunt him when he goes to bed.

Charlottetown police say the Kos are not alone. They've been receiving many complaints in the area, not only from other businesses, but from pedestrians and drivers as well.

Last week police began videotaping the lunchtime packs to try to identify the main perpetrators.

Richard Collins, deputy chief of the Charlottetown Police Department, says the behaviour of the young people is causing serious problems, and the videotaping will resume after the March break.

Police say they plan to turn the videotapes over to school authorities and will be asking them to deal with the offenders.

(Emphasis mine.) Funny, all this time I thought it was the job of the police to “deal with the offenders” when someone does something illegal. What, exactly, would be the worst that the school could do about these little monsters? Suspend them? That'll help, sure. And as someone who, while going to that very high school, had a group of about 10-15 junior high kids follow me home at lunch throwing rocks at my back for the crime of being different and unable to defend myself I can tell you exactly what the school will do about this if left to themselves: nothing.

While people are busy patting themselves on the back for promoting racial harmony, dealing with this gets sloughed off on school principals who thus far haven't even bothered to show up to the place.

There's no excuse for this, and every single one of those kids involved has something deeply wrong with them. While it might be 10 or 20 kids who think it's a good idea to organize a mob to terrorize a poor couple trying to run a business, there are 200 people who'll blindly go along with it, and thousands more who don't lift a finger to stop it. (In another time and place, that last group was called "good Germans." Yes, I went there.)

Rob MacD has the best idea in a post here:

It would take quite a bit fewer than 200 adults to snuff out this trouble, and there'd be no need for violence. A group of 10 adults, and a couple of digital cameras, and the willingness to get involved would suffice.

If it's too late for Tommy and Lina and the Noodle House, of which I've been a huge fan since even before they officially opened their doors so many years ago, then I am deeply sad and ashamed as an Islander. We didn't come together to show that they weren't alone and helpless.

Update: Zach Stephens has set up a site at http://www.supportthenoodlehouse.org/ for people to leave notes of support / thanks.
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