The Sunday Morning politics shows were dominated by one particular theme. Can you imagine Seumas Milne and the gang devising their post-local-election strategy? Brainstorming, you might say. “Let’s go with Pendlegate! That should stop people whining about antisemitism.”
So we had John McDonnell and Barry Gardiner acting as if they had been gravely affronted, with a similar amount of outrage from Andrew Marr, Robert Peston, and Sarah Smith.
The offending tweet was too, too awful to describe, horribly racist, unrepeatable and pass the smelling salts, Mildred. Not terrible enough to be redacted or permanently banished to room 101 though. You could see it in its full glory on Guido.
Several precious moments of air-time were devoted to the implications of this despicable tweet, which everyone found too obnoxious to describe but insisted that the nature of it totally discredits the Conservatives who are now (thankfully) just as toxic as Labour.
The level of this discourse typifies the superficiality we’re supposed to accept as journalistic scrutiny.
The racist joke is no longer just a racist joke. Now, according to the pundits, it represents the “views” of the lady who was dumb enough to tweet the joke rather than simply recounting it while pissed, in the pub. People come back from pubs with ten-a-penny jokes like that all the time, (so I hear) and despite being (or maybe because) they’re racist, they’re deemed worth repeating because they are funny, in an absurdist way.
Let’s look at the joke. (It was a JOKE).
The dog fits the supposed criteria for dole, and for that 'unarguable' reason, he’s given it. There you have a racist and absurdist joke. I'm not justifying the tweet, the joke or the lady, by the way. Just pointing out the way it has been, to use a fashionable term, 'weaponised'.
The undeniably racist element of the joke is that brown people, (impliedly immigrants) are workshy, unwilling to learn the language and smelly, and the perception is that “they” are unworthy of the hand-outs they’re supposedly being given, willy-nilly; the theme is society’s underlying resentment thereof.
However, the way the joke is constructed, the humour is principally absurdist, which is why it is amusing.
The antisemitism in Labour doesn’t even have the saving grace of being in the form of a joke. It’s straightforward, unadulterated Jew hate, and it’s not even mildly funny.
The BBC should consider this opinion:
ReplyDeleteDr Peterson said hate speech laws were “bad enough”. “Who is going to regulate it? Who is going to define it? I know the answer to that — the last people in the world you would want to,” he said.
That’s one councillor look hard enough and the MSM will find aonther 10 idiots to hound and it still won’t in anyway match the number of Labour members willing to post Anti Semitic rubbish.
ReplyDeleteIt may be "absurdist" however its implication is quite prejudiced and nasty. It is not "hate speech" though. Just not in good taste. I would not vote for someone who posted this, because I would be "offended" that someone offering themselves as my representative is that stupid that they did not think first about posting this online!
ReplyDeleteStupid, peurile, and not exactly a reason to vote for the perpetrator...however, not the crime of the century. Today on BBC World Service, there was some very racist talk about "white geeks" who, apparently were too clever, at least that seemed to be the complaint, and should get out of the tech kitchen, so to speak. The presenter seemed to find it amusing, though it was clearly offensive to any white person working hard in robotics and related fields.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Anon about this. It was an astonishingly stupid tweet. Even if there is no real equivalence, the left will grab any opportunity to accuse the Conservative party of racism in order to counter the problems of anti-Semitism within their own ranks. You might not like it, but I am afraid that's what will happen. This was only too evident on today’s Sunday Politics. The spokesperson for the Guardian more or less claimed, without producing any evidence that anti- Semitism in the Labour Party is counterbalanced by Islamophobia in the Conservative Party. This is just fuel for that cause.
ReplyDeleteFollowing the link above to Guido, I saw a headline "Hatred can’t be policed" which contained a link to this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921
ReplyDeleteA teenager who posted rap lyrics which included racist language on Instagram has been found guilty of sending a grossly offensive message.Chelsea Russell, 19, from Liverpool posted the lyric from Snap Dogg's I'm Trippin' to pay tribute to a boy who died in a road crash, a court heard. The lyrics were ‘kill a snitch n**** and rob a rich n****.’ She said: “Young people across Liverpool use the word to greet each other. I listen to rap music and it’s in every single song.” Hah! I wonder where she hears it.
She was given a community order and put on curfew.
The case was handled by a female constable whose brother Anthony Walker was murdered in a race crime. Even more extraordinarily, "PC Walker also asked Carole Clarke, defending, not to use the word n**** in the court because she found it so offensive."
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/woman-who-posted-rap-lyrics-14543694
Racism, made up neoMarxist tool to sow division. Ah and some gimmegrants are dirty dogs, that's why their here.
ReplyDeleteTo claim that racism doesn’t exist and is nothing more than an invention of neo-Marxists is patently absurd. You are shutting down the argument just as surely as those on the left who seek to narrow down and refine the term to their own political ends. You then compound this with the use of words such as “gimmegrants” and “dirty dogs”. The reason why it was impossible to have a sensible debate on immigration for decades was not just because of the liberal left shutting down the debate with cries of racism, but because of people like you.
Delete