A Couple of Rebuttals...

I was at a journalism seminar today, and there were a couple of race-related comments from participants which really got my goat, and which I feel the need to quickly respond to here. I was sorely tempted to speak up upon hearing them, but alas, I held my tongue.

The first comment came from someone who is actually a good friend of mine, but whose politics are nevertheless sometimes highly disagreeable to me. During a discussion about journalistic agendas in the media, he suddenly piped up by mentioning the anti-immigration agenda of the Daily Mail, "which borders on racism a lot of the time".

This is plain wrong. There is nothing racist about the Daily Mail. Firstly, there is a big difference between being against uncontrolled immigration - which the Mail is - and being against all immigration. And secondly, there is an even bigger difference between being opposed to uncontrolled immigration and simply hating all immigrants or foreigners - the latter being a position that the Mail has NEVER held. The myth of the "racist" Daily Mail is a long-established one, but in fact the Mail has only ever been against uncontrolled immigration and the problems that arise from it, not against immigration itself, and certainly never against immigrants as a whole. I suspect the myth of the Hateful Mail comes largely from the fact that they concentrate more pages on immigration issues that other papers, as - unlike other papers - they actually realise that it is an important issue that has lasting and significant effects on our country. And, although the liberals won't tell you this, the Mail has also several times published editorial pieces slamming the BNP as a vile, hateful, racist Party. Here is one such article. So much for the "racist" Daily Mail.

The other irksome comment came from a self-righteous liberal type, who thought he was being exceedingly clever when he pointed out the "hypocrisy" of Channel 4. During this year's Big Brother, C4 repeatedly aired feeble apologies for the fact that Emily Parr said the "N-word" (in a completely non-racist, non-threatening, copy-cat context, I might add). And yet, the commenter ranted, C4 followed Big Brother with a documentary "saying that all Muslims in the UK are closet terrorists".

I assume he was talking about the Dispatches documentary which revealed the hatred being preached in "moderate" mosques. Hatred against Jews, Christians and homosexuals, and incitements to violence against them. Imams saying that disobedient women should be beaten by their husbands. THAT is what the documentary was about. It never at any point said that all Muslims hold to these same views; its intention was simply to show the hatred that is being preached, and yet Dispatches is accused of hatred itself. Indeed, the primary purpose of such a documentary is to help moderate, peaceful Muslims, by alerting them to the spread of extremism within their ranks, so that they can weed this ideology out and work to blunt the success that hate-preaching has enjoyed in Western mosques (and of course, an examination as to just why it is that these kinds of teachings are so popular among Muslims in the first place wouldn't go amiss).

Both cases described above illustrate the liberal tendency to classify anything which might place blame or criticism on a non-Western, non-white entity as "racism" or "hatred". In their politically-correct fantasy world, it is unforgivable to suggest that people who aren't white might have done something wrong, or be responsible for their own actions, unless they are somehow the product of something WE did. It is this mindset that makes someone unwilling to consider the fact that our tolerance towards immigration shouldn't extend indefinitely. It is this mindset that makes someone unwilling to consider the fact that some supposedly moderate Muslims aren't really moderate; rather, in their minds, WE are the hateful extremists. Politically correct multiculturalism has very much taken root in this country, and it can only be to the detriment of us all.

Meanwhile, I spend ten minutes of the seminar laughing hysterically, tears streaming down my face, because someone read out a news article they had written, which was about a Chinaman called Ching Chong. Racist, me? Nah, never!