Racism Obsession

                               Mark van Bommel: Modern martyr who sacrifices others for his beliefs

Jake Wallis Simons has got a problem.

If you don’t know who he is, it is of no matter. Jake’s importance lies in his representative quality.

It so happens that Jake writes a blog for the Telegraph.

Two things about Jake make him interesting:

• He precisely describes his psychosis without the least suspicion that he is mentally ill.

• His condition afflicts a majority of the British people and is spreading further.

Jake caught my attention with his remarkably lucid, wise, and profoundly insane thoughts on racism.

It was the title of his post that first caught my eye:

Yid chants are not racist. But the Jew goal is.

These two sentences sum up the solemn insanity of our modern attitude to prejudice.

Jake’s blog tackles the question of whether football fans using the word “Yid” is a serious crime or a harmless self-identification.

To illustrate the range of opinion on the issue Jake quotes several British authorities on the subject.

The football association, on the one hand, takes a hard line. They released a statement last week warning that any fans: “chanting the word ‘Yid’, perceived to have anti-Semitic overtones, could face criminal charges and long banning orders.”

David Cameron, on the other hand, asserts that: "There’s a difference between Spurs fans self-describing themselves as Yids and someone calling someone a Yid as an insult,” and he went on. “You have to be motivated by hate. Hate speech should be prosecuted but only when it’s motivated by hate.”

Oddly enough it was left to Guardian moonbat, David Baddiel, to carve out the most rational or at least most legally enforceable position: “Yid is a race-hate word. It was daubed across the East End by Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, along with the word ‘Out’. The only possible reason why a culture that has tried to dismiss other race-hate words to the margins of language would consider it acceptable is if the racism of which it is part is somehow less offensive, somehow less significant, than other racisms.”

Rational and also, for the Guardian, novel. Does this mean they are going to start getting just as upset by “cracker”, “honky” and “kuffar” as they have been about the “N-word”?

Don’t hold your breath.

Jake takes more than a few erudite column inches to patiently explain why the use of “Yid” is perfectly acceptable  and why “Jew goal,” an expression describing a goal scored in a sneaky way, is like the “N-word” totally beyond the pale.

How Many Racists Fit On A Pinhead?

The general impression you get from Jake is of the absurd intellectual contortions involved in the use of a single word. How the hell are those football fans without the benefit of an Oxbridge education supposed to work it out? And when they don't correctly interpret the liberals' Sibylline texts on the subject they become the focus for a torrent of bien pensant bile.

And as to why “kuffar” the term used by Muslims meaning something like “disgusting infidel” is not offensive to liberal sensibilities, I have only a vague  idea. I expect that it goes something like this. Because “kuffar” is used by mostly brown oppressed people about the people they wish to oppress…

Damn. I give up. I guess I’ll have to wait for the next installment of wisdom from Jake on the matter.

Liberal Idea?

              

Here’s a thought. Maybe we should stop prosecuting people for thought crimes. Maybe we should consider the following and get some perspective back:

• Racism has become unacceptable to the vast majority, because they realize the stupidity of judging somebody by their colour.

• If somebody is racist, the best way to shut them up or even better change their mind is good old social pressure.

• Merely preventing somebody from saying something hateful, does nothing to eliminate racial prejudice. It doesn’t even save the feelings of the person who is not called a “nigger bastard” of a “kuffar cunt”. They will still feel the prejudice, but in a way that is much more difficult to confront.

• It’s useful to know that somebody hates you. That's why, for example, I wouldn't want to penalise Muslim hate speech. We need to know how they really feel.

• Racist epithets are in the end just words. Is “jungle bunny” necessarily more offensive than “boring, ugly middle-aged cunt” or “lazy fat bastard”?

• You cannot legislate away people’s thoughts.

           

Nothing illustrates the obsession with racism better than an incident from last year’s Euro finals in Poland.

After Poland’s years of preparation including the construction of 4 brand new stadiums. After investing billions of euro. With millions of fans glued to their TV screens across Europe. And in front of tens of thousands of supporters many of whom had travelled across the continent to be there. In view of all that, Mark van Bommel, the Dutch captain threatened to march straight off the pitch and abandon a match if he heard a single example of racial abuse directed at his players. And such is the collective lunacy that this ridiculously dis-proportionate act of self-indulgence was regarded by most commentators as a brave and appropriate response.

Racist speech is stupid and ugly, but if you really want to live in a free country you need a thick skin.