Telegraph Comment of the Week (#16)

It’s been 16 weeks since I started the Telegraph Comment of the Week and in that time, the vast majority of the comments I’ve featured here have been left by self-described ethno-nationalists who baulk at the thought of being called ‘racists’.  Yet this is what they are and there is no escape for them. No matter how hard these people try to rationalise their racism as eminently sensible and logical, they always end up making themselves look foolish as well as hate-filled.

This week’s comment was found on this blog by Alan Johnson, no not the right-wing Labour MP, but the Torygraph columnist. His mini-biography describes him as…

… the Editor of Fathom: for a deeper understanding of Israel and the region and Senior Research Fellow at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM). A professor of democratic theory and practice, he is an editorial board member of Dissent magazine, and a Senior Research Associate at The Foreign Policy Centre.

A “deeper understanding of Israel”? Come again? That is not the aim of BICOM (British Israel Communications and Research Centre), which is, for all intents and purposes, the British version of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). Like its American counterpart, BICOM acts as a propaganda and lobbying arm of the Israeli state and exists to demonize opponents of Israel’s military and social actions. Its role is to also cosmeticize Israeli brutality in the Occupied Territories and Gaza and to drum up support for a war against Iran.

The title of Johnson’s blog is designed to attract loads of frothing-at-the-mouth nationalist types who whine and moan about ‘halal’ and ‘dhimmitude’. The title is:

George Orwell betrayed: Islamist Tariq Ramadan gives a lecture in his name

Here are the opening paragraphs.

This week in London, the annual George Orwell Lecture was given by the Islamist writer Tariq Ramadan. Where is one to start?

George Orwell was against religious censorship. Tariq Ramadan campaigned successfully to cancel a production of Voltaire’s play Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophete in Geneva.

Orwell was a rational man. When Ramadan taught at the College de Saussure he argued in favour of Islamic biology over Darwin.

I’ll tell you what isn’t ‘”rational”: the tone of Johnson’s article.

Cue today’s headbanger! Today’s commenter is “journeyman” who writes:

This is the rant of a  typical BNP type. Notice the hysterical tone of the comment: the way he (I assume it was a he wrote this dreck) rails against “anti-racism” and complains of “White historical guilt”. Notice how he also falls back on Nazi-style hygiene metaphors by using the words “healthy and auto-immune defence mechanisms”. Anyone who isn’t in “journeyman’s” eyes one of ‘us’ is by definition a ‘parasite’. Yet, what these people seem to forget in their rush to claim the ‘West’ is more civilized than any other point on the compass, is the brutality that was used to subdue colonized peoples in Africa, Asia and The Americas. There was nothing ‘civilized’ about the European genocide of the American Indians or the Australian Aborigines.

When hardline right-wingers like “journeytoparanoia” rant and rave about social hygiene, it’s only a matter of time till they start playing the victim.

By doing this the Left aided and abetted in Global Capital / Corporatism’s unquenchable thrist for cheap labour and profit, by crushing any resistance to mass immigration by demonising it as ” fascist ” “bigot ” ” racist ” ” hate monger ” “nazi “

Here, our fascist friend uses words that allude to The Protocols, then he complains that he and his violent ilk are being “demonised”. There’s an old saying where I come from. ‘If the cap fits’ and the cap fits this fasho so well.

The last part of this comment is completely off-the-scale in terms of its ridiculousness.

The Capitalist billionaires who donate to Left wing causes are not “right wing ”  They are Capitalists who support Left wing agendas like the Koch Brothers or Soros who are pro-mass immigration .

The Koch Brothers are what? Left-wing? Not according to all the available information, they’re not. Naturally, “journeytothebin” closes with a much-loved phrase of the anti-immigrationist right: “mass immigration”. Nothing like an appeal to emotion, eh?

Coherent thinking is not the forte of the far-right, hence the potpourri of hate-speech and paranoid ramblings. Their ideas are produced out of hatred, prejudice and fear. They use emotional phrases to play on the heart-strings of gullible members of the public, some of whom will claim they are in favour of ‘free speech’. But in allowing these people to dominant the discourse on immigration, they unwittingly allow the entire debate to be poisoned with the rhetoric of hate and intolerance.

Remember, if you’ve seen a comment on the Telegraph website that you think qualifies as a candidate for Telegraph Comment of the Week, then post a screenshot of the comment and a link to the original article to buddyhell@hotmail.com.

Telegraph Comment of the Week (#8)

This week’s comment comes from the not-so-subtly named “Great White”, who whines about the film Rush. This comment was left on Brendan ‘Don Quixote’ O’Neill’s blog.

Rush is a film about the rivalry between 70s Formula One racing drivers Nicky Lauda and James Hunt, so it was unlikely that there would be any black people involved.  But “Great White’s”  sense of victimhood is palpable. The idea of black people being involved in anything seems to irritate him more than anything else.

The comment underneath “Great White’s” paranoid comment is a joy.  Notice the way “Great White” has chosen an image of a great white shark as his avatar. Cute, eh?

Remember if you see a comment you think should be included in the Telegraph Comment of the Week, then drop me a line at buddyhell@hotmail.com

Life on Hannan World (Part 5)

Hannan plays the victim card again

I can always tell when Dan Hannan’s bored because he starts moaning about how “lefties (a word I detest) hate the Tories”. What gets me about his oft-expressed sentiment is how he seems to feel everyone, regardless of their political complexion, should love the Tories – even respect them while they’re being repeatedly kicked in the face. But why should I or anyone else have any respect for them? He doesn’t say. He won’t say.

Today Hannan claims that “some online hatreds are prosecuted, others applauded”.  This blog hangs on the coattails of those which support Mehdi Hasan’s article in which he describes being subjected to Internet abuse (much of it on Telegraph blogs). Representing the Mambo covered Hasan’s article and the handwringing outrage that greeted it in this excellent blog. Hannan opens with,

The Guardian is again agonising over the nasty comments on its online opinion section, Comment is Free, aimed at ethnic minority contributors, especially Muslims. It has a point. You don’t have to be squeamish to be revolted by a great deal of what happens beneath the line. Here are three typical comments, posted within 20 minutes of each other on a single thread:

Jeez, have you even met any Muslims? They’re like a cross between Fagin & Goebbels.

I have always found Muslims to be nasty, selfish, lying, despicable, evil, grasping, ignorant, duplicitous wastes of oxygen.

Muslims are extremist scum. End of story.

Now that seems reasonable until you read the next paragraph.

Actually, I’ve played a little trick on you. These comments were posted on CiF in response to a piece by Tim Montgomerie, editor of ConservativeHome. In each case, I’ve changed a single word, substituting ‘Muslims’ for ‘Tories’.

Intellectually dishonest but did you expect Hannan to be anything else? He’s got plenty of form, guvnor.  But there’s more.

No, what interests me here is why the odium on CiF comment threads is so much more palpable than elsewhere – to the constant bewilderment of that section’s good-natured editors. I’m afraid it’s hard to avoid the politics: socialists, whether of the national or Leninist variety, often enjoy a good hate.

Here Hannan repeats his old saw that the ‘left’ has a monopoly on hatred. While he lays into The Guardian’s Comment is Free (CiF), he wilfully ignores the hatred expressed in the comments of Telegraph blogs. The suggestion here is that people should be prosecuted for expressing their hatred of the Tories, who continue to act as though they have divine sanction to attack the poor and the vulnerable.

As I read through this blog, it gets much worse.

No, what interests me here is why the odium on CiF comment threads is so much more palpable than elsewhere – to the constant bewilderment of that section’s good-natured editors. I’m afraid it’s hard to avoid the politics: socialists, whether of the national or Leninist variety, often enjoy a good hate.

My bold. Here he conflates socialism with Nazis. He’s done this before. Yet he would complain if anyone were to compare the Conservative Party with Mussolini’s fascists.  Furthermore, he also wilfully ignores the numbers of people in his own party who have openly expressed admiration for the Nazis. In his mind, it’s almost as if Aidan Burley and Alan Clark never existed.

I’ve already posted legion examples of some of the racist and anti-Semitic comments that regularly appear on Torygraph blogs, but Hannan seems to feel that such sentiments are worth ignoring so that he can advance his threadbare thesis. Here he tries to ram his point home,

Whenever I point this out, Lefties generally reply: ‘How can you possibly say that? Right-wingers are the biggest haters of all!’ That response is interesting on three levels. First, it’s not true. Second, it concedes the essence of the charge (yeah, we totally hate you, but you deserve it). Third, it’s a form of projection: because we hate you, you must feel the same way about us.

The Lyin’ King seems to think that his brethren don’t hate people on the left. But I could point to countless comments and articles written by right-wingers that do exactly that. Like so many of his ilk, Hannan enjoys playing the victim. He’s white and male and so is unlikely to be subjected to sexism or racism. But he persists in his risible assertion that he and his fellow travellers are being ‘victimized’ because they are Tories. If anyone is being victimized and persecuted it is the poor, the low-waged, the disabled, students, council tenants, the list goes on.

Hannan’s attempt to claim the moral high ground in this way is shamelessly hypocritical. Unable or unwilling to fathom the myriad reasons why people despise his party, he suggests (in not so many words) that any expression of hatred against the Tories should be prosecuted in the same way as other hate crimes. But Hannan has failed to grasp the fact that the Tories are not a minority ethnic group; they are a political party and they form the current government. Parties in power are not victims, they cause others to become victims through the implementation of policies that are designed to consolidate their power and that of their wealthy supporters.

Hannan’s argument, such as it is, is weaker than a day-old kitten but he’s too ignorant to see it.

UPDATE 12/7/12 @ 1350

I’ve just noticed that the Lyin’ King has changed the title of his blog to read “There are some kinds of hate-speech that Lefties openly applaud”.

Speaking of hate speech, a comment from the knuckledragging “danoconnor” has appeared on the thread. I will quote a snippet,

danoconnor

41 minutes ago

”  I sympathise with Mehdi Hassan ”

You sympathise with an alien, subversive, fifth column, trojan horse , who described Western infidel as ” cattle ”  just to test the waters to see how demoralized we’ve become  ?
And from what I hear ( I threw the TV out )  he is invited on to play Oracle of Truth on the BBC .
Allowed to use your ruse Mr.  Hannan , let’s pretend that a conservative journalist had compared Muslims to cattle .
Would he still be invited on to the BBC or writing for a newspaper ?
Or would he be just finishing a prison stretch ,and getting ready to start a probationary course in multicultural sensitivity indoctrination  ?

The pussyfication of Western civilization .
Islam’s slap-bitch .
There is no question as to who is going to lose this war .
I suppose practising the fine art of being the mental minority today will prepare us for the real McCoy a few decades down the road a way .  Practice makes perfect .
It takes two to make a clash of civilizations and one of them isn’t clashing back .

This comment has 10 likes at the time of writing. It’s also doggerel.

Life on Hannan World (Part 4) or the victimhood of the British right

The right loves to play the victim. If they aren’t complaining that the BBC is “left-wing” then they’re moaning and bitching that they can’t get their own way (which is odd given the fact they’re in power). They groan about Britain’s comedians being “left-wing” and often get their knickers in a twist about the Question Time audiences. Is there no pleasing  these people? Oh, I know what would please them… the imposition of a right-wing dictatorship run by Dan and his wibertarian chums. Or perhaps our Danny would rather a wibertarian nation ruled by some semi-fascist man-of-steel like Augusto Pinochet Ugarte?

Today, Dissembling Dan Hannan has produced this blog in which he whines,

The Australian version of BBC Question Time is called Q&A. As you can see from the above clip, filmed when I was in Sydney a couple of weeks ago, the two shows are remarkably similar in format and furniture. There are, though, two differences. First, Q&A is live, which allows for real-time interaction with electronic media. I’m not sure why QT doesn’t do the same: one of the reasons it has avoided the slide in audience share that other current affairs programmes have suffered is that it was quick to understand the importance of Twitter; the hiatus before the broadcast drains much of the drama from the online debate.

This is the UK, Danny, not Australia.

While the Australian show’s viewers are perhaps a touch more liberal and metropolitan than the general population, they don’t exhibit anything like the Left-wing militancy of their British counterparts. This is true both of the studio audience (the Australian producers invite political parties and organisations to distribute places, rather than asking applicants to state their affiliation on a form); and, far more strikingly, of those following online.

“Left-wing militancy”? He’s lost the plot. He continues,

The Internet is never a place to go for subtle and nuanced debate, of course, but something about the #bbcqt Twitter tag attracts trolls and sociopaths. It’s especially noticeable if there is a Right-of-Centre woman on the panel. When Nadine Dorries was on recently, or Emma Boon from the TaxPayers’ Alliance, they hadn’t opened their mouths before a torrent of puerile, vicious, semi-pornographic abuse began. Here’s something one doesn’t expect to write very often: we should try to be as decorous and restrained as the Australians.

Aw, diddums. The Lyin’ King doesn’t like the #bbcqt Twitter feeds. Listen, Danny Boy, if you don’t like them, then don’t read them. There is a such a thing as agency or is that word too left-wing for you? I love the way he tells us that #bbcqt “attracts trolls and sociopaths”. Let me tell you something, my little capitalist cupcake, most of the trolls and sociopaths are in your own party. Some of them take umbrage at the slightest thing. In fact, many of them are too politically correct for their own good.

These “left-wing” QT audiences are something of a myth. Perhaps he missed all those editions of QT in the shire counties? Or perhaps the mood of the country is such that it can no longer tolerate whingeing, lying Tories? I think that’s it.

Perhaps Hannan would like the QT audience to be vetted by him and some of his hand-picked supporters. Can you imagine what sort of questions he’d include on the application form?

1. Do you own a Che Guevara T-Shirt?
2. Have you now or ever been a member of the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party or any party that has the word “socialist” in the title?
3. Do you support unbridled capitalism?
4. Are you selfish?

If you answered “yes” to questions 1 and 2, Hannan’s goons will take you out back, shoot you in the head and bury you in a lime-filled pit. If you answered “yes” to questions 3 and 4, you will be allowed to take part. You may even get to meet The Lyin’ King himself.

I’ve always thought that wibertarians weren’t particularly mature and this latest outburst from Hannan serves to underline my point. Hannan will only be  happy if this country became a one-party state where the left (or what remains of it) is imprisoned, disappeared or thrown out of a helicopter or plane that has been hired by a private hit squad (it’s a free market, don’t you know?).

If you were ever in any doubt about how The Lyin’ King feels about Pinochet, then doubt no more. He managed to squeeze something about Pinochet into this blog about  Tzipi Livni, the current leader of Israel’s Kadima party.

Pinochet arrived in Britain as an ally who had supported us during the Falklands War. Koussa came as a foeman, implicated in the Lockerbie atrocity and accused of arming the IRA. Guess which one was arrested.

The Tories never tire of telling us how Pinochet was our “ally” and “friend”. Yet, they’re rather fond of telling us how socialism has killed “millions”. It’s a pissing contest and Tories love pissing contests. Point out to them the millions killed by their favourite dictators and watch them foam at the mouth and swivel their eyes a full 360 degrees.

Not wanting to be seen as an admirer of the General, Hannan says,

Never mind Pinochet: ally or not, he was a harsh and corrupt autocrat.

Was he? Well, knock me down with a feather! That didn’t stop your idol Thatcher from cosying up to him – Falklands War or no Falklands War. In fact, Hannan’s party has previous form when it comes to supporting dictators… until the dictator in question develops a mind of their own. Saddam Hussein, anyone?

So when Hannan and his buddies tell you that the QT audience is too left-wing or that the BBC is “left-wing”, you know what they’re really saying and it has nothing at all to do with ‘balance’.

POSTSCRIPT

One thing that our right-wing friends have deliberately, nay, wilfully ignored is the fact that when Labour was in power, the QT audience routinely rounded on them.  Yet I didn’t hear a single Labour MP or MEP claim that the QT audience was composed of “right-wing militants” or that the programme showed bias. Grow up.