Europe Can’t Avoid Immigration
Restrictionist rhetoric that would be unthinkable in the U.S. has moved into mainstream European publications.
If Ann Coulter had neither a law degree nor some fear of being parked permanently beyond the pale of respectable discourse, she might write like Katie Hopkins. The latter, a British columnist for the Murdoch tabloid The Sun is now in heavy soup for penning a scabrous column about African migrants, which by chance happened to be published a few days before a large boat of such migrants sunk in the Mediterranean, drowning at least 700. Before that tragic event, Hopkins had let fly what she thought about the people from the southern continent scrambling to seek asylum in Europe:
NO, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad.I still don’t care.Because in the next minute you’ll show me pictures of aggressive young men at Calais, spreading like norovirus on a cruise ship.Watching them try to clamber on to British lorries and steal their way into the UK, do I feel pity? Only for the British drivers, who get hit with a fine every time one of this plague of feral humans ends up in their truck.
She went on to liken the would-be migrants’ tough durability to that of cockroaches, suggested they be deterred at sea by gunboats rather than met by rescuers, etc. Unsurprisingly, bien-pensant Britain has worked itself into a fury like nothing seen before; several online petitions with thousands of signers are demanding The Sun “redeem” itself by sacking Hopkins, while a group called the Society of Black Lawyers is trying to get her prosecuted for inciting racial hatred. It might help Hopkins that she is a columnist who trades regularly in the outrageous, which includes thoughts that many people actually think. She once wrote that dementia victims take up hospital space and should be euthanized. She is also not writing for American Renaissance, but for Britain’s largest selling newspaper.
I have prior experience criticizing immigration for a Murdoch-owned tabloid, and found no readiness at the top to support someone promoting immigration restrictionist views. Of course I didn’t write like Hopkins, but in a more measured and deliberate style, with statistics about wage rates and school performance, and quotations from George Kennan and Eugene McCarthy. But that was in New York, in the mid-1990s. There are as yet no signs the Murdoch operation will pull the plug on Katie Hopkins in today’s London. It goes without saying that it is insensitive and vulgar to liken would-be migrants to cockroaches, inviting the inevitable Nazi comparisons which thousands in Britain are making.
Nevertheless there is the matter of massive African and North African migration to Europe, and all the politically correct censorship in the world won’t make it go away. ...
Posts
