Posts
"Marauding
migrants": UK government plumbs depths of inhumanity and
ignorance
The migrant crisis is not a threat to Britain but a human catastrophe for those fleeing for their lives, often as a result of Western intervention.
10
November, 2015
PHILLIP
Hammond's comments on migrants yesterday marked a new low in levels
of ignorance and inhumanity on the subject from a government already
plumbing the depths.
There
can rarely have been a Foreign Secretary who got elementary
demographic facts so wrong. In particular his claim that
'millions' of African 'marauders' are trying to get into Europe is a
complete fabrication.
Germany,
the favoured destination of by far the largest number of migrants
into Europe, is expected to get
a total of 400,000 asylum applications
this year. And most of these won't be from Africa.
On
the assumption that Hammond checks available figures, he must be
deliberately making things up. It has been widely reported that Just
recently Syria overtook Afghanistan as the main source of refugees
into Europe.
For
his information, neither of these countries are in Africa. In fact
according to the government's
own figures in
the last year only two out of the top five countries of origin
of refugees coming into Europe are in Africa.
Hammond
claims that a huge influx of Africans is a threat to social
stability in Britain. There are around 5,000 migrants in Calais at
the moment.
Contrary
to the media and political spin, most migrants coming to Europe
don't want to come to Britain, because it is widely known that the
government treats migrants unusually badly, with
lower levels of welfarethan
many European countries.
Experts
agree that those people fleeing for their lives who do want to come
to Britain, tend to be people who think they have a good chance of
finding work here, or already have family connections.
Police
figures suggests
that less than one per cent of the population in London have
immigration irregularities. If this is correct then the usual
figures quoted for the number of 'illegal immigrants' in Britain are
hugely inflated. And the overwhelming majority of these don't go
anywhere near the channel tunnel. 80% enter the country legally.
The
migrant crisis is not a threat to Britain but a human catastrophe
for those fleeing for their lives. Apart from creating a poisonous
anti immigrant atmosphere, perhaps one of the reasons that Hammond
is distorting the facts is that he wants to obscure the causes of
the current crisis.
Reading
the actual list of the refugees' main countries of origin -
Syria, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iraq, Iran, Egypt according
to research
by Sky News -
it is quite clear that western wars are one of the main drivers of
these huge flows of desperate people.
Many
of these countries have been devastated by wars pursued by
successive British and other Western governments.
If
anyone was in any doubt, today's revelation
that British soldiers have been fighting in Syria without
the knowledge - let alone the agreement - of parliament, underlines
the current government's commitment to continued foreign aggression.
The
terrible plight of those fleeing war is one more reason to
strengthen the campaign against further intervention.
Source:
Stop the War Coalition
What happens when you comment on Daily Mail articles with actual Nazi propaganda
10 November, 2015
TL;DR: They get up-voted... a lot
We've highlighted how in the last few weeks, media coverage of migration into Europe has become increasingly alarmist, not helped by our prime minister using language more associated with the far-right.
The anti-migrant sentiment expressed in some papers became too much for the people behind the @bestofthemail and @dmreporter Twitter accounts, who prefer to remain anonymous.
In a post on Medium, they detailed an experiment conducted on the comments section of the Daily Mail website to show the dangers of this dehumanising language becoming normalised.
They wrote:
[We] wanted to see what level of support the comments would get if we took some famous pieces of Nazi propaganda and changed the word 'Jew' with 'migrant'.
Here's what happened:
Yes, that quote has received 193 up-votes.
They got more blatant, yet the up-votes kept on coming:
And then Adolf Hitler himself was quoted:
The last time they counted, they received 480 up-votes compared to 16 down-votes for right Nazi comments.
In an email to i100.co.uk, @BestoftheMail said:
In recent weeks we were both fairly shocked by the tone of much of the migrant debate, especially the dehumanising and hateful nature of the language used to describe them. We wanted to illustrate how easy it is for hate speech to become normalised and show the importance of focusing on the people and the facts rather than resorting to prejudice.
@DMReporter told us:
What really interested us was the amount of support these comments were getting. Every website gets comments like this submitted but what struck us most was the enthusiastic manner in which they were accepted. They were just knee-jerk approvals instead of any considered thought about what sort of comment they were actually agreeing with.
The Mail is hardly unique in this respect. One of worst examples in recent memory was from Sun columnist Katie Hopkins, whose description of migrants as "cockroaches" led to accusations she was adopting the tone and language of the Third Reich. On a liberal medium such as Twitter, the comments are enough to make you despair, and even on the Independent website.
Mail Online later stopped @DMReporter from making further comments on its site for "going against the community guidelines".
BANNED: Fury as the Daily Mail bans me from leaving comments on MailOnline… cc @BestoftheMail #BadgeOfHonour
The most extreme posts were blocked by Mail Online moderators, and there's nothing to suggest the views posted were condoned by the Daily Mail.
We Were Upvoted for Posting Nazi Propaganda about Migrants in the Daily Mail
Over the past couple of weeks, @DMReporter and I have been getting more and more aghast by the tone of some of the coverage of the migration in Europe. This is especially apparent in newspaper comment sections where it now seems that literally anything goes.
You can fantasise about how you want to kill them:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.