The Daily Mail is an awful newspaper, and I apologise in advance for linking to it. However, whenever someone is involved in oh so terribly awful offensive racial slurs, it's usually the best at reporting them: the serious papers are quite happy to say "cunt" or "cocksucking motherfucking wanker" without asterisking at all, but whenever someone says "nigger", "Paki" or "Yid" they tend to gloss over the slur rather than repeating it.
The Mail, on the other hand, will refer to an unfortunate racial incident as "the youth suggested that Mr Barnbook should go and f*** himself in every relevant cavity, while the bigot suggested that the youth was a c***ragging worthless piece of n****r s*** who should go and get himself a f***ing job rather than sit about w***ing all day. And also that the youth's mother was a dirty c**n w**** who took it up the a*** from every gentleman with 50p to spare".
In the real, vaguely adult, world that I'm hoping most of the readers of this blog live in [*], then I'm hoping we'd go for the principle of "racial ephiphets, like all breaches of tact and civilisation, should be reported and slated, but at the same time asterisking out expletives is pathetic, Victorian-aunt behaviour". And hence I'd link to neither kind of hypocrisy. But without the Daily Mail piece, the story I'm linking to here makes no sense.
Now, I'm not asking you to share my views on the rightness of 'we stood by whilst the Germans tried to wipe out an entire race, therefore it's entirely fair enough that we should give them a country full of people who are neither us nor Germans'. I'm still distraught that the postwar settlement didn't involve carving out an Israel-sized bit of Germany, making it the Jewish homeland, and also using it as the key European US Army base - clearly the safest and fairest solution, with no drawbacks.
But sadly it didn't work like that, and instead we decided that the best recompense for the Holocaust would be to make a Jewish state somewhere full of Arabs. Sorry, Arabs! Anyway, the Arabs got cross at this and started some fights; the Jews who decided to take advantage of this special offer went for it, and hence Israel. America, feeling [INSERT REASON FOR THE US'S BLIND SUPPORT OF ISRAEL BEYOND ANY STRATEGIC REASON], decided to back said place to the hilt.
Anyway. The net result is, Arab chaps who had their land nicked are cross; some of them try and fight the people who nicked their land; but more of them, because it's easier, try and kill civilians on the other side who're on the land that got nicked. The killing of civilians is an evil and murderous piece of behaviour, as recognised by all kinds of international law. As a result, the Israelis bomb the shit out of said people.
Unfortunately, this also tends to involve bombing the shit out of civilians in the area. A lot. And as it happens, the Israeli military's approach to civilian casualties is similar to that of Sir Arthur Travis Harris Bt: they're the enemy, hence they need dead. Both are wrong [**]. Hence, civilised people tend to become cross at Israel's actions.
And so we return to the original story: Rowan Laxton getting prosecuted for his actions in the gym, whilst watching a report of the Israeli military's latest murder of a civilian. On reading the story in the Times and Grauniad, who merely suggested that Laxton used appalling and bigoted ephiphets, I'd assumed he'd shouted something unspeakably evil in order to get busted, perhaps: "fucking Yids, Hitler failed, gas the lot of 'em" - that might be considered worthy of a bit of censorship, even in a civilised society.
But the Mail article reveals that all he said, on watching some civilians whose parents made a deeply poor choice of homeland being slaughtered, was "fucking Israelis, fucking Jews". And that's enough, in this day and age, to get you done for incitement to racial hatred, fined and sacked.
Meh. It's obviously a twattish thing to say. Luckily, nobody ever makes twattish exclamations on seeing emotionally moving things. Which, weirdly, is where we came in... I'm leftier than most types about here, but still far keener on freedom than enforced PC-osity, and I hope that any idiot who's pleased to see Laxton's downfall is equally happy to see people locked up for saying "fucking terrorists, fucking Muslims".
Which, apart from the fact that a far higher proportion of Jews are Israelis than Muslims are terrorists, is a statement that's no more ignorant or offensive. And shouldn't involve getting jailed or sacked.
[*] One where we can say "cunt", no right-wing cunt will try and get us censored for taste, and no left-wing cunt will try and get us censored for misogyny...
[**] In 1940, more or less any British action would've been fair enough. But Israel and Harris both utterly fail to cross that criterion due to the unequivocal support of the world's greatest superpower. Thank you, FDR, for making Harris's actions dreadful rather than necessary.
