Dogwash

I was half-listening to Eddie Mair and Jennifer Tracey's iPM programme on the steam wireless the other day. iPM is very much a characteristic Mair vehicle, an irreverent light-touch spin-off from the mainstream afternoon news programme PM which pursues "human interest" anecdotes, largely suggested by listeners. The iPM programme has been collecting listener suggestions for its own "new year's honour award". One of the nominees was a chap who has started up an online social networking site for ex-servicemen.

As I say I was, as ever, only half-listening so I don't recall the chap's name or details. But my little pointed ears pricked up when he started going on about his experience with fending off the BNP and the EDL. He cited as an example a supposed "EDL" troll on his site who had been complaining about the lenient treatment of Muslims by the courts, comparing this with the case of two White men banged up for 12 months for spray-painting poppy images onto a mosque. This, asserted our candidate hero, was a totally made-up story. It had never happened. He had, he said, investigated it and could vouch for its fictitiositude.

Oh yes, I thought. I remember that story. It seemed real enough to me. So I did a bit of googling to reinvigorate the old neural pathways and came across, among others, the Hoax-Slayer site, which seems to be a sort of one-man Snopes run by an Australian busybody called Brett Christensen.

Mr Christensen attempts to deconstruct the odious comparison between the cases of Vasey and Smith (the poppy sprayers), who were sent down for 12 months with that of Tohseef Shah, who painted the slogan "Islam will dominate the world – Osama is on his way" on a war memorial and was made to pay approximately £600 in compensation and told not to be a naughty boy. Fair enough, Vasey and Smith had also committed vandalism against other "Asian" buildings, but the key distinction is that Vasey and Smith's crime was deemed to be racially aggravated, while that of Shah was not.

It is worth looking at the CPS's reasoning in the latter case,

“The CPS specialist unit was sent the pictures, as well as his mobile phone records, to see if there was a racially or religiously motivated connotation.

“It was decided there was not enough evidence to prove this, and they decided it was politically motivated."

Now there's subtle, look you. I shall have to remember that for next time I'm up before the beak for being rude to a wog. "I was not being racist, Your Exiguousness, I was merely employing Mr Khan as a proxy for the late Osama bin Laden, the latter gentleman being unavailable. My comments were therefore political in intent."

A spokesman for the CPS said: “While it was appreciated that what was sprayed on the memorial may have been perceived by some to be part of a racial or religious incident, no racial or religious group can be shown to have been targeted.”

Ah yes, the British, the people who don't exist, innit.

You do begin to wonder who's running the CPS and to what purpose. Well, not for me to cast nasturtiums, but here's an interesting post at Casuals United

We get an insight from an email we recieved from an ex employee of the CPS

“The new “Director of Diversity” decided she could earn brownie points by downgrading all the senior caseworker posts and making them junior posts. Ostensibly this was to cut the wage bill. It also had the effect of getting rid of all part-timers and anybody with a family friendly work pattern. The Family friendly policy was SO last year! She wasn’t the only one making cuts, nearly 1000 of us went in the department in the course of a year. But it had the secondary effect of ridding the department of experienced, mature staff, who were mostly white, because we had been there since the 80s and the junior replacements were recruited with ‘diversity’ criteria in mind. I had got used to not hearing English spoken around me on the tube – during this period I started to find the same thing in the office lift and canteen queue”

The above cases and this from an ex employee PROVE that the CPS has become a politically correct organisation who are clearly not interested in prosecuting anyone for racial offences other than white people. It should be scrapped. End of.

One law for all.

You may make what you will of that. I couldn't possibly comment.

Apologists for Rhea Page's assailants have argued in a comparable way to Mr Christensen, dredging up examples where groups of attackers have been spared jail due to perceived mitigating circumstances. (I had a link for this but in my cack-handed way I'm afraid I've mislaid it.)

I have no problem with the principle of mitigation as such, and I am wary of passing judgement on the basis of newspaper reports. Even the most conscientious report will necessarily be incomplete, never mind one in the Daily Mail. However, judging from their photographs and the CCTV footage, I am having some difficulty convincing myself that this particular coven of violent Somali painted jezebels were in reality the group of shy, chaste and naïve young muslimas temporarily led astray by bright lights, infidel temptations and unfamiliarity with the demon drink that we are asked to believe in.

But that's not really the point, is it? Despite their racially-charged language, including "Kill the white slag", no less, their offence was not deemed to be "racially aggravated". In my not particularly humble opinion, the concept of racially (or religiously, etc) aggravated offences would be fragile and socially divisive even it were applied with visibly scrupulous impartiality. In a situation where one "community", in this case the White British, has anecdotal but credible (or at the very least not convincingly discredited) reason to believe that it is being actively discriminated against, it is a recipe for disaster.



Oh, and one bonus point to finish with. Back briefly to Mr Christensen. In his efforts to demonstrate that White racists are not treated disproportionately badly, he cites the case of Ryan Austin,

For example, if the message had compared the Shah and Choudhury cases with another case in which Sunderland man Ryan Austin sprayed racist grafitti on a Mosque, its power would have been considerably curtailed. As with Shah and Choudhur, Austin was not sent to prison. He received only a fine for his crime.

Did you actually read your link, Brett? Mr Austin, full name Ryan Zahid Austin, is an Anglo-Pakistani half-caste, confused by his multicultural upbringing and largely rejected by his peer groups of both ethnicities, whose crime was motivated by revenge against his decamped Pakistani father. Hardly your average White chav, eh?

Must try harder.