Dogwash

The Righteous, inclluding Sunny-Ji and the well-known political solipsist Richard Seymour as well as some geezer I've never heard of before, are lining up to express their outrage at the prosecution of Azhar Ahmed for making offensive remarks on Faceache about the six British soldiers recently killed by a mine or IED in Afghanistan, remarks which the police and/or CPS have construed as a "racially aggravated public order offence". Expect a couple of anguished pieces on CiF over the next few days.

Now at one level I'm entirely in agreement with these fine upstanding liberal commentators. The prosecution is a nonsense. A — how can I express this without getting myself arrested — an intermperate, illiterate young Paki mouths off in inarticulate, inaccurate and deeply offensive terms.

People gassin about the deaths of Soldiers! What about the the innocent familys who have been brutally killed... The women who have been raped... The children who have been sliced up...! Your enemy's were the Taliban not innocent harmful familys. All soldiers should DIE & go to HELL! THE LOWLIFE FOKKIN SCUM! gotta problem go cry at your soldiers grave & wish him hell because thats where he is going...

I can see a lot of White people being offended by this stuff, but I expect the physical outcome to be a certain amount of dismissive swearing rather than a general pogrom against Darkies. And as to Muslims being incited into violent unrest, well there are those who can incite themselves effectively enough without the aid of this pipsqueak, and there are those who, even if they become aware of the matter at all, will simply carry on running their kebab shops, driving their minicabs, and watching Pakistani TV on the satellite.

So no, I don't think this should be prosecuted.

But then again, I don't think bad tempered shouty stuff by White people should generally be prosecuted either. Remember Emma West, out of the limelight now but still awaiting trial, charged with a racially aggravated public order offence, for whingeing in an unseemly manner on a tram? I don't recall the outrage among the Righteous about the state's overreaction to that incident.

But now somebody "on your side" has been hurt by the overweening hate legislation, and you're crying about it. Diddums.

Seymour whines:

Azhar Ahmed is the latest victim of a concerted effort to re-define racism as "anything that could conceivably offend white people". Ahmed is being prosecuted by police over a statement he made on Facebook. The police say it is a "racially aggravated public order offence".

Look at the statement. There is not a hint of racism in it. To make it racist, one would have to assume that the troops were not just exclusively white, but somehow the bearer of whiteness in its essence. Maybe they are in this day and age; maybe it is through imperialist action and its effects both domestically and internationally that whiteness is produced. But the second assumption one would have to make is that white people are the victims of racist oppression by black people, Muslims and so on. We'll come back to this.

Redefine racism away from what, Richard? "Anything that could conceivably offend Black people", perhaps? Because you're a believer in the "racism = power + ethnicity" doctrine, aren't you, so that racism only works one way? Try explaining that to all the White lads in the Midlands and the Pennine Towns who've been attacked because of "the colour of their skin".

And I do like

To make it racist, one would have to assume that the troops were not just exclusively white...

an argument also expressed below the line at LibCon. Remember how you all laughed when those squirming White racists were pleading, "But Islam is not a race, it's a religion, ergo I'm not racist"? Personally I always regarded that as a precarious argument, since in practice in the UK the vast majority of Muslims are South Asians or Africans and race, culture and religion are not easy to disentangle. And now you're trying that fragile ploy yourselves. Well, not all soldiers in the British Army are White, to be sure. But most of them are, and I'll lay six archbishops to an imam that it was White — or as South Asians of my acquaintance usually say, English — soldiers that young Azhar had in mind, not some turncoat Paki coconut from down the street.

If there is a serious point to all of this, and it is one which indeed does seem almost to peep tentatively through the jungle of Marxspeak in Seymour's piece, it is that the state's increasingly ready recourse to open-ended and arbitrarily applied hatecrime legislation as a means of keeping the lid on rising intercommunal tensions is not going to work.

There will be tears. But in the meantime, my Righteous friends, I'm going to enjoy a few moments of Schadenfreude at your, how shall I put it, hilarious fucking hypocrisy.