The Guardian is again agonising over the nasty comments on its online opinion section, Comment is Free, aimed at ethnic minority contributors, especially Muslims. It has a point. You don’t have to be squeamish to be revolted by a great deal of what happens beneath the line. Here are three typical comments, posted within 20 minutes of each other on a single thread:
Jeez, have you even met any Muslims? They’re like a cross between Fagin & Goebbels.
I have always found Muslims to be nasty, selfish, lying, despicable, evil, grasping, ignorant, duplicitous wastes of oxygen.
Muslims are extremist scum. End of story.
Actually, I’ve played a little trick on you. These comments were posted on CiF in response to a piece by Tim Montgomerie, editor of ConservativeHome. In each case, I’ve changed a single word, substituting ‘Muslims’ for ‘Tories’.
Alright, it’s an old ruse, and the last thing I want to do is to make light of racial or religious bigotry. Islam is one of those topics, along with animal rights and Europe, that brings out some truly demented commenters – alongside, to be sure, some reasonable ones. (Once, just to see what would happen, I combined all three topics in a blog about the EU’s plans to label halal meat; I wasn’t disappointed.)
Read More at The Telegraph
