Thursday, August 08, 2019

NEW YORK TIMES TELLS US AGAIN THAT "MANY SAY" A RACIST IS A RACIST

I'm glad Maggie Haberman of The New York Times is writing about President Trump's renewed interest in the abhorrent Katie Hopkins, "a far-right British commentator who has made denunciations of migrants and Muslims — and defenses of Mr. Trump — a staple of her public discourse." (Trump has been retweeting Hopkins recently, something he did before he was elected but stopped doing once he took office.)
On Saturday morning, Mr. Trump invoked Ms. Hopkins shortly before a mass shooting that killed 22 in El Paso, where the suspect wrote an anti-immigrant manifesto that echoed Mr. Trump’s inflammatory language about migrants.

The president, at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., shared a tweet from Ms. Hopkins condemning London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, over the city’s crime rate. Mr. Trump has feuded with Mr. Khan since 2016, when Mr. Khan criticized his remarks about Islam.

“The nipple-height Mayor of Londonistan has NEVER been so unpopular,” Ms. Hopkins tweeted. “He has MINUS approval ratings because we are stab-city. London deserves better. Get Khan Out.”

The president also retweeted a post by Ms. Hopkins that blamed the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, for crimes committed by immigrants.
But why does Haberman hesitate to call Hopkins a racist?
As President Trump doubles down on a re-election approach of stoking fear of immigrants, he is once again elevating a voice of validation — and many say racism — that he discovered during his last presidential campaign.

... British headlines have routinely labeled Ms. Hopkins a “racist” and a “bigot” for her views about immigrants.
"Many say" that Hopkins is a voice of racism? She has been "routinely labeled ... a 'racist' and a 'bigot'"? Haberman tweets this as a matter that serious people dispute.

Apart from the "Londonistan" swipe against Sadiq Khan, here are the worst examples of Hopkins's rhetoric Haberman can find:
In a 2015 column, she compared migrants to cockroaches. And after a suicide bombing killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in 2017, Ms. Hopkins tweeted that “we need a final solution” to the terrorism problem. She later deleted the post....

And last month, Mr. Trump retweeted Ms. Hopkins’s post suggesting that “send her back” — a chant by Trump supporters directed at one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress — could be a new campaign slogan. “Send her back is the new lock her up,” she wrote.
But that's just scratching the surface. Dean Obeidallah -- a standup comedian by trade who's become a talk-show host and CNN commentator -- turned up much more in a column he published last month:
Hopkins has a long and storied track record targeting blacks, Muslims, immigrants and Jews. Hopkins claims she was banned from South Africa in 2018 and again in 2019 for "spreading racial hatred," after she argued that there was "ethnic cleansing" of white farmers in South Africa who were being "slaughtered" by "black gangs," a claim debunked by the BBC and others.

And that followed a tweet in 2018, when Hopkins called a black man who disagreed with her the racial slur: "Jigga-Boo." (She later deleted the tweet but did not apologize for the use of this slur.)

... As Sir Mick Davis, a former chair of the UK's Jewish Leadership Council, [has] noted, Hopkins had horrifically blamed the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in which 11 Jews were killed by a far right wing, anti-immigrant actor on the temple's rabbi, with Hopkins writing two days after the attack, "Look to the Chief Rabbi and his support for mass migration across the Med," adding, "There you will find your truths."

Speaking of anti-Semitism, as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote, Hopkins "enthusiastically meets up with senior figures in Germany's far-right Afd [Alternative for Germany] and the Nazi-founded Austrian Freedom Party, which Israel itself boycotts." And just last year, Hopkins shared the stage at an event with a Holocaust denier....

Hopkins has also taken to promoting appearances by white nationalists like America's Jared Taylor, whose despicable views ... include writing that, "When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization -- any kind of civilization -- disappears."
And let's not forget this:



And this:



And this:



And this:



Haberman hesitates to call Hopkins a racist and a bigot? Seriously?


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