"Them" And "Us"

Cote D'Ivoire, for so long the happy exception to the African disaster, has applied for basket-case status.

The Guardian reports as follows :

John Sullivan, head of Save the Children's operations in Ivory Coast, told Radio 4's Today programme that attacks on foreigners were indiscriminate.

"Much of the rhetoric on television and public radio was very incendiary," he said, adding that it was hard for large mobs to distinguish between French and other white-skinned people, who seemed to be the focus of attacks.

I like that 'seemed to be'. Isn't there a word to describe that sort of thing ?

In Holland there are attacks on the property of dark-skinned people. The Guardian reports :

Spray painting a white cross and White Power slogans on to the grey brick walls of the Muslim school the previous night, Dutch racists had set the place ablaze.

Can you spot the word ?

Of course, racist is a word that only applies to white people.


The new liberal consensus appears to be that Theo Van Gogh's murder was a particularly nasty case of suicide. Guardian again :

To his admirers, Van Gogh is a martyr to freedom of speech. To his many detractors, Van Gogh was a loudmouthed racist hungry for attention and himself a victim of the hatred he helped to foment.

Free speech campaigners Index On Censorship considered Van Gogh's killing to be his very own 'martyrdom operation'. Van Gogh was a 'free speech fundamentalist' - just like the guys that killed him. They were fundamentalists too.

"Cleverly he would often seek out the most extreme and ignorant opponents for his public battles, reinforcing the perception that only the extreme and ignorant opposed him.

The inevitable violence of their response was grist to his mill."

You see ? He stirred up the abstracts of "hatred" and "inevitable violence".

Theo, you should have stuck to attacking the Catholic Church, or George Bush. In the unlikely event of your being killed by a Christian, you'd have been a martyr to free speech instead of a suicidal racist. And maybe I could have written about how your attacks on Christians triggered 'inevitable violence'.

Only joking. The freedom to attack, say, American Christians as ignorant, backward morons, also carries with it the freedom to criticise Dutch muslims (I don't think either stereotype is true, but then I believe that "Men without religion, Just can't keep in a righteous man's position").

In the white liberal worldview it's alright to attack "us". Attacking "them" - well, he asked for it.