Poppy Burning and Racism

This is just a quick blog to express my annoyance at one of the more stupid "copy and paste" messages going round facebook. I saw it posted by someone I was at school with who is a friend on facebook, though really I barely know her, and was so irritated I had to comment.

The message which bothered me was one like the red quote below (there are a few variants it seems), which may, if you read it in a naive way, not sound so offensive, but I imagine is designed to stir up anti-Muslim sentiment.

"Today we saw muslims break the 2 minute silence in central london, with banners holding "British Soldiers Burn In Hell" & the burning of a poppy... if you don't like us British people paying respect for our brave fighters, then you know where the airport is. disgusting, ... disrespectful bastards. copy and paste this if you're British and proud."

Here (slightly edited for clarity) is my response:

------ I assume you just want to show you care about people who made sacrifices to defend others in war, but that is not how this will be interpreted and it would be naive to believe that was why it was written.

First it's a tiny incident by a handful of idiots, with almost no impact until it gets reported etc, and I note no mention above of the English Defense League assaulting people at the same time. Secondly labeling them by religion is a subtle way of suggesting this behavior is a common characteristic of Muslims, it's not. We could equally label them by race or residency. How does "we saw people in Britain break the 2 minute silence" sound? Then there is the invitation to leave the country, reminiscent of a BNP rally and finally we have the "British and proud" slogan often used as euphemism for racism and xenophobia, so much so that you'll find a facebook group "British and Proud...BUT NOT RACIST".

I am fairly sure both the people who made the daft protest and whoever wrote this nonsense being copied and pasted into facebook want to stir up racial and religious divisions and people like you reposting this are helping them do this. Please stop.

I hope this doesn't makes me a facebook bully, but I was genuinely trying to change her mind and warn her about the connotations. It seems she has either defriended me or deleted her account. I feel a bit bad if it's the latter because I doubt that she realised how it might be interpreted and perhaps not everyone will read it the way I do, but I do believe that racial and religious hatred is likely the motivation behind creating such messages and hope if others pasting that post into facebook find this blog they will realise the connotations and delete it.

EDIT: Since some rage has been requested (see comments) I thought I'd add in this ~approriately themed song, by Machine Head "A nation on fire"



With the lines:
"The media it
Blinds out eyes
A people divided
And force fed lies
The black and white societies corrode
Warring, hating, blind, a rage explodes"

just put social in front of media and it works ;). sort of.