There’s a new strain of victimhood circulating around Great Britain. Curiously, this novel virus infects the same people over and over again.
Nowadays, one cannot make antisemitic comments, lend vocal support to loveable rogues like Hamas, who, in their typical moderation suggest they’d like to wipe Israel from the face of the earth, or traffic in conspiracy theories of Jewish domination without being accused of antisemitism.
The horror. The horror.
One repeat victim of this indiscriminate virus is a British lawmaker, our first black British MP, and leading British nutter—Diane Abbott.
Last week, with the characteristic intellectual and moral looseness for which she is famed, Ms Abbott said in The Observer that Jews, Travellers, and Irish people don’t suffer racism, but endure the same level of prejudice reserved for, say, white people with red hair. Quite the take, I must say. Without saying it, Abbott all but said only black people really suffer racism at all.
Abbott had replied to Tomiwa Owolade’s column which dared suggest the ‘white people bad’ narrative in vogue is a faulty one.
His crime was to outline with erudition and eloquence that Irish people, Travellers, and Jews are amongst the most abused. After sifting through the study, Owolade concluded that ‘racism in Britain is not a black and white issue but far more complicated.’
And writing is complicated. After pissing off just about everybody, Abbott claimed her letter was a first draft and sent in error. First drafts, as Hemingway said, are always shit.
But this little porky didn’t survive contact with reality. Abbott sent the very same letter with the very same wording—twice.
Abbott’s problem is a simple one. Over the course of her decades-long career, she has demonstrated a yen for crude thinking, conspiratorial piffle, and utter bollocks. So regular and so predictable are these bouts of bollock-talking that ‘doing an Abbott’ should be a verb phrase for saying something usually reserved for the improperly medicated.
Abbott is of that peculiar type which cannot help invoking the Jews in explanation to all that is wrong with themselves and the world. Oh-so-cleverly, they cloak this as anti-Zionism.
Reader, imagine a cadre of cranks obsessed with and agitated by the state of Italy. They claim Italy has no right to exist, but they’ve no problem with Italians themselves. With glee, these people wish for the destruction of Italy—a country in which Italians just happen to reside—but claim no ill will toward Italians. Pull the other one, mate.
But such self-deception is mandatory if one wishes membership of today’s modern progressive movement.
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