Don’t Menshn Religious Incitement

The Super Soaraway Currant Bun may be hidden away behind a paywall, but a Zelo Street regular has made available an image from today’s paper (see how that works, Rupe?) which shows that falsehood and misinformation is being allowed to pass onto the printed page. I’ll go further: one column verges on malicious defamation and religious incitement. So who is the culprit, and what’s the deal?

(c) Doc Hackenbush 2014

But you know who is shooting her mouth off once again: former Tory MP Louise Mensch is off and running, telling that the Rotherham abuse scandal has been subjected to “party political efforts to cover it [up]”. Moreover, no opportunity to say “Muslim” is passed up, and in this way she continues to make this some kind of religious act, where it is not. And then comes the incitement.

“Add in the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs we know about in Oxford, Bradford and Rochdale and the number of rapes committed by Pakistani Muslim men against white children runs into the millions”. Yes, forget that there were many girls from Pakistani heritage homes who were also involved, and get that big scary number pitched. In the world of Ms Mensch, this is all about religion.

It is also about bashing the Labour Party: “It was Labour who did this in Rotherham and Rochdale – to win Muslim votes. Labour Police, Labour PCCs, Labour Councillors, Labour leaning prosecutors ... Labour’s greedy, sleazy pandering to Muslim votes brought us Sharia tribunals – Labour set them up in law – postal vote fraud, uncontrolled immigration, Trojan Horse schools, and now this sick hell.”

Where does one start with that lot? PCCs – a Coalition policy – are so recent as to have had no effect, there is no such thing as “Labour Police” or “Labour leaning prosecutors” – the Tories would have kicked off years ago if that had been the case – and, for the umpteenth time, Labour have not set up Sharia tribunals. As for postal voting, well, show us the evidence Ms M – you won’t.

Nor, despite her insistence, did any political party have anything to do with what happened in a few schools in Birmingham. And as for immigration, well, just repeating what her paper has tried to pitch as received wisdom does not make it a fact. This is, let us not drive it around the houses for too long, a complete pack of lies, a vicious attempt at demonisation and incitement.

So why have Rupe’s downmarket troops allowed Ms Mensch’s partisan and fact-free rant to pass into print? Simples. The discredited PCC has already wiped their collective arses: the precedent complaint Stable v Daily Mail (Littlejohn – need you ask?) has the details. Put directly, the PCC concluded that it was OK for pundits to lie, as readers would know it was an opinion column, and they say things for effect.

With a former MP, more care should be taken, but isn’t. That’s not good enough.