Don’t Menshn Muslims

The Sun is hidden away behind a paywall, but a Zelo Street regular has made extracts from today’s paper available (see how that works, Rupe?). And from these, it is all too clear that the attack on Mil The Younger is being joined in earnest, even at the expense of what little factual accuracy the red-tops can usually manage. The event is, to no surprise at all, Miliband’s donation to a homeless woman.

(c) Doc Hackenbush 2014

Who will lead the charge? Will it be a down-to-earth man or woman of the people who walks among them on a daily basis? You jest: for this task, the Super Soaraway Currant Bun has enlisted the dubiously honed skills of (thankfully) former Tory MP Louise Mensch, now representing the distant constituency of Manhattan Upmarket. The detachment from reality is palpable from the word go.

“Everything about this incident shows just why Labour is imploding” she asserts, managing not to notice that the party suffering in-fighting and defections right now is the Tories, but then, she and her paper are shilling for Young Dave and his jolly good chaps. “Ed only handed out a copper” she claims, although, as I pointed out yesterday, it was at least two coins, and neither appeared slim enough to be a 2p bit.

But it does not take too long for Ms Mensch to go way over the top: “let’s throw in the fact [that would be ‘personal observation’, actually] that this street vagrant looks clean, well-dressed and is wearing a headscarf that indicates she is some kind of immigrant”. I’ll just capitalise that: “WEARING A HEADSCARF THAT INDICATES SHE IS SOME KIND OF IMMIGRANT”.

Wearing a headscarf means that the wearer is, er, wearing a headscarf. No other attribute can be given with any certainty, although in most cases, it shows that the wearer is a follower of The Prophet. So what Louise Mensch is saying is “All Muslim women in the UK right now are immigrants”. Had that been a Labour, Lib Dem or indeed UKIP pundit saying that, the Sun would have been outraged.

We’re left with one of two alternatives: either the Sun’s subs – or, worse, its senior editorial staff – thought that kind of singularly nasty comment was OK, or they couldn’t be arsed subbing Louise Mensch’s column, which, given the litany of wacko opinion masquerading as fact that she has come out with in the past, is most unwise. And that she meant to say what she said is not in doubt.

The Sunday Sun has shown here that its desperation to smear the Labour leader is so great that it is prepared to base opinion columns on speculation dressed up as fact, and then to reinforce them by smearing people in the basis of their religious affiliation. Louise Mensch and her paper are veering too close to the racism line; one more wobble and they’ll go straight across it.

That remark is bang out of order. So don’t expect an apology any time soon.