Still for some reason given a berth at the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph, Allison Pearson is well known to Zelo Street regulars. Who can forget her plaintive wail “Don't care whether Brexit is poached or boiled. We are NOT staying under jurisdiction of ECJ which stops us kicking out jihadists”? Her Europhobic paranoia prevented her from realising that the ECJ does not prevent us kicking out jihadists.
Allison Pearson
She also advocated, more or less, for concentration camps: “We need a State of Emergency as France has. We need internment of thousands of terror suspects now to protect our children”. And her crass response to the Brussels Airport attack was the stuff of legend: “Brussels, de facto capital of the EU, is also the jihadist capital of Europe. And the Remainers dare to say we're safer in the EU! #Brexit”. Well, she’s back. And still bigoted.
Shamima Begum
After Shamima Begum was stripped of her British citizenship by opinion poll chasing Prime Ministerial aspirant Sajid Javid, Ms Pearson enthusiastically joined in. By the time her Telegraph column had appeared, she had perhaps become a little too enthusiastic.
It’s not as if the Tel saw it coming: Ms Pearson’s first Twitter response was “The jihadi bride Shamima Begum has had her British citizenship revoked by the Home Office. A welcome move that sends out a powerful signal to those who betrayed the country they belatedly and conveniently decide to call ‘home’”. They. Belatedly and conveniently.
Also, note the use of “betrayal”. Proper judgmental stuff. From here, the next port of call was to justify stripping the citizenship from someone in defiance of international law. Ms Pearson enthusiastically endorsed one Tweeter who told “Australia revoked the citizenship of 5 people who were dual nationals last year for going to Syria & Iraq to fight for Isis”. The problem here is twofold, not that there is much point telling her.
One, this is talking about dual nationals, and Ms Begum is not. She is now stateless. And Two, just because A N Other country might veer on to the wring side of international law is not a justification for joining in, and nor is it a credible defence.
Still, on she went, first with the whataboutery of “The Home Office has spent nearly £5million keeping 23 returned jihadists under restrictions. A tiny fraction of the total number. Many go unwatched as it’s ‘too expensive’. Are these acceptable risks for innocent Britons to bear?” and then with her column. And one fateful assertion.
“Shamima Begum may have been born here, but she was never British”. Think about that. Someone born in the UK to parents who have right of residence is British. What Ms Pearson is saying is that this does not extend to Muslim Britons. Or does it not extend to all brown Britons? Does it extend to black Britons? It is not hard to see the slippery slope down which she is heading. But it is hard to see why the Tel still tolerates her.
Small wonder that Miqdaad Versi of the Muslim Council of Britain responded “Truly awful that the Telegraph published this & chose to propagate this in a tweet. Whether it is Pearson or Daesh, too many think we can never be equal in our society”. Quite.
Alison Pearson is a deluded and paranoid bigot. While the Telegraph continues to publish her, it is promoting deluded and paranoid bigotry. And that’s not good enough.
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Another minor example of Britain going yet further down the same neonazi sewer constructed by the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Wolfowitz gang and their predecessors in the USA.
ReplyDeletePearson may be a mere symptomatic propaganda clerk, but add her into the Murdoch/Rothermere and Blair/Brown lot and it's easy to see how corrupt the "message" has become. The US version is even worse.
The grave mistake is to assume these people are aberrations. They aren't. They are precisely the same mentalities which preceded the rise of 20th century fascism across the West.
There's nothing new about any of it. It's the same old rotten-to-the-core evil.
She climbed aboard the Modern Review in the early 90's. What a bunch - the once talented Birchill and the never-talented Toby Young and Allison Pearson.
ReplyDeleteThe fatter she's got the more right wing she's become. Islamophobia has become her only income source.