5 June 2017

Al Jazeera: Has Katie Hopkins committed a hate crime?

Hopkins' use of the words "final solution" - the Nazi term for the Holocaust - was interpreted to mean that she was advocating the killing of Muslims. Complaints were made to the police who are reviewing the matter and, as a result of the public outcry, Hopkins was fired from her job as a presenter at LBC radio, although she remains a columnist for the Daily Mail. [...]

Indeed, Hopkins' writings reveal a pattern of abusive and inflammatory language conveying a message of hatred and fear about Muslims, which, it could be argued, amounts cumulatively to a form of religiously aggravated hate speech. For instance, she stokes up fear against Muslims when she describes Muslim demonstrators as "the vanguard of an army that can hide in plain sight amongst us" in one of her articles . At other times she is plainly abusive, such as in a recent tweet where she, in effect, called Muslims "nasty sods".  [...]

The answer is that, sadly,  Islamophobia is so endemic within the British media and society at large - as has been well documented by organisations such as the independent think tank, the Runnymede Trust, and the Islamic Human Rights Commission - that when Hopkins expresses Islamophobic views, they are not recognised for what they are, but, instead, are treated as legitimate, if inflammatory, expressions of political opinion.

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