I feel sullied.
A court story I wrote for the Manchester Evening News a couple of months back has cropped up on the BNP website, as part of their vile propaganda.
The racist bigots are claiming that just because the defendants happened to be of Asian ethnicity it backs up their warnings about – ahem – “Muslim heroin gangs operating in our cities”.
Utter bollocks. You get the odd criminal scumbag in the Asian community, just like you do in the English, Scottish, Welsh, black, Chinese, French, Polish, male, female, gay, straight, disabled – or any other – communities.
But what exactly does their religion, or that of their families, have to do with anything? It wasn’t mentioned once in my news story, because IT WASN’T RELEVANT.
And I don’t remember ever hearing of Christian drug dealers, Christian muggers, Christian rapists, or whatever.
The culture of Muslim-bashing that’s developed in this country really bothers me. As does people’s willingness to jump on the bandwagon without having the intellectual curiosity to do some research on what the religion’s all about.
These ignorant, blinkered people make me ashamed.