Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The stupidity of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

The Yasmin Alibhai-Brown business is quite remarkable, isn’t it? She takes herself on to Radio Five Live to make her usual sententious and ill-thought out views on the stoning of Muslim women. Western politicians are not morally qualified to condemn such stonings, she said, because they’ve killed lots of Muslim women with bombs etc. Now, this is a typically stupid assessment, for all the obvious reasons. It implies that the allies were not morally qualified to condemn Nazi atrocities because they killed some of the very same people, largely inadvertently, with bombs and so on. It is, like the rest of YA-B’s journalism, an Aunt Sally argument scarcely worth the effort of rebutting.

A Tory councillor called Gareth Compton, from Birmingham, heard her talking this usual drivel and posted a message on Twitter to the effect that maybe YA-B should be stoned to death. Nobody could possibly consider this an incitement to violence; it was, poor taste or otherwise, a joke. But the old bill were dispatched to arrest Mr Compton (he’s been bailed) and YA-B, puffed up with her matchless self-regard and self-importance, has said that she wishes to press charges on the grounds that it is a racially motivated incitement to murder. Well it’s neither racially motivated – it was motivated by your own stupidity, love – nor an incitement to murder. Incredible.

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