Tuesday 29 April 2014

White South African says black Englishman should move to a "black county"

A UKIP candidate for Enfield Council has said that Lenny Henry should go and live in a black country if he wants to be around more black people and likened Islam to the Third Reich.

William Henwood was responding to Lenny Henry's call for more black people on TV when he said:
I think if black people come to this country and don’t like mixing with white people why are they here? If he wants a lot of blacks around go and live in a black country.
Whilst he makes a very valid general point that if someone doesn't like mixing with white people they shouldn't come to this country, Lenny Henry was born and bred in Dudley. He didn't "come here", he was born here - he's a black Englishman. Unlike William Henwood who is a white man born in apartheid-era South Africa! As one friend put it last night "The headline should read 'White South African tells black Englishman to emigrate to a black country'."

Whether there are a proportionate number of black people on TV based on the percentage of the population I don't know and frankly don't care. UKIP is a meritocracy - if you're good at something then it doesn't matter what colour you are. We don't believe in race/religion/sex quotas and in all fairness that it probably what Henwood was trying to say in 140 characters on Twitter but failed because of his own ignorance.

As for his suggestion that Islam is like the Third Reich, that's clearly just batshit crazy. Yes, there are a lot of people around the world doing a lot of bad and dangerous things in the name of Islam but there are a lot of people doing a lot of bad and dangerous things in the name of Christianity and Judaism too. Islam itself isn't dangerous, some of its adherents are. Ok, it seems like a lot of them are but to put it in perspective, there are 1.6bn Muslims in the world and it's the world's fastest growing religion. Hitler's Third Reich carried out the state-sponsored slaughter and persecution of million of people and plunged humanity into a second world war. He didn't do it because his sky fairy told him to or because he'd been brainwashed by ideologues, he did it because he hated people who weren't white and Christian, who were gay, disabled, wore glasses, etc. Muslim terrorists do what they do because they've been brainwashed into believing this is what their god wants based on some passages from their bible that they believe says they have to kill non-Muslims. Similarly-worded teachings in the Old Testament - also one of the Islamic holy books - tell Jews and Christians to kill non-believers and prescribe the death penalty for any number of sins.

Henwood clearly thinks he knows more than he actually does and it would be sensible to remove him from the public eye not only to save him from his own stupidity but to protect the 99.9% of normal UKIP candidates who don't want to be associated with his ridiculous comments.