Anyone who, like me, unthinkingly clicked “Like” on the Facebook group “Supporting the Met police against the London rioters” — hurriedly set up on Monday night at perhaps the darkest moment of the London looting, when many people understandably wanted to support the London police force — may now want to think again and leave it.
WARNING: OFFENSIVE MATERIAL. Sean Boscott, the founder of the group, which now boasts close to a million members and was unwisely praised by David Cameron in his speech yesterday, seems to harbour some at best prehistoric, at worst nastily racist views, as this investigative blog post — by the video-game expert Stuart Campbell — has uncovered. Another blog gives further examples.
As Boscott’s Twitter history (which has since mysteriously been locked) shows, his self-professed “bad taste/offensive jokes” are appalling, sub-Bernard Manning rubbish. Boscott initially claimed his Twitter account had been hacked, but it seems rather unlikely that all his previous tweets were similarly the work of a hacker, ones he doesn’t deny responsibility for. A typical example (and that’s one of the milder ones):
“So the story of Barack Obama rising to become President is being chronicled in a new film. It’s called Rise of the Planet of the Apes”
No, we’re not laughing either.
By all means get behind the police but reject the racist sentiments of people like this — who seem to be exploiting a volatile situation to divide British society at precisely the time when we should be doing anything but.
Oh, and instead watch this….
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