As Covid storm approaches, Daily Mail can’t stop its xenophobia

After what it called “decades of sustained and unrestrained anti-foreigner abuse, misinformation and distortion”, the United Nations accused some British newspapers of “hate speech”. It clearly had the Daily Mail as one of them in its sights. UK experts have been warning for some time now that hate crime is being “fuelled and legitimised” by the British media. Relentlessly hostile and often inaccurate headlines have been described by charities as “dangerous”. 

Some newspaper editors have a strong incentive to run sensationalist anti-migrant headlines: after all, it boosts their readership. By the looks of this, the most ridiculous headline I’ve read since the Sun reported that Freddie Starr had eaten a hamster, the Daily Mail is obviously worried that its Brexit campaign, one pushed with its strong message of overt racism, is perhaps threatened by the changing priorities of people, especially older people who voted for Brexit but are now the target of the Coronavirus Covid-19.

Perhaps the Daily Mail would like to do a piece on the people making the ultimate sacrifice in the fight against Covid-19. The first three NHS doctors who have died are:

 

Adel el-Tayar – NHS surgeon 27th March

Habib Zaidi – GP 27th March

Amged el-Hawrani – NHS consultant 29th March

 

 

 

There’s irresponsible journalism and there’s the Daily Mail.

 

Remember the DM ‘Enemies of the people’ headline? The reality is that it’s the surgeon, the GP and the consultant, this is the who they really mean. As the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said in 2015:

“History has shown us time and again the dangers of demonising foreigners and minorities”

 

I wonder if Gordie Greig, the editor of the DM or its chairman Viscount Rothermere – if they were diagnosed with Covid-19 and facing an ICU and a ventilator would accept Adel el-Tayar, Habib Zaidi or Amged el-Hawrani as the right people to help them in a moment of life and death when everyone else was too stretched to give them a skin colour of name-change choice.

When this crisis is over, we should not forget that the Daily Mail is right at the heart of the Stop Funding Hate campaign. Many responsible and ethical companies now refuse to advertise or work in any way with the DM such as Naked Wines, Co-Op, Farmdrop, Laithwaite’s, SurveyMonkey, Ecotricity, GoodEnergy, Derby University, Makers Academy, CentreParcs, South Bank Centre, Woodland Trust, Travelodge and many, many more.

Wikipedia will not publish links to its website because – “Consensus has determined that the Daily Mail (including its online version, dailymail.co.uk) is generally unreliable, and its use as a reference is to be generally prohibited.”

At TruePublica we have refused to place a link pointing to the DM even if we are making reference to it and never use the DM as a source of reliable information.

When the chips are down, who is it that is flying the national flag? Is it really the Daily Mail or was it Adel el-Tayar, Habib Zaidi or Amged el-Hawrani? These three individuals stood up to protect people in Britain – the Daily Mail is undermining Britain.

 

Daily Mail blaming China just like Donald Trump

 

They can’t help it can they? This article is littered with inaccuracies, hearsay and blame-gaming. Right now, the real origins of the Coronavirus Covid-19 is not known as a fact. The thinking is that animal to human transfer has occurred through bats. There is scientific evidence that this has been the case for hundreds of years. And whilst it emerged in China, the evolution of this novel virus is exactly that – evolution. This racially pointed slant by the DM is the same tactic being used by Donald Trump as a way to defend his appalling handling of the Covid-19 pandemic that will quite soon overrun North America. It is propaganda. It is misleading at best and dangerous at worst.

As Byline Times Editor Peter Duke says about the headline above –  “If not the EU’s fault, the steep British rise COVID19 cases must be blamed on China. The Mail on Sunday follows the line of Trump and Farage. Of course, none of this will help tackle the pandemic. But what a hateful job having to recycle xenophobia all day long.”

And as one twitter commentator says to his 26,000 followers about the DM blaming EU negotiator Barnier for Boris Johnson becoming infected with C19  – “The Mail is more dangerous and virulent than Cov19 – they haven’t been physically near each other for weeks. People who write this shit are not journalists – they are propagandists/scaremongerers/truth destroyers. Ashamed of themselves? Not a chance.”

We should not forget that tens of millions of indigenous people have died because of the invasion of the Americas. Europeans who settled in America brought with them smallpox, bubonic plague, chickenpox, cholera, the common cold, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, measles, scarlet fever, sexually transmitted diseases, typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis, and pertussis. The Spanish Flu had nothing to do with the Spanish and a lot to do with American servicemen during WW1 – but it wasn’t called the American Flu.

 

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