Katie Hopkins in the Death Camp of Tolerance

Katie Hopkins is in trouble again.

Instead of welcoming boatloads of Libyan immigrants into Europe with open arms, she argues in her latest Sun column, we should be repelling them with gunboats and sending them back home.

It begins:

NO, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad.

I still don’t care.

Because in the next minute you’ll show me pictures of aggressive young men at Calais, spreading like norovirus on a cruise ship.

Watching them try to clamber on to British lorries and steal their way into the UK, do I feel pity? Only for the British drivers, who get hit with a fine every time one of this plague of feral humans ends up in their truck.

And she has a point, don’t you think? Maybe most of us wouldn’t have had the balls (or comical insensitivity) to have expressed it quite so trenchantly but the underlying argument is sound: today’s pitiable batch of parched, desperate refugees picked up by the Italian coastguard is tomorrow’s socio-political disaster waiting to happen.

Yes, in a perfect world it’s possible that these people may end up as model citizens and contribute greatly to the economy. But it’s also possible that in their midst are criminals and violent jihadists, like those lovely Muslim refugees who recently tossed Christians over the side of the ship. And even if you take the optimistic view, where do you stop? Are we simply to accept that it’s now Europe’s job to house every single refugee from Libya and elsewhere that survives the perilous crossing?

Or should we not even be talking about such things? Is the only fair and decent response to shut our eyes and pretend that it’s not happening?

This, it seems, is what all the caring, sensitive types on Twitter and elsewhere would like us to do – as we can tell from the mass of social media outrage prompted by Katie Hopkins’s article.

Already – inevitably – there’s a Change.org petition demanding that Katie Hopkins to be prosecuted for “inciting genocide”.

And another one to have Katie Hopkins fired by the Sun. (Yeah, that’ll happen. Tabloids hate columnists who sell lots of newspapers)

There has been an angry piece by some dreary, bearded social justice warrior in the Independent, who thinks that Hopkins is sorta, kinda worse than the Nazis…

A bit strong to compare Hopkins to Hitler? Read her column on page 11 of yesterday’s Sun.

And the Wankerati have been out in full force in Twitter to parade their moral virtue by telling their fans how utterly disgusted they are with Hopkins’s howwidness.

 

There’s plenty more where that came from too. The offenderati have been out in force this weekend.

But there’s a key point they all seem to be missing in their urge to tell us what a frightful Nazi Katie Hopkins is, in their frenzied desperation to have her sacked or, better still, locked up in prison, for writing an article they didn’t like, namely:

This is what the Nazis did. They really weren’t in to free speech. But they were very much into closing newspapers that didn’t conform with the prejudices of the time, and into sacking people and imprisoning people – or worse – for having “incorrect” thoughts.

I wonder if any of these people have ever seen the South Park episode The Death Camp of Tolerance.

If they did, its significance seems to have gone right over their heads.