{"id":11237,"date":"2011-09-20T09:10:18","date_gmt":"2011-09-20T13:10:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=11237"},"modified":"2011-09-20T10:16:15","modified_gmt":"2011-09-20T14:16:15","slug":"about-that-ethnic-cleansing-in-basildon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/09\/20\/about-that-ethnic-cleansing-in-basildon\/","title":{"rendered":"About that “ethnic cleansing” in Basildon"},"content":{"rendered":"

All the great and the good are girding for battle over the Dale Farm evictions<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

A terrible episode of \u2018ethnic cleansing\u2019 is looming. It promises to be so bad that a spokesman for the United Nations\u2019 Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has been helicoptered in to \u2018oversee negotiations\u2019. Amnesty International has set up a special \u2018priority action\u2019 page on its website, pleading with people to write letters of outrage to politicians. Head-tilting celebrities have turned up to raise awareness about what one journalist refers to as the \u2018racist hysteria\u2019 of the coming cleansing, including that grande dame of right-on causes, Vanessa Redgrave. Things are so dire that the BBC has sent in Fergal Keane, its softly spoken, Irish ponderer of all things evil, who doesn\u2019t only wear his heart but also his lungs, liver and spleen on his sleeve, who cut his teeth reporting on the war in Bosnia and the calamity in Rwanda. \u2018It\u2019s a very apprehensive situation\u2019, he intoned on last night\u2019s news.<\/p>\n

Oh god, what has happened? A new war in Africa? A rekindling of the old wars in Bosnia? No. Basildon Council in Essex in south-east England is planning to evict some Travellers from their plot of land in Dale Farm. That\u2019s all. Yet watching the media coverage, perusing the millions of tweets of tear-stained concern, you could be forgiven for thinking that the so-called Battle of Dale Farm was a rerun of Bosnia 1992. That is because moral opportunists, cause-hunters, those desperate for some political momentum in their lives, have cynically transformed a small-scale spat between a council and some Gypsies into an epochal stand-off between the forces of racist hysteria and the massed ranks of decent UN cheerleaders. It speaks to the desperation of today\u2019s wannabe moral crusaders that they are willing to infuse even the Dale Farm fallout with the kind of simple-minded moralistic lingo they usually reserve for foreign wars.<\/p>\n

Of course, the threatened Dale Farm eviction, which was supposed to take place yesterday until the High Court in London imposed a temporary injunction against it, will be bad and distressing for the Traveller families involved. Eighty-six families could be forcibly removed, simply for building homes on land which they own yet which Basildon Council says is protected Green Belt territory. But is that any justification for using phrases such as \u2018racist hysteria\u2019 to describe Basildon Council\u2019s actions and even conjuring up the Holocaust to describe the plight of the Travellers, with Vanessa Redgrave talking about \u2018what happened during Hitler\u2019s rule\u2019 and demanding that \u2018minorities shouldn\u2019t be destroyed\u2019? If there\u2019s any hysteria here, it is among those who fantasise that we\u2019re witnessing a rerun of Nazi evil and that it is down to conscience-exercising celebs and Amnesty letter-writers — the heroes of the hour — to stop it in its tracks.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All the great and the good are girding for battle over the Dale Farm evictions: A terrible episode of \u2018ethnic cleansing\u2019 is looming. It promises to be so bad that a spokesman for the United Nations\u2019 Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has been helicoptered in to \u2018oversee negotiations\u2019. Amnesty International has set up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,84,9,28],"tags":[480,456,217,691],"class_list":["post-11237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-government","category-law","category-media","tag-hypocrisy","tag-hysteria","tag-rights","tag-unitednations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2Vf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11237"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11239,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11237\/revisions\/11239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}