Saturday, May 03, 2014

The Natural Interpretation

As Clive Bundy has made clear, there is no limit to how racist one's words can be while still being able to claim -- apparently with a straight face -- that it is entirely unreasonable to claim the words are racist. Over in the Netherlands, we have possibly the platonic ideal of that formulation as applied to Jews:
The rapper Ismo, whose real name is Ismael Houllich, included the text in his first single. The official video clip for the song titled “Eenmans” (or “One Man’s”) shows Ismo singing: “I hate those fucking Jews more than the Nazis,” “don’t shake hands with faggots” and “don’t believe in anything but the Koran.”

The clip, which was filmed in the southern border city of Breda, had received 125,000 viewers on YouTube before a 19-year-old homosexual resident of the city, Lars Hobma, filed a complaint with police against Ismo for alleged incitement to hatred, the news site of the Algemeen Dagblad daily reported Friday.

Hobma has received death threats on Facebook after filing the complaint, the daily reported.
In an interview for Omroep Brabant, a regional radio station, Ismo denied Hobma’s allegations.

“They are trying to twist my words against me,” he said. “I don’t hate all Jews. I hate only Zionist Jews that made Palestine smaller than my neighborhood.”

He added: “It all depends on how you interpret the song. By ‘faggots’ I didn’t mean homosexuals and by ‘Jews’ I didn’t mean all Jews. My fans realize that.”
One can't help but feel for Ismo. It's getting to the point where one can't even say "I hate those fucking Jews" without someone calling you an anti-Semite. What a ludicrous world we live in.

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