Katie Hopkins reported to police for 'inciting racial hatred'

The Guardian and Independent both report on the latest scandal involving Katie Hopkins as she wades into yet another accusation of inciting racial hatred.

In a twitter exchange with the Labour MP for Rochdale, Simon Danczuk, who marked Pakistan National Day by raising the Pakistani flag in his constituency, Hopkins tweeted a number of messages denouncing Danczuk by referring to men of Pakistani heritage recently convicted of child sex offences.

Hopkins tweeted a picture of men convicted of sex grooming offences in Rochdale saying:

“Are these your friends too ‪@SimonDanczuk? Is this why you are raising the Pakistani flag in Rochdale? 77 years inside.”

She followed it up with a number of other messages all conflating the crimes of the few with the British Pakistani community more broadly. She wrote:

“Your Pakistani friends saw young white girls as fair game when they abused them.”

“Raising a Pakistani flag in Rochdale is not helping community cohesion.”

“It is inflammatory. ‪@SimonDanczuk you & your party disgust me.”

“Do NOT lecture me on community cohesion fool.”

Danczuk has referred the messages to the police stating, “I don’t think we should beat about the bush here, Katie Hopkins is inciting racial hatred.”

“Rochdale has a proud history of coming together to mark special days in different cultures, from St Patrick’s Day to the Ukrainian Holodomor, and our town will not take any lessons from Katie Hopkins on community cohesion. She has waded into something she doesn’t understand and her ignorance is extremely dangerous.”

The complaint of Asian businesses in Rochdale of hate crimes experienced on the back of media coverage of the sex grooming trials is certainly evidence of ignorance inviting danger, as is the exploitation of the issue by far right groups who have targeted a number of town and cities in campaigns against ‘Muslim grooming gangs’.

But Hopkins is not alone in perpetuating the ignorance that undermines community cohesion and which blames entire communities for the criminal acts of the few. In his review of Trevor Phillips’ documentary about race in Britain, Joseph Harker, reflected on the ways in which “casual stereotyping” seeps into our everyday conversation to the point of normalising prejudice.

Of the way in which race and crime is discussed in the media, Harker observed, “There is an infinite number of facts about any one ethnic group; so the issue isn’t whether certain facts are correct or not; but which facts are chosen.

“The strongest recent example of this has been the shocking revelations of sexual grooming by mainly Pakistani-origin men in several British cities, with thousands of young victims. Hundreds of men are implicated in these horrific crimes. Yet in Britain there are 1.2 million people of Pakistani heritage. The vile grooming gangs are a tiny proportion (far less than one in 1,000), yet the stories have led to all manner of discussions about what is wrong with Pakistanis in general. Or, even worse, what is wrong with their religion, Islam, which has still less connection to the issue. Said one Radio 5 Live caller: “They can’t have relationships with their own young ladies because it’s forbidden so they go after young white girls.” Presumably “they” means all Muslim or Pakistani men.”

Given the penchant of sections of the media to divulge some “facts” but not others, the ignorance displayed by Hopkins is the thin wedge of a much wider problem when it comes to media representations of Islam and Muslims.