The last acceptable prejudice
by Effie Deans:
There has been a great deal written this week about prejudice. One remark that might have been said in private about the skin colour of a baby is enough to condemn an unnamed member of the Royal family. But while all prejudices are equal some prejudices are more equal than others. Some prejudices indeed are not merely acceptable but are expressed by all right-thinking people.
A Green Party Peer Baroness Jones has suggested that all men should be banned from the streets after 6 PM to make women feel a lot safer. This is in response to Sarah Everard going missing in London and the possibility that she was raped and murdered. The baroness does not know what happened to Sarah Everard. The police have suspect, but he has not been convicted of anything. Would the baroness respond in the same way next time there was a terrorist attack in London?
Whenever there is a terrorist attack, even when it has certain characteristics, there are people on social media including the usual politicians who tell us that we must not jump to conclusions about who might have committed the crime. If later, we discover that that the terrorist was a Muslim we are continually told that we must not judge the Muslim community by the actions of this one individual. This of course is correct. Out of the whole population of Muslims living in Britain only an infinitesimally small percentage are involved in terrorism. To judge Muslims in general because of the actions of Muslim terrorists is prejudice.
Imagine if someone suggested that because a Muslim blew himself up or knifed people in the street while shouting God is great in Arabic that all Muslims should be locked up so that everyone would feel safer. This would be considered to be so outrageous that anyone who said it would be immediately thought of as worse that the most prejudiced bigot. Consider for instance Donald Trump’s response to terrorism committed by Muslims when he banned people from certain Muslim countries from travelling to America. It is unlikely that Baroness Jones thought this tolerant or acceptable. Yet she expresses a prejudice that is essentially the same, only her prejudice is acceptable.
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