Author: Daniel Pipes
Publication: WorldNetDaily.com
Date: January 24, 2004
URL: http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1482
[Note from Hindu Vivek Kendra:
During an event here for senate candidate Nancy Farmer, Ms Clinton introduced
a quote from Gandhi by saying, "He ran a gas station down in St Louis."
Given the background of the case stated below, surely Ms Clinton should
be banished from politics!]
"It's gone too far. I have worked
in other places where you can't even ask for a black coffee," says one
woman. "At times you are afraid to open your mouth in case somebody finds
what you are saying is offensive," adds a man.
No, they are not at a university,
nor even a television station or a church. They are officers in a prison
system, the British prison system. Their comments above were made in a
BBC documentary on race relations in jails and quoted in an analysis of
perhaps the most astonishing PC item I have yet stumbled upon. Here is
what happened, as reported by David Sapsted in London's Daily Telegraph:
Colin Rose is 53 years old, a former
Coldstream guardsman, a father of three and a prison officer with 21 years'
of impeccable service. On Nov. 15, 2001, he dropped some keys into a metal
chute at the Blundeston Prison gatehouse. The keys made such a racket that
someone nearby suggested they could puncture the tray at the bottom of
the chute. To this, Rose replied with the following jocular but life-changing
comment:
"There's a photo of Osama bin Laden
there."
Well, other prison staff overheard
this remark and were outraged at its insensitivity. It turns out that the
governor of Blundeston Prison, Jerry Knight, had issued a staff notice
on Sept. 25, 2001, regarding the atrocities of two weeks earlier. In it,
Knight later explained, he asked staff "to have continued sensitivity .
[and] to avoid inflaming the situation." Or, as the Daily Telegraph more
bluntly put it, he wanted staff "to say nothing about the terrorist attacks
because of the high number of Muslims in the prison."
A six-month official investigation
followed, and Rose was dismissed in May 2002. He asked for a review of
his case by an employment tribunal, at which he explained his now-infamous
statement while throwing the keys down a chute:
I heard either one of the crowd
of people waiting to go through the gates, or possibly a member of staff,
comment that it sounded as if the keys were coming through the metal. When
I heard this comment I said, "There's a photo of Osama bin Laden there."
I meant that I was flicking the keys against an imaginary picture of Osama
bin Laden at the back of the chute. There were a lot of comments about
him around the prison.
Rose characterized his comment as
"a light-hearted, throwaway remark born of the stress I was under and the
speed with which I was having to work."
The good news is that the employment
tribunal issued a scathing judgment against Rose's dismissal:
Conduct by the governor was reprehensible,
totally unjustified, and in so far as he argues to the contrary, we do
not accept his explanation. He seemed determined to justify a course of
action which seemed wholly disproportionate. . This was a gross error of
judgment, at the very least, on his part. Mr Knight started with the presumption
that the applicant would be dismissed. We are most disturbed that a man
in Mr Knight's position should approach the future of a long-term prison
officer in such a manner.
Another hearing will determine the
compensation for Rose, though his firing left him "a broken man," and he
will not be returning to his old £24,000-a-year job.
The bad news is that Her Majesty's
Prison Service fully supports Gov. Knight's decision to dismiss Rose. The
spokesman said the service is "very disappointed" with the employment tribunal's
verdict, for the decision to fire Rose "had already been found to be fair
by an internal Prison Service appeal and the Civil Service Appeals Board,
which is completely independent. The decision to dismiss Mr Rose was fully
consistent with Prison Service policy ... to eradicate racism in prisons."
So, there you have it: The worthy
goal of eradicating racism translates into severe punishment of a light-hearted
expression of hostility against the mastermind of the world's most deadly
terrorist attack in order to appease Muslim criminals.
At this rate, will there always
be an England?
