Though Katie Hopkins goes too far at least once a week, she really has gone too far. The Debrief version of events? Bear with us:
Each year, thousands of migrants try to cross the Mediterranean in boats to get to the EU, where they eventually head to Germany, France and the UK for better lives. These would-be migrants pay huge sums of money to traffickers who promise to get them across the massive sea, but their boats aren’t ideal and can frequently fail.
Instead of just letting the migrants die in the water, the EU used to pay for the Italian authorities to do search and rescues of the sea to save these people. However, last year, the EU said this was simply encouraging the migrants, and decided to cancel the mission. After two boat tragedies involving migrants trying to get to Italy, 800 people died trying to cross the water in the last week alone.
Hours before, Katie Hopkins stuck her horrible oar in in her column for The Sun. She compared the migrants to ‘cockroaches’ saying: ‘No, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.’
She added: ‘Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants’
And, to borrow language used in propaganda in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, she continued: ‘They are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors.’
There is now a petition to remove Katie Hopkins from her role, and it’s got 200,000 signatures. However, there might be more direct courses of action: complaints to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (which was created to deal with this exact sort of thing) have reached 100 and have also been reported to the police (who can also deal with this sort of thing) for incitement to racial hatred (yes, that’s a crime).
Katie has responded to the furore surrounding her comments by saying on a guest spot on LBC that she only ever wanted to ‘use gunships in order to be able to tow boats back to where they came from’ and that ‘We pay an enormous amount towards foreign aid as it is, I don’t think we need to be helping with a rescue programme in the Med as well.’
That rescue programme in the Med saved 100,000 migrants before it was cancelled. The death toll of the latest tragedy could well reach 950.
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Picture: Rex
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.