Updates: Borat, Darrell Hair, The Queen

There are some news items that never go away: criminal activities funnelled through government sluices, human rights violations in developing countries and underground human rights violations in "developed" countries... The list is endless and unfortunately it includes such terribly annoying elements as Borat, Darrell Hair and Frau Queen herself, the matriarch of English national thievery? Ah, blogging is so much fun.

Borat

First off, Borat... As the Saccharinist has reported in the past (here and here), the comedian behind Borat, a Mr Sacha Baron Cohen, has conveniently and cleverly fooled millions of people around the world into accepting the fact that in these times of religious prejudice against Muslims, there is nothing wrong with an Orthodox Jew openly mocking Muslims. Borat, and Ali G, if you recall (Baron Cohen's two biggest moneymakers) are indeed blithering caricatures of Muslim stereotypes. What's so hypocritical about Baron Cohen is that he portrays himself as fighting prejudice, but limits the fight to anti-semitism while at the same time propagating prejudice against Muslims. Doesn't really highlight his human rights credentials now, does it?

But enough with the bigotry, let's get on to more pressing issues along the lines of this blog -- is it any surprise to anyone that Mr Baron Cohen is in fact half-Iranian? Yes, indeed, as the UK Guardian (amongst thousands of other sources) published awhile ago, Baron Cohen's mother Daniella Weiser is in fact an Iranian Jew who was born in Israel. What a shame that she never got a chance to grow up in her own country where Iranian Jews are content to live as the largest population of Jews in the Middle East, outside of Israel itself. Guess she missed out big-time!

Darrell Hair

Speaking of Bigots...let's move right along to one Darrell Hair...As the Saccharinist reported in late August, Herr Hair is a professional cricket umpire who has been openly known for years for being racist against South Asian players. This Australian's hatred and prejudice has been so intense and so persistent that it was a well known fact. The question is, or should I say, was, why Herr Hair was allowed for so very long to exhibit his racism publicly in such an unsportsmanlike fashion? Very simply: why was the racist Darrell Hair allowed to continue in his job for so many years? There is no acceptable or honest explanation for that.

However, as karma has it, there are two kinds of bad people in this world: those who are diplomatic and those who are not. See, the (really underhanded) diplomatic ones have a posse of "friends" who protect them because there's no harm in it, the undiplomatic ones eventually run out of support. Mr Hair fits in the second category and finally this week he was relieved of his duty (i.e. the world was relieved of his dooty) and fired from his job umpiring international cricket. A small victory long-time coming is better than no victory at all, I suppose.

Frau Queen

And finally, to round off our update on international bigots, who better than the Queen herself? These days she's all over the English and Commonwealth press because it's Veteran's day (actually, the English call it Remembrance Day) tomorrow -- a day when she parades around town and tabloid attempting to show the world that she gives a toss that thousands, millions of soldiers lost their lives so she can hold on to a bounty of wealth, land, and power she neither earned, nor deserves, nor does anything positive with. She is, after all, a grand thief whose personal expenses alone (including her royal ass-wiper -- em, arse-wiper) could eliminate poverty in most African nations overnight.

Besides, as the Guardian newspaper (amongst others) has reported time and again, the "English royals" aren't even English, they're German. Fancy that! How sympathetic is a German whose family has proven Nazi connections, to soldiers most of whom died in the wars against Germany in the last century? Exactly.