Saturday 1 August 2015

Welcome to 'The Jungle'



It seems it's Language Awareness Week every week now. Fail to be sufficiently 'aware' and all hell will break loose. 

Most 'infamously', there was the hugely-reported row over David Cameron's use of the world 'swarm', which hordes of the usual suspects claim to have found offensive, alleging that it 'dehumanises' those thus described (in this case illegal immigrants .... er, sorry Twitter.... migrants).

The story of the BBC's Paul Adams finding himself on the receiving end of such a Twitter frenzy after an appearance on BBC Breakfast has its amusing points but, when you think about it, is rather too depressing to laugh about (much). 

The BBC reporter asked a black migrant in Calais, ‘Are you going back to the Jungle or will you try again?’ 

As you and I know, he was referring to 'The Jungle', the illegal camp there, but that didn't stop the chronically ill-informed and easily-outraged from swarming onto Twitter and screaming "Racism!"

Still, Paul Adams doesn't seem to have been too phased by it all. (Why should he after all? As Metro's Rebecca Lewis put it....
...Paul has ignored the undeserved social media outrage...
...before noting though that he had objected to some other kinds of Twitter comment (whilst also engaging in a spot of 'virtue signalling'): 
He instead took to Twitter to air his thoughts on the migrant situation in Calais, writing: 
‘Leaving Calais. Have met refugees / migrants from Eritrea, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kuwait & more. Astonishing stories. 1/2’
‘Judging by Twitter responses, some find their very existence objectionable. But we need to know who they are and why they come. 2/2.’

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