Richard Bacon, cyber bullying and Doug Stanhope

Cast your mind back a week or so and the BBC presenter Richard Bacon was presenting a programme about cyber bullying, he having been the victim of this in the past.

A few weeks before this the same Richard Bacon had undertaken a typically sycophantic interview with American comedian Doug Stanhope. Typical that is of Richard Bacon when interviewing someone from the left of politics and/or an edgy comedian, see my recent post re his interview with James Delingpole for how Richard Bacon interviews someone not to his liking. Richard Bacon included in that show a suggestion to look on YouTube for a particularly nasty piece of Doug Stanhope comedy aimed at Sarah Palin and her Down's Syndrome child. This came to my mind as I read Allison Pearson's piece in today's Telegraph which relates the cyber bullying that she recently experienced at the hands of Doug Stanhope and his Twitter friends.
Read the Telegraph article and feel free to ask Richard Bacon if he has read the article and if it has changed his view of Doug Stanhope?

Whose values have been offended?

From a few weeks back Allison Pearson writes:

"On a train to London, a young woman wearing a burkha, with only her heavily made-up eyes peeping out, did not have a valid ticket.

Challenged by the guard, the young woman gave a litany of excuses. She had left her bag at her boyfriend's, he had bought the ticket, she had no money on her...

My friend Jane, who was in the same carriage, noticed how the guard became nervous as the Muslim girl presented herself as an innocent in a society she didn't understand.

Instead of issuing a penalty fine, the guard backed off, shrugging his helplessness at the other passengers.

So imagine my friend's surprise when she got off at the same station as burkha girl and saw this 'penniless innocent' whip out a credit card from under the folds of her dress with which she promptly bought a Tube ticket.

Jane was so incensed she sent me a text message, explaining what she'd witnessed. It ended: 'Attack of Burkha Rage. Grrr.'

Jane is not a BNP voter. She is a university lecturer who specialises in the developing world.

Yet Burkha Rage has become our personal shorthand for someone taking the mickey out of our country and its tolerant ways.

Despite a growing acceptance that multi-culturalism has been deeply damaging to race relations, there are still almost weekly opportunities for a fit of Burkha Rage.

Look at Fata Lemes, the Muslim bar waitress who won £3,000 compensation this week for quitting her job after she objected to wearing a red cocktail dress.

Apologies if I find it hard to keep a straight face, but my jaw keeps dropping open. Miss Lemes took the job in a bar and left after eight days, claiming managers asked her to wear a dress that made her look like a prostitute.

Actually, the frock is conservative by London bar standards - more Petersfield garden party than Peter Stringfellow. But fair enough if Miss Lemes didn't like it.

What was not fair enough was her demand for £20,000 compensation.

An employment tribunal found that Miss Lemes had 'overstated her trauma'. You can say that again. Her compensation claim was 'manifestly absurd'.

Yet instead of telling the 33-year-old to grow up and accept that a British city bar is not readily confused with a convent, the tribunal awarded her £2,919.95.

As a Bosnian Muslim, it said, she 'holds views about modesty and decency which some might think unusual in Britain in the 21st century'.

They might think it was unusual if they had spotted that modest flower Miss Lemes on Facebook wearing a vest top with a gaping cleavage. But that image was not produced in court. "

Read the rest of Allison Pearson's article and get angry; it's our country let's keep it free.