Comment by dijit
3 days ago
Being critical of MENA migration is not hateful speech.
Hateful speech is stating: you are from a MENA region therefore you are x negative trait.
Being critical of migration is just being critical of migration, which is allowed. His defence ("suicidal empathy" etc;) comes from the situation in the UK where people are being arrested en-masse for "hate speech" for referencing acts of terror[0].
You can dislike what he says, but hateful carries a more specific meaning (to me, at least).
[0]: https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...
He did imply that brown people are rapists, and that transpeople bad. So he also fits your definition of hateful.
In "As I remember London" he also says that crime increases when there are more brown people.
I think he backed his citations, and just because migration from MENA regions (a historically entirely different culture) are “brown people” doesn’t make it invalid. Mexicans are also brown people and so are Spanish people in some definitions. Yet somehow he’s not talking about them. If you look closely he’s criticising the kids gloves that the authorities are handling the newcomers that leads to a worsening narrative for everyone- lets not forget that there are victims in both camps here.
We should be able to criticise migration without everyone saying it’s racism otherwise you loosen the definition of racism so much that everybody becomes a “racist” eventually and it stops having a sting
He did not back those up. He provided anecdata about a single "Pakistani rape gang" story, but the actual statistics say that child sex crime "gangs" are predominantly white [1].
You're allowed to criticize immigration, but if you only ever cherry-pick anecdotes about immigrants of a certain color and creed, and also refuse to correct your statement after you're made aware of the actual facts, you're most likely a racist.
DHH is also not criticizing immigration per se, because he's including non-white native brits in his category of undesirable Londoners. You can't deny that that's racism. These are people who grew up as part of the British culture, they just don't have the right skin tone.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20251003224438/https://assets.pu...
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