I’m still kind of amazed at the way my compatriots continue to amaze me.

I’ve talked in the past about Indian racism – applying that to racism in its purest form, that applied by North Indians and people of North Indian origin against Africans and people of ethnic Mongoloid origins, including Indians from the East and the Himalayan belt. The Africans are thought of as, and often called to their faces, “monkeys”; the Mongoloids are “Chinkies” who are fit only for menial work.

Now – in the wake of a continuing wave of rapes and assaults against tourists – I’m compelled to add another version of racism, what I’d call racio-sexism: the racism that leads the average Indian man to think East Asian and white women as fair sexual prey.

Just ask any woman from China, Japan or Europe or the Americas who travels alone in India what her experience was like, and even if she hasn’t been actually molested or raped she will tell of groping hands and whispered propositions, some from people whom one would think far too sophisticated for that sort of thing.

After all, these women are friendly, casually dressed, unaccompanied by any man, and they all “believe in free sex”…just watch the porn videos for confirmation. How dare they turn the average pot-bellied virile Indian hunk of manhood down?

On one level one might say it’s revenge for centuries of being at the receiving end of white domination and the rape of uncounted non-white women at the hands of white conquerors; but I don’t exactly think Danielle Favre from Lyon, France or Hiroko Sakamura from Kyoto, Japan, are to blame for the actions of French soldiers in Algeria or Japanese soldiers in Nanking. And if they are, I certainly don’t want to live in that sort of world.

And in any case, watching how the same people who target the white woman shamelessly kowtow to the white man, I’m sure that’s not what’s going through their minds – if they have minds, that is. I tend to doubt it.

    

When I spoke a little while back about cricket receding from the media consciousness, I admit I was mistaken. But then I couldn’t have anticipated just how far media can go to make a buck.

Whenever I talked in the past about cricket not being a game any more but a substitute for war, I had people on my back. I think I just stand vindicated.

If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, it’s about a test match between the BCCI XI (the “Indian” cricket team) and Australia which ended yesterday in Sydney. The BCCI XI crashed, as if we didn’t know it would, to yet another defeat. Yawn-worthy. Only, it wasn’t.

It wasn’t, because this test match was allegedly marred by “bad umpiring decisions” against Indian players and “unsportsmanlike conduct” from the Australian side.

The “unsportsmanlike conduct” included pretty standard gamesmanship like taking advantage of umpiring lapses, apparently (maybe someone needs to point out that this is modern professional sport, not some schoolboy tournament where the honour system can find some relevance).

Also, the BCCI XI’s Harbhajan Singh (in the photo, on the right) stands accused of racially abusing the only black Australian player, Andrew Symonds (left), by calling him a “monkey”. As a result of this Singh’s been banned for three games. The BCCI is appealing and threatening to withdraw from the tournament unless the ban is revoked, something I'd call blackmail. Then the team will return home and trumpet about how it would have won all the remaining matches but had been cheated out of its legitimate victory. Kind of like we would have won this war or that, if only...

I’m not in a position to say how accurate or otherwise these accusations are, because just now it’s impossible to find any objective account from the Indian media which have turned this into some kind of “national pride” issue. As for the foreign media, they have either (and quite rightly) ignored the whole thing or else reported it dead-pan as another South Asian circus.

I would really not give half a damn for the whole thing if only they hadn’t removed all real news and repeated this, ad nauseam, everywhere all over the media.

It’s a joke. It also makes me sick. Which makes it a sick joke.   

 

    

In 1991 or 1992, I was in Lucknow and since I had nothing better to do I accompanied a couple of classmates to watch part of a three day cricket match between England and the BCCI XI (something that then called itself the Indian cricket team and nowadays calls itself Team India). The match was, like virtually all of cricket, so monumentally boring I retain almost no impressions of it. What I remember perfectly well is the behaviour of the crowd – it called the English players the filthiest names it could think of – motherfucker and sisterfucker were the lesser ones; and all in Hindi so the English wouldn’t understand. I remember seeing Mike Gatting (remember him?) sweeping his hat off and bowing to the crowd. He thought they were cheering him.

Nowadays the Australian cricket team is touring India and grinding the BCCI XI into the ground and mixing it into the mud. And, therefore, the Indian crowds are doing whatever they do when defeat is inevitable – throw things at the players. This time they went a bit further. They started making “monkey noises” at Australia’s only non-white player, the dreadlocked Andrew Symonds (in the picture). Which is something not unexpected, because, as I mentioned somewhere (if I’m not mistaken - and believe me I know damned well I'm not), Indians are as racist as they come and they all love to think they are superior to anyone else, especially if that person is dark-skinned.

And on the field now things aren’t much better. When the BCCI XI wins, its players gesture and mouth abuse at their opponents and call it “healthy aggression.” When, as usually happens, the BCCI XI loses, the players gesture, mouth abuse, and claim they were victimised.

I guess cricket isn’t totally useless – it shows up our national character, in all its unlovely lack of charm. Feudalistic, voyeuristic, arrogant, self-indulgent, utterly corrupt to the core.

Lose on.  

Back during my trip to Russia in 2005 I was surprised by the existence of Neo-Nazi Hitler-worshippers in Russia. Some were even in St Petersburg, the city Hitler, in 1941, had ordered wiped off the face of the earth even if it offered to surrender. They said Hitler ought to have won the Second World War. I wonder if they have any idea that if Hitler had won, they wouldn't have been around to worship him now.

Nazism = ignorance. It may also be that Nazism = idiocy, but it equals ignorance for sure.  

But even so I was amazed by what I read today.

You all know, I guess, that I hate and detest the pseudo-state of "Israel".  But some things are too much for anyone to digest. I think I can appreciate what the average "Israeli" will feel about this.

Of course, if you build a state on the basis of systematic discrimination against a section of your own population, you shouldn't be too surprised if the demon of racism comes round and finally bites you in the ass, but still...

Haven't these bastards ever heard of the concentration camps, for dog's sake?

My name is Mohammad Haneef. I’m a terrorist.

This may seem a little odd to the many people who are under the impression that I’m a doctor and husband and new father. This may also seem odd to people who believe in the rule of law and such outmoded stupidities.

Because, you see, I am a terrorist.

Consider the overwhelming evidence against me. First of all, I’m a Muslim. This should have set alarm bells ringing in Australia when I arrived here to study and work at a hospital in Brisbane. Unfortunately for Australia, they did not.

Then, consider the facts. Someone in Glasgow rammed, allegedly, a car into the terminal building of the airport and set it on fire. The car was partly burned and so was the man. Nobody else received a scratch. That was a terrorist attack, of course. Terrorist attacks are always such brilliant successes.

Searching this person’s belongings, the police turned up a group photograph taken in Bangalore which featured the man himself and two of his cousins, all of whom had graduated from medical college. And one of those cousins happened to be me!  What more proof do you want?

But of course there’s more, much more.

You see, I chatted online with my cousin Sabeel Ahmed, on June 26, three days before the “attack”, sorry, attack, rather, make that ATTACK!!! on Glasgow airport. And we talked about the birth of my daughter! Now if we had talked about car bombs and suchlike it of course would not have been suspicious. But talking of my daughter? Can you imagine the loaded symbolism of such words and phrases as “congratulations” and “what are you going to name her?”

Ah, don’t think that’s all the evidence against me. There is more. My other cousin, Kafeel, also part of this great big humongous plot against civilisation, the guy who actually drove the KILLER CAR and set himself afire, had lent me 300 pounds in 2005 so I could sit for a medical examination! Now why on earth do you suppose I would want to take a medical examination? Isn’t that, well, suspicious?

And here is the clincher. A year ago, I had given my mobile SIM card to my cousins. And they had not used it in planning and executing this ATTACK! If they had, certainly, I might have argued my innocence. But they didn’t. That proves it.

Oh – as for my cousin Sabeel. He’s guilty as hell, too. He “became aware" of material that would tend to inform him that a terror attack might be planned, and he failed to tip off the authorities! Terrible. He should be made an example of, so that all those god-fearing white Christian hellbound infidels can now begin snooping on their sons and fathers, mothers and daughters. 

Now what do you think happened? I was on my way to see my baby daughter when I was arrested at the airport. You see, the Australians got lucky. A few hours more and I would have been at my daughter’s cot-side, and who knew what terror plots I would have been scribbling on her used diapers?

Ah – I forgot. I’d bought a one way ticket on my way to Bangalore. Now this proves that I’m a terrorist. Of course it has nothing to do with the fact that with the rupee appreciating by the day against the US$, I could buy a ticket for the return journey in India and save a lot there. No.

It’s certainly true that the Australians did their best to cover up or their earlier lapses. They cited all the evidence they could not present against me, because to present that evidence would reveal their sources, and they locked me up. Some bleeding heart liberal groups (ha ha ha, just you wait, liberal cowards and softies! Wait till the Islamic caliphate comes into being! You’ll be the first for the sword! Ha ha ha!) made all kinds of fuss until the judge decided to release me on bail. But the Australian government was made of sterner stuff. It cancelled my visa. This was because, as I’ve been admitting all along, I’m a terrorist and so I’m of bad character. Without a visa, I was an illegal alien. So they could lock me up. So far so good?    

Even if the ridiculously slack and soft Australian legal system lets me off, if they call me innocent, the stupid idiots, the Australian government is determined to deport me as an undesirable. That’s apart from the constant questioning I’m being subject to. That’s the way to be tough, people. Otherwise you have no defence against the likes of me.

Meanwhile, the Indian government knows how to act. Behind a screen of soft words for the morons who believe them, the Indian government has done absolutely nothing to help me. I’m a Muslim, therefore I’m a terrorist, and all the government wants to do is give the Australian police all assistance and contemplates arresting my family, including my wife and probably my newborn daughter as well. Yes, do arrest her. In particular, please check her diapers.

Now, you Australians who are out to support me. Don’t you understand that I’m the enemy? Are you really that stupid? Look how tough and fair your nation has been, historically, against the likes of me. Australia exterminated those savage hordes, the Tasmanians; it tore mixed race children from Aboriginal families and brought them up with white families, so that they couldn’t turn into terrorists; Australia was, too, enlightened enough (until liberal contamination of its values) to keep itself pure by a White Australia policy. Look, too, how Australia fell over itself in its eagerness to send troops to Vietnam to help out the American defenders of freedom, and to Iraq; that’s the way to stand on the side of humanity, fairness, and decency everywhere. Right.

A word of advice, Australians. You need to keep electing John Howard to the premiership. As a terrorist, I can tell you, he’s the one who can keep you safe. Just throw away your freedoms and do exactly as he tells you.

And if you have an iota of sense, don’t demonstrate for me.

    

 

 

                                          

        

I guess I should be incensed.

I should be incensed that someone like Robert Mugabe is destroying his country, its resources, its economy, its reputation, with inflation running at 2200% (reputedly) and people flocking abroad by any means possible. I should be incensed that Mugabe is going to chair the UN Commission for Sustainable Development, when he is an "international pariah" or at least ought to be.

I guess I should be incensed at the audacity of a man who beats up his political opponents and imprisons them on the flimsiest of pretexts, is now a figurehead for African resistance to the West. That this is the man of whose country President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa (that same South Africa whose apartheid regime was such a paragon of democratic anti-communistic capitalism to Reagan and Thatcher), said

"The fight against Zimbabwe is a fight against us all. Today it is Zimbabwe; tomorrow it will be South Africa, it will be Mozambique, it will be Angola, it will be any other African country. And any government that is perceived to be strong and to be resistant to imperialists would be made a target and would be undermined. So let us not allow any point of weakness in the solidarity of SADC, because that weakness will also be transferred to the rest of Africa."

Or perhaps I am not so incensed at all.

Just look at who's lined up against Mugabe. The Bush regime - that same Bush regime which ignores its own peoples' wishes on Iraq and pretty much everything else, which has mishandled and destroyed everything it touched, domestically and internationally. The Bush regime's poodle Tony Blair, whose signal contribution to English has been the term "sexing-up" and whose only desire seems to be to grovel at the feet of the king. Australia, whose prime minister John Howard's publicly stated goal is to make his nation "America's agent in the Asia Pacific" and who opposed sporting sanctions against South Africa in the Apartheid period, yet wants them imposed against Zimbabwe now.

Remember what these worthies said about Saddam Hussein, and what they did - and are doing - to Iraq?

I do admit Mugabe is a dictator. I admit that he's doing everything he can to cling on to power, including manipulating the media and controlling the verdict of elections. But, uh, didn't we see someone else doing those exact things to stay in power? Now who could that be?

All right, sarcasm apart, just why is the West going such hammer and tongs at Mugabe, given that Zimbabwe isn't exactly the  most resource rich country in Africa, nor yet the most dictatorial (why don't they check the Moroccan occupation regime in the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, or the Meles Zenawi regime in Ethiopia, for example?). I mean, even if Zimbabwe suddenly returned to democratic ideals (whatever those might be) and cast iron market capitalism tomorrow, it still won't be a gigantic market for Western goods, would it? And as for talk about the West supporting freedom...spare me.

The answer, I think, isn't all that difficult to find. And it lies in the core idea of racism and the hangover of the imperial past.

When the white settlers arrived in Africa, they found in the wide grasslands of Southern and Eastern Africa good farmland. The problem was, if you had farmland you needed men to work it, most so in that age before farm machinery. And the locals were quite comfortably settled on their own little farms. So, what do you do?

The solution was found in what became the conscious and forcible alienation of land from the African tribal, so he was quite literally rendered landless in order to force him to labour for the white settler. Much of the time the newly landless labourer found himself working for the white master on land which would have been his own under normal circumstances. And in order to tie the African to that land, two other things were done.

First, the white settler took over much more land than he needed or could possibly ever use. The idea was to reduce as far as possible the land available to the black tribal to force him to work for the white settler for survival. Again, I repeat, this was a deliberate policy, part of a package that imposed high taxes, prohibited blacks from owning media outlets, and promoted Christianity as the sole means of gaining affordable education. Worldwide, missionary Christianity has virtually always been a tool of imperialism.

Secondly, the black labourer was issued with a pass, called kipande in Kenya, which was a

registration certificate recording work periods, wages, comments by employers, and other employment-related matters; from 1920, all adult males were required to carry the kipande under penalty of heavy fines - Sicherman (1990).   

The kipande, and its Southern African equivalents, was a virtual certificate of slavery. The black could not even spend a night off his farm, or go and visit a friend, without written permission from his employer on his kipande. If he wanted an education for his children, he had to get them baptised so they could attend missionary schools - such as they were. He could not work for himself. He had nothing. He could aspire to nothing.

So, what did this produce?

In time, it created a country of massive landholdings, mostly under- or un-utilised, run by a tiny number of white farmers, with an underclass of black slave labour - slave labour in all but name. This happened in Kenya and led to the Mau Mau revolt of the Kikuyu people. It happened in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia, after the imperialist warmonger and mass looter Cecil Rhodes) and led to the liberation war against the British and then against the Ian Smith apartheid regime.

Then, Zimbabwe's freedom came. And what happened?

Although the revolutionary black government was in power, most of the country was still in the hands of a small minority of white farmers and the blacks still had little or nothing to show in terms of regaining the lands that were theirs by ancestral right. Of course, with modern machinery, the white farmers could claim that they were hyper-efficient and running the country as the granary of  Southern Africa. But the blacks were in the same old hole as before.

Now please remember two things.

First, when you keep a people trodden down for centuries, and when they finally get the chance to stand up again, they get quite vocal about regaining their rights. This becomes especially true when they regain their rights as the result of a revolutionary movement. That movement has to deliver on its promises or stand accused of selling out. And, second, as I said here, nations that fight for their freedom tend to value them far more than countries which gain independence by default.   

For a long time, in fact, the Mugabe regime sold out the revolution. It didn't deliver on a key promise to the indigenous people - the reclamation of the lands occupied by the white farmers. And when it finally did, when politically it became suicidal to hold off on that promise any longer, it went about it in a totally ham-handed way, sending in an armed rabble to forcibly and violently take the land over. It was so crude that the farmers, who - let's remember - usurped that land from the actual owners, and reduced them to the status of slaves, came out as the victims and the target of sympathy in the eyes of the media. And - today - it's only the media that counts, in the manufacture of reality.

Again, let's remember that racism cuts both ways - nobody gave a damn so long as it was just Afghans killing each other, just as it was all right for Rwandans to massacre 800,000 of their own citizens and Somalians and Congolese to tear their country apart in endless civil wars. White and yellow lives count for much more in this world than black or brown. Just stating facts.

So, I think it finally comes down to this - so long as Mugabe remains in power, the black population of Zimbabwe is at least nominally empowered; while if the Western supported Morgan Tsvangirai were to come to power tomorrow, you can bet he would pay for his accession by restoring the farmlands to the white settlers - and more likely than not pay compensation.

As long as Mugabe remains in power, it can be claimed that the economic woes of Zimbabwe are the fault of his land reforms, which handed over land to incompetent and corrupt blacks, and not other causes (actually, Mugabe asked many of the white farmers to continue in charge of their farms, but as managers and not owners). Also, Mugabe said clearly that it was Britain, which alienated black land and handed it over to the white settlers, which should pay any compensation due - but that is another thing the British refused to so much as consider. Who wants to remember inconvenient historical fact, after all?

Again - I don't like Mugabe. I suspect nobody, really, does. But then nobody really liked Saddam Hussein either and he proved to have been the bulwark against the deluge, didn't he?

Regime change in Zimbabwe would certainly make the Bush cabal cream themselves. But would it actually make any positive difference to the people of Zimbabwe?

Look at Africa and see the worsening indices of human development, the rampant corruption, skyrocketing poverty - and all this in countries which are held up as models of freedom. Would a capitalist pro-Western Zimbabwe's people avoid that fate? 

Going by the experience of other nations where Bush has been at work, I think they'd rather not find out.  

For any observer trying to stay at all impartial, our society today is fairly obviously well on the path to Nazism. It's evident in the rightward shift on virtually every parameter; the social, where retrograde "values" are actively promoted; the political, where exclusive, identity-based politics now seem to be the only sort going; the economic, where business houses and industrialists are involved in the running of government; and in the arena of foreign policy, where the nation is being dragged into an alliance with the most heavily armed goon on the block..

Yes, we're becoming a Nazi nation. And the Muslims are the Jews, targeted in numbers as in the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 (second photo above), for mass extermination; or individually for petty harassment, like MF Husain, the 91 year old painter and shameless gimmickist who's been hounded into exile because he allegedly "insulted" Hindus by painting Hindu goddesses nude.

We've become a Nazi nation, where to be left wing is to be ipso facto anti-national; where right wing action squads based on the Nazi Sturm Abteilung (SA, top photo above) can arm, drill and train under the benign gaze of the authorities while left wing activists are hunted down and murdered in staged encounters as "Maoist rebels".

We've become a Nazi nation, when history and prehistory are re-invented to prove the origin of the "Aryan" (yeah, that same "Aryan") race was here in India, and that all other races are interlopers and by implication "inferior".

We've become a Nazi nation, where the perceived and propagandised interests of a single, and invented at that, community (the North and West Indian versions of Hinduism, and to hell with the very different East Indian and South Indian traditions) becomes the "national interest" and where adherents of different religions are all "foreigners" (and no matter that Christianity in India is older than it is in most parts of Europe, having arrived here in the First Century CE, or that Islam has been an Indian religion since at least 700 CE). We've become a Nazi nation, when anyone opposing the official line is hounded by legal and illegal means till he or she either pipes down or is forced to leave.

We've become a Nazi nation, where the - again, invented - traditions of a group of people not making up half the national population is sought to be made the official traditions of everyone else, and this is passed off as "culture", and where the worst features of that tradition are those that become dogma.

We've become a Nazi nation, when women are asked to go back into the kitchen and know their place (and it's not for want of trying that the Nazis won't get them back there).

We've become a Nazi nation, when trade unions are suppressed and the police and authorities automatically take the side of industrialists in trade disputes.

We've become a Nazi nation, when increasingly large parts of the national budget are hived off into weapons purchases which have no conceivable use but to enrich certain officials through kickbacks.

Fortunately, our homegrown Nazis are the poor imitations of the originals. For whatever the originals were, they had a sort of awful majesty; they never did things by halves. Ours - well, look at the pathetic image of the RSS oldsters on parade below, and compare them with the SA on top.

If Nazism was the Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, Hindutva is the Corporal "Schicklgruber".

Like everyone and his uncle, I have about had enough of Don Imus news over these last few days. If you don’t know what I am talking about (it's about an elderly American radio "shock jock" describing a team of young black women from Rutgers University as "nappy headed ho's") , you either have not too much spare time to spend online; or else you stick to work and avoid irrelevancies. In either case, you’re better than the rest of us.

And it is of course to the rest of us that I’m addressing myself – sort of like a politician trying to convince fence sitters to vote for him. So let me just get Imus out of my system once and for all.

First: I think it’s all not a storm in a teacup; no, it’s less than that. It’s beneath notice and would have remained that way. However racist Imus has been in the past, however much a piece of racist ordure he is, a stray remark by a self styled “shock jock” – someone who is paid to be offensive – about “nappy-headed ho’s” is not so much offensive as ridiculous. (Something a bit odder – the on-air comment to Imus by the show’s longtime producer, Bernard McGuirk, calling the women’s final the “Jigaboos vs. the Wannabees,” – did not seem to draw any condemnation, though I’d have thought “Jigaboos” more offensive. It’s a word most people would at least recognise. Even a year ago, I, for one, would have had no idea what a “ho” was supposed to be. A hoe, perhaps? And seeing as right wing hatebags, sorry, commentators, like Ann Coulter have no problems calling Arabs “ragheads” [quite apart from encouraging Bush to invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity], “nappy headed” would not normally strike me as offensive. But then, what do I know?)

So, exactly what goes on here?

In the first place, “nappy headed ho” coming from a white man sounds about as unforced as, say, an Irishman talking to another and cursing by saying Scheisse (that's German for "shit"). I very, very much doubt that Imus thought it out of the top of his own head or that it was as “unforced” as he seems to want everyone to think.

But still, nappy-headed ho?

In fact, as has been repeatedly pointed out as well, Imus was merely following in the footsteps of black "artists" like Calvin Broadus up above who calls himself Snoop Doggy Dogg. I have no fondness for "Dogg" or the rest of the gangsta rappers. Part of this dislike is personal - I admit that I dislike hip-hop "music" and I can understand about one word in five of the "lyrics" anyway. (Although I did enjoy The Two Live Crew, one of whose albums I used to own. The Two Live Crew are so over the top no one can seriously take offence at their creations. If you're listening to a song called "Face Down Ass Up That's The Way We Like To Fuck" you shouldn't be surprised by "offensive" language. Nor that I remember The Two Live Crew as being racist either .)

Apart from that, it seems to me that like politics in India, a criminal record – and ongoing criminal involvement – seems to be a prerequisite for a career as a gangsta rapper. From where I’m sitting, the whole lot of them seem to have done, or are doing, or in very short order are going to be doing, prison time. This is in itself not something that is automatically dishonourable in a system loaded against the black man like that of the US. But these men are always sentenced for violent crime, shooting up each other (including killings like those of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., possibly by each other’s followers), not driving offences or white-collar escapades (and looking at their earnings they should certainly have been capable of tax fraud and suchlike). Apart from the lack of visual aesthetic (I defy anyone to find anything to like in the bling-loaded ensemble of 50Cent and his tribe) their language is primarily disrespectful of their own people. By that I assume that they consider black people their own people, but I'm not entirely convinced even of that.

Malcolm X and the black middle class despised each other quite as much as the gangsta rappers and the black wannabe-whites of today do; I don’t really think though that they referred to each other in quite those terms like “Nigga” and “ho” (who am I kidding? I know damn well they did not talk about each other like that, though during a part of his career Malcolm did call whites “devils”.) In any case, the gangsta rappers are the ones who began the whole business of misogynistic, degrading depictions of young black people, especially women, and made a fortune out of it too.

So, when Imus said “nappy headed ho” he was just following in the footsteps of Dogg and his pack. He may have thought he was being “cool” – all he was being was ridiculous. That’s my take, anyway.

So, why is this not very substantial issue being blown out of all proportion? I think it boils down to a combination of three factors.

First is the media’s determination to cash in by milking any story dry. Anna Nicole Smith was one, but now one can’t even milk her daughter’s parentage any more. Even that has been settled by DNA analysis. So a new issue was needed and Imus obligingly provided it.

Then comes the reason why stories like this have to be played up for all they can. This is to divert attention, as I said, from real stories – like the continuing failure of the “surge” in Iraq, or the fact that mortgages have ensured many Americans are shortly going to be rendered homeless. As I said in the Sheeple post, a house of cards can be patched up only while the people can be made to look elsewhere.

The third and last reason is the most prevalent and most interesting. This is rampant, unrestricted tokenism. If you raise a hue and cry over a relatively minor incident, you can reduce the impact of not doing anything about far more important issues. Blacks in the US are increasingly marginalised; they provide more and more of the warm bodies packing US prisons and manning the armies of the “war on terror”; Hurricane Katrina showed to all the world how utterly unconcerned the US administration was about the fate of black people. I also remember then the media (the same media which are now excoriating Imus) portrayed blacks as “looters” while whites were said to be “survivors” who “found food/clothes/whatever”. So, put up a few collaborators like Colin Powell and Condi Rice; blow Imus out of the water for “racism”, and you don’t even have to do a thing about much more influential and virulent racists like Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, or any Bushie, once you get beneath the skin. You can say “In this society racism has no place” while systematically depriving blacks even further, conspiring to disenfranchising them, and driving wedges between them (it’s likely this “controversy’ has hardened black ghetto support for the likes of Dogg, Dre, or 50Cent). It’s exactly the counterpart of the Indian system of providing educational and employment reservations for a tiny section of the affluent portion of “disadvantaged” castes and ignoring the schools, roads, power and security they would need to overcome their genuine backwardness.

Nappy headed ho’s? How about psycho-brained slimeballs for the Bushies, the media, and the rest?

This ad has been cited as one designed to "insult the maximum number of people as quickly as possible".
Storyline: Swarthy male (read Arab Muslim, i.e. "terrorist") drives over to where blond white people are having fun in an outdoor cafe and explodes the ordnance strapped to his body.
Makes one wonder where the limits of taste end.
Apparently, it was made as an advert of the makers' (a British duo calling themselves Lee and Dan) own expertise, so as to get them jobs - and it even did.
Imagine a similar ad featuring Timothy McVeigh and a Ryder truck, and any humour or satire in it disappears pretty damn quick.