Rod Liddle played the politics of hatred - we should be honest about his legacy

Rod Liddle played the politics of hatred - we should be honest about his legacy Peter Oborne Tributes praised a 'great journalist', but very few touched on the fact that he was also a racist, a bigot and an Islamophobe 'Truth-teller for our times', or racist and bigot? Newspaper columnist Rod Liddle (Photo/X) This year, few public figures have enjoyed as resounding a send-off as the newspaper columnist Rod Liddle. Mr Liddle, who died this week, is being hailed as a truth-teller for our times whose trenchant columns "upset all the right people". There’s no denying that Liddle was a sometimes dazzling writer who grabbed the reader’s attention and never let it go. Many tributes have emphasised this heaven-sent quality, and many have added that a kindly soul lurked behind the intimidating public personality. But very few tributes even touched on the fact that Liddle was also a racist, a bigot and an Islamophobe. This open and undisguised bigotry was a core part of his public identity, his personality and his legacy. "I have spent the morning trying to draw a cartoon of a black person without it being racist," Liddle opened one column for the Spectator. He went on: "It’s bloody difficult. Especially the lips." In another Spectator article he falsely claimed that the "overwhelming majority" of violent crime in London was carried out by young African-Caribbean men. Genocide denial On Tuesday, this kind of writing was hailed as brilliant right across the British media and political establishment Fraser Nelson, who as editor of the Spectator published hundreds of Liddle’s articles,said that "his jokes were built on judgment, rigour, compassion". But is this true? middleeasteye.net Pride with a dash of prejudice: How the Spectator embraced the narrative of anti-Muslim bigotry Take, for example, Liddle’s public defence of Myanmar’s massacre of Rohingya Muslims. On the pages of the Sun in September, 2017, he asked:"Are you sure we’re being told the full story about those Muslim Rohingya refugees who are flooding into Bangladesh from Burma? "All we get is a BBC correspondent crying in front of the refugee camps every night. "It’s probably true that the Burmese government has been a bit, um, heavy-handed. But shouldn’t we be told a little more about the causes of the problem?" Myanmar, bear in mind, is now charged with genocide. It is well-documented that Burmese militias, backed by the army, had gone through Myanmar’s Rakhine province on a systematic campaign of slaughter, rape and destruction. In the immediate aftermath of the events that Liddle dismisses so lightly, I travelled to neighbouring Bangladesh to get the stories of survivors. One witness told me that the first action of soldiers upon arriving at his Rohingya village was to separate the local people into three groups. Men, young women (including girls as young as five), old women or those one eyewitness described to me as "those who are not so beautiful." The soldiers opened fire. "All the young men were shot at once. It took less than ten minutes," the eyewitness told me. The soldiers then walked over to the pile of dead