Greece Bans Voula Papachristou from 2012 Olympics over African Joke
Voula Papachristou was kicked off Greece’s Olympic team on Wednesday for making a racist, derogatory comment on her Twitter account. She wrote: "With so many Africans in Greece, the West Nile mosquitoes will be getting home food!!!"
A harmless joke. Offense to Africans is in the eye of the beholder.
What was the joke? "With so many Africans in Greece, the West Nile mosquitoes will be getting home food!!!" she tweeted. Athletic officialdom was not amused.
What was racist about the comment, given that Papachristou, apparently a strong Greek patriot, did not express any negative opinions about Africans, is a mystery … at least to normal people. She did not traffic in what the left believes are standard racist tropes. She did not say that Africans are more violent or disposed to crime than Greeks. Nor did she claim they are less intelligent than the descendants of Homer, Plato and Aristotle. She told an off-color joke, as it were.
She is also guilty of supporting the Golden Dawn party, which, while admittedly sounding a little extreme, opposes immigration; in other words, they would keep Greece for the Greeks. Perhaps that, as Patrick Cleburne wrote, is the real crime. Vdare
What we at Human-Stupidity say is much more offensive. Prepare for Human-Stupidity being raided and shut down! Freedom of expression has long been abolished by speech codes and political correctness rules.
Voula Papachristou’s other sin is promoting views of a party that is in Greek parliament. If a party is not outlawed, promoting it should not lead to expulsion from the Olympics! Political correctness destroys our democratic liberties and ideals.
Papachristou’s Twitter account ((at)papaxristoutj) contained several retweets and links to sites and YouTube videos promoting the views of Golden Dawn, a formerly marginal extreme right party that entered the Greek Parliament in two recent elections – in May and June – by polling almost 7 percent of the vote. She has since erased those links and retweets from her account. 2
Political correctness
Political correctness starts lightly and is ever expanding overcriminalization. Hate speech laws were intended to punish incendiary speech promoting violence and genocide. It was illegal to say "Kill Africans". Then it extended to using derogatory terms like the N -word ("nigger"). If someone uses the N-word, it is understood that the offended have the right to escalate violently "retaliate". I do hope that I don’t get arrested, or attacked by vigilantes, for typing this word once. Now we got as far as to get punished for privately making a joke?
But it was her attempt at a joke Sunday that got the most attention. Commenting on the widely reported appearance of Nile-virus-carrying mosquitoes in Athens, Papachristou wrote: "With so many Africans in Greece, the West Nile mosquitoes will be getting home food!!!". Her tweet prompted thousands of negative comments that snowballed Wednesday. 2
Vdare assails the fuzziness of hate crime definitions:
One cannot know what is racist and what isn’t. The word has no precise definition. One day, it means burning crosses and terrorizing blacks. The next, it means calling President Obama a socialist. Or skinny. Or opposing his health-care plan. Yet because those who level charge control what it means, or doesn’t mean, and can use it any way they wish, one is defenseless against it. It cannot be falsified. The very charge imposes the conviction of guilt. Vdare
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