It's all over the press that Tory students at St Andrews Uni burned an effigy of Barak Obama, and are now being hounded as racists. Lets take a deep breath here and without a knee-jerk reaction, consider if they actually are.
Now don't get me wrong, I can't stand the Tories, so anything that paints them in a bad light is fine by me, but come on, are they actually racist?
The burning of effigy's of people you have problems with has a long and noble tradition, especially in the middle east, where effigy's of political leaders (esp in recent times of George Bush) have been coming into contact with naked flames on a pretty regular basis.
Now, if the St Andrews students were burning the effigy "because he was black", then yes, they're racist scum. But if they were burning the effigy in protest at US policy's, then the skin colour is irrelevant, and they are not racist. I may be a bit naive here, but Barak Obama isn't white, so if the dummy wasn't of a similar colour to the person it was meant to represent, no-one would know it was supposed to be the leader of the last remaining superpower. Would they?
Politics is like football. It causes way to much trouble and should be outlawed, but hey that's not going to happen, so how about a little bit of common sense and a bit less sensationalism from the press in reporting things like this.
Accusing the students of being racist when they're not, because the effigy they're burning happens to represent a black man is stoking the fires, and likely to cause actual race problems in the fallout. Remember people. If it was Bush or a white man in power, the effigy would have been white, and there would be no accusations of racism.
Let's all just use some common sense, which ironically doesn't appear to be that common.
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