Are Roald Dahl Books Racist?

[DangerousBeanz]

I've been reading a thread on a Facebook page where someone asked for recommendations for children's books. Someone suggested Roald Dahl as a good choice for characters who didn't conform to gender stereotypes, and another contributer said his books were racist.
Now I've never noticed any racism, but it kind of kicked off a bit and the recommended was told that if she couldn't see the problem she was part of the problem even though she only asked for examples of how and said she'd never noticed that aspect to the stories.
I didn't like to ask how and which books in case I got slagged off too.
So AIBU in thinking Roald Dahl children's books are fab and not racist or have I really missed something?

@HugeAckmansWife

I was discussing something like this with my 9yo the other da. In many fantasy series, made up worlds, the 'West' are always the good side and East is always bad.. Think Calormenes in Narnia, Mordor.. Almost every fantasy series I ever read was like it. Obvs Tolkien and Lewis were of that generation when Muslims, the Middle East etc were associated automatically with something a bit 'off'. Anything not white British basically. However, provided this is understood in context I don't think the books should be consigned to history.

Can't comment on Lewis as I know very little about Narnia, but with Tolkien, in the early stories of Middle Earth the evil side is in the North and Men originally awoke in the East of Middle Earth.

Not saying there are no issues by todays standards, but it's more complicated than Tolkien associating the east with wrongness or bad things.

For Sam G76 quote below from the cited text on Israel's 'Yemenite Children Affair' notorious eugenics racism scandal, where the victims of the white Jewish settlers, were genuine indigenous middle-eastern Jews.

"One of the marketed excuses for Israel’s colonial conquest of Palestine is that the Jewish white Western invaders supposedly shared an identity with Indigenous Jews of the region. Yet, in terms of colonial racism, Jewish white settlers conquering Palestine clearly regarded themselves as an elevated, superior, separate Western ethnic group, because among their first victims were actually Indigenous Middle Eastern Jews. In 2017, it came to light that a large number of children who had been brought up by settler parents were actually Yemeni-Jewish. Blood tests demonstrated that they had been stolen from Yemeni parents who had been regarded as too culturally primitive to successfully rear their own children.

As the Jewish news organization Mondoweiss revealed...the complete extent of settler crimes against the Indigenous Yemeni Jews also included eugenics-like human experimentation: “a Knesset committee followed up by confirming earlier this month that Yemenite babies died during the 1950s after state medical institutions conducted experiments on them.” See link below

mronline.org/2020/12/04/a-racist-endeavour-zionist-israels-black-jewish-victims-of-color/

Btw SamG76, Since the 1930s,your suggestion that white western Jews aren't real westerners has been acknowledged as a form of anti-semitism.
In the 1930s, Jews and socialists took to the streets to fight Fascists who were claiming Jewish citizens were not real westerners.

Well supporters of Apartheid Israel have maligned Dahl because he merely complained of UK Israel supporters given there allegiance of to a foreign country's state apparatus. However Israel supporters like UK Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, have no problem applying the Tebbitt test to Black Britons who simply support the West Indies or Pakistan cricket teams - see links below.
So the racist double-standard of giving your allegiance to a foreign Apartheid country much of which would be hazardous to our Black citizens is supposedly ok? But being Black and merely supporting a foreign sports team is a violation of your citizenship.
Obviously, this racist hypocrisy and complete nonsense! See link.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/12189152/Minorities-must-pass-the-Norman-Tebbit-test-Chief-Rabbi.html
&
www.thejc.com/news/uk/mirvis-pass-tebbit-test-1.61394