Spectator 2016 -
"The hounding of Boris for his ‘Kenyan’ comment is the dumbest Twitterstorm yet."
"Normally, Twitterstorms, those unhinged uprisings against a politician or celeb who has dared to make an outré utterance, are best treated like tantrum-throwing two-year-olds. Stand back, let them do their foot-stomping, and wait for them to exhaust themselves. But the storm over Boris’s ‘part-Kenyan’ remark in relation to Obama is different. This Twitterstorm has been so dumb, and so destructive, that it cannot simply be allowed to pass and take its place in the bulging book of Times People Went Unnecessarily Crazy About Something. No, we need a reckoning with this Twitterstorm. We need to take stock."
^"As a keen watcher of Twitterstorms, I’m struggling to remember any that have been as batty and as immune to factual information as the Boris one. Boris is being put through the wringer, slurred as racist, for writing a Sun column last week in which he wondered if Obama’s ‘part-Kenyan’ heritage may have been behind his decision in 2009 to move a bust of Winston Churchill out of the Oval Office. In his little list of the various reasons people gave for Obama’s shifting of the Churchill bust, Boris includes this sentence: ‘Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire–of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.’ ...
"Oh, and the Guardian said it, too. Yes, the newspaper that has been outraged by Boris's comments, and whose hacks have been stirring up the defamatory mob on Twitter, said the same thing as Boris. In March 2009, the Guardian asked if Obama’s ‘colonial heritage’ might ‘spell the end of the special relationship’. In relation to Obama’s moving around of the Churchill bust, the Guardian suggested this demonstrated that Obama’s ‘Kenyan…ancestry’ is ‘helping to reshape America’s supposedly “special relationship” with Britain’. The ‘darker days of the UK's relationship with Kenya’ could be coming back to haunt us, it said."
"In short, Obama may have taken certain actions, including in relation to the Churchill bust, because of his Kenyan heritage. Racist Guardian! This is how mental the Boris-bashing Twitterstorm has been: he has been demonised and made into handwringing headline fodder at the Guardian for reporting what the Guardian itself said seven years ago."
www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-hounding-of-boris-for-his-kenyan-comment-is-the-dumbest-twitterstorm-yet