Tag: raoul moat
Cameron Proclaims: No Sympathy
by John Walker on Jul.15, 2010, under The Rest
It has been decreed by our Prime Minister that no one should feel sympathy for Raoul Moat. In a comment made in Prime Minister’s Questions today, he said:
“As far as I can see, it is absolutely clear, that Raoul Moat is a callous murderer. Full stop, end of story. And I cannot understand any wave, however small, of public sympathy for this man. There should be sympathy for his victims, and for the havoc he wreaked in that community. There should be no sympathy for him.”
Just to be clear, obviously Moat’s crimes were terrible. And his victims of course deserve abundant sympathy. The “wave of public sympathy” to which Cameron refers is the much publicised, and obviously ludicrous, Facebook groups in which people are supporting Moat as a hero. No matter what the circumstances of someone’s life, perhaps it’s reasonable to suggest that at the point they start murdering people one should cross them off the hero list. Unless they’re Batman.
However, the idea that in not supporting/endorsing a murderer’s actions one must backflip to the opposite extreme, and exhibit no sympathy at all, is quite extraordinary. It is, in fact, inhuman.