Why We are So Incensed

For those of you following the William Bapthorpe affair with interest, Mr. “ I want to slaughter Jews” Bapthorpe made an interesting comment about his posting ability (or lack thereof) earlier today.

williambapthorpe’s comment 13 Jan 10, 2:20pm
@JayReilly, did you take your moniker from A Confederacy of Dunces? (Just to show that I know what you’re talking about…) A great novel with a very sad story behind its composition / publication. I had assumed it was your real name. Dunno why, because mine sure as hell isn’t William Bapthorpe.
Anyhoo my comments seem to be taking an age to appear, if at all. Is it this ‘plucking’ business? Anyone else experiencing this? [emphasis added]

How revealing that only now, after more than 80 posts since his now infamous January 6 post, does he complain about the time its taking for his comments to appear. Shouldn’t he have realized by now that for the past week he’s been pre-moderated. At least that was the impression that Matt Seaton chose to give when he said this yesterday:

[r]egarding the post in the Blincoe thread which you respectively have complained about, let me assure you that – contrary to the impression Cif Watch chooses to give – the comment was deleted promptly by moderators, and as per our standard moderation protocol the user has been placed in quarantine as ‘untrusted’.

It seems that Matt is being economical with the truth (and its not the first time) and that in actuality Bapthorpe only went into pre-moderation after CiF Watch published his comment two days ago.
So what conclusions can we infer from this?
Well first, while the moderators on duty deleted Bapthorpe’s post, they clearly didn’t feel that the offensiveness of his post rose to a level that betrayed the “circle of trust”. I would proffer that the reason for this is that the moderators have been exposed to so much demonization of the Israeli “settler” population that they have become completely desensitized to the gravity of calling for their slaughter right down to the “last man, woman and child”.
What is worse though is that this attitude pervades Guardian management. Instead of immediately and permanently banning William Bapthorpe like any self-respecting organization should do, the Guardian has taken the jaw droppingly astonishing (to quote one of our regular readers) step of just pre-moderating Bapthorpe leaving open the possiblity that Bapthorpe may, if he behaves himself in the future (i.e adheres to the Guardian World View), return to the “circle of trust”. And more astonishingly, as I explained yesterday, this step is in contravention of the moderation policy that the Guardian itself holds itself accountable to.
What it boils down to is simply this: while Matt Seaton (and by extension Guardian management) may pay lip service to condemning Bapthorpe’s post, the failure to immediately and permanently ban Bapthorpe sends the message to the Jewish community that anti-Jewish bigots like Bapthorpe are acceptable members of the CiF community.

The inability of Matt Seaton to comprehend the revulsion we feel from this speaks volumes.

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