A wee bit precious?

I don’t know what it’s like to have a history of victimisation, although I grew up in The Block, so perhaps I do. And I’m not being trivial. Growing up in The Block truly traumatised me.

But my “people” don’t really have a history of being victims.

But, aren’t we all getting just a little precious? Two things today suggest we are.

AIDS groups, and Jewish groups have slammed a campaign announcing AIDS is a mass murderer, using the face of Adolf Hitler as its poster fuhrer.

It’s intended to shock, and does.

The second is the recent – second – suspending of shock jock Kyle Sandilands. He suggested that if Magda Szubanski really wanted to lose weight she should book in to a concentration camp. She’s been passive aggressive about it, but Jewish leaders – hmmm . . . a pattern emerges . . . are “outraged.”

Here’s the skippy tho. AIDS kills people in their masses. It’s a mass killer. I can’t see what the offense is that Hitler’s face be used to highlight the evil that is AIDS. That’s not to say people with AIDS are evil. No reasonable person would deduce that. It is to say AIDS is an insidious disease that needs to be highlighted.

Auschwitz happened. Well, most reasonable people agree it happened. It was horrific. It, too, was the result of evil. But the plague happened, too, and we joke about that. The Inquisition. The Salem witch trials. Rwanda. Ethiopia. And maybe it’s little off colour to make “jokes” about some of these things, but to be publicly outraged, call for Sandilands head on a plate . . oops, maybe that’s a bit off colour . . . to demand he lose his job? That’s just being a bit too precious.

The Jews have their own in-jokes about Gentiles. They are not beyond their own pogroms. They need to chill out a bit.

Advertising is an art form. The freedom of speech is sacred. I understand and accept the need for some restrictions . . . but not many.