A Response to the Channel Island Forum

I have had a rather large amount of traffic to this blog over the last couple of days (well, a relatively large amount), and so I started searching through my site statistics to see where all these visitors are coming from. To my surprise I noticed that a few people had come from the Channel Island Forum.

Intrigued, I visited the forum to search for a link to The State of Jersey, and to my delight I noticed UserName had posted a new thread about my website (thank you for that). I have just read the replies to his initial post and was surprised to find that Dicko has posted a rather harsh response to The Xenophobic Islander. This really is nothing personal; everyone is entitled to their own opinion, however I would like to use this post to respond to Dicko’s comment.

Dicko’s response to The Xenophobic Islander was:


Another example of PC bollox.

I have nothing against Polish people, I just think there’s too many on the island.

Having a strong opinion on immigration doesn’t make someone a racist.


Firstly, I would like to make everyone reading this post aware that I am very much against political correctness for the sake of politeness, and so there is nothing P.C. about the post in question at all. As for the last two sentences, Dicko may be surprised to learn that I agree entirely (in fact the rate of immigration is one of my greatest worries about Jersey); however holding the opinion that there are too many Polish people in Jersey and voicing a racist comment to a Polish individual (as mentioned in my post) are two completely different things.

Nowhere in The Xenophobic Islander did I state that holding a strong opinion about immigration makes somebody a racist, and so I fail to see the reasoning behind Dicko's last sentence.

I would also like to mention that I do not believe racism to be a very large problem in Jersey at the moment; but nobody can deny that a minority of residents are openly racist (and by this I do not mean having a strong opinion on immigration, I mean being insulting to immigrants because they are immigrants). I fear that this small amount of racism may in time grow into an island-wide problem, and so by becoming aware of it now we may be able to prevent this growth – this is the purpose of The Xenophobic Islander.

Once again thank you to UserName for making the effort to advertise my blog.

- Benjamin Langlois