Artigo do blogue "http://gazetadigitalpraiadaluz.blogspot.com/"

«Words can kill – A message for Charlotte Ross, a five years old columnist from The Evening Standard

Never before, in my 50 years of life, saw somebody with a so serious mental problem and being able to write. Charlotte Ross, who seems to be the author of a opinion column at The Evening Standard, discovered something that no other journalist (British or Portuguese) could find: there are no “natives” at Praia da Luz, it was completely colonised by British. Charlotte Ross made an appeal similar to those that “Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines” (RTLM), the Hutu's controlled radio in Rwanda, has done, before the genocide of one million Tutsis.She wrote it some time ago and I only found it now. The tittle is superb: “These police belong in the dock, not the McCanns.” Charlotte Ross is trying to earn a place in History, obviously. Of course, she his far from Adolph Hitler, with his blind hate against the Jews, Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, the founding father of Ku Klux Klan or Mathieu Ngirumpatse, president of the Hutu extremist National Revolutionary Movement for Democracy and Development.But we must excuse her. She did her best to preach a message of hate, to put British and Portuguese inhabitants of Praia da Luz, living peacefully together since many years, against each other. She tried, indeed, to make them look at the other as the “foreigner”, the “occupant”, or the “native” and the “primitive”.“Then there is Praia da Luz. The Portuguese hate it. Twenty years ago it was a sleepy, whitewashed fishing village. As the Algarve transformed into a tourist mecca, Luz, as it's known locally, was quickly colonised by English second-homers. Now it's considered a Little Britain a sterile seaside enclave lined with ice-cream shops and bucket-and-spade sellers. The locals were priced out long ago”, she wrote.Why do Portuguese hate Praia da Luz? Because they were “priced out long ago.” As much of the Portuguese people living in Praia da Luz are able to speak and read a little bit of English, I hope that this message can be made available to all of them, copied and distributed, posted in the walls and in the coffee-shops, in supermarket Batista and in every corner of that small town.I hope the British citizens who live there can read it, side by side with the Portuguese, and be ashamed to see somebody spreading a so vicious and spiteful message. I hope that people Praia da Luz – British and Portuguese – while reading it, ask an obvious question, to each other: what is the reason that took Charlotte Ross to write this piece of mud? Does she really thinks – if she thinks, which is something I doubt.. - that Portuguese people hates Praia da Luz and it's large British population? Did she just felt an uncontrollable necessity to insult Portuguese people, because two British citizens were named as formal suspects in a case of a missing child? Why?There are a few dozen British citizens in Portuguese jails. Charlotte Ross never pay any attention to those poor white men, blond and blue-eyed pure British citizens, suffering a hell of a torment in jails that, following the ideas of Charlotte Ross, would make turkish prisons like we saw in Midnight Express seem to be a paradise.Why is the McCann couple so important for you, Charlotte Ross? Your words about us, Portuguese, are just a simple expression or your deeply entrenched racism? Or is there something more, behind it? Are the McCann so powerful and important that you felt obliged to cross every limits of decency? Are you in the run to replace Justine McGuiness, the McCann's Chief Press Officer, now that she has been fired? Words can kill, Charlotte Ross, as History has shown, so many times. And those that use words of hate to spread the fire of intolerance usually finish as ashes, burned out in their own bonfire.
Posted by Paulo Reis at 11:08:00 PM «

http://gazetadigitalpraiadaluz.blogspot.com/2007/09/words-can-kill-message-for-charlotte.html

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Estou perplexa perante os comentários desta jornalista britânica sobre o nosso País...