Katharine Birbalsingh is not a name many of you will be familiar with, but her blogs for the Daily Telegraph show a desire for infamy Peter Andre would blush at…
I confess, I only recently found out what, in internet terms, a “troll” is. I am not what you would call tech-savvy, but after I found this word in, of all places, an English language textbook the internet made a little more sense to me. It is surprising, however, to find a troll blogging for a broadsheet newspaper.
I am of course assuming Birbalsingh’s latest blog is an excellent piece of trolling. It is such an offensive piece of vile tripe that it even stands out in the Telegraph. According to Birbalsingh, who made her name as “the teacher who exposed the failings of the comprehensive school system at the Conservative Party conference last year” (their words and definitely not mine), Jens Breivik, the father of Anders Breivik who killed dozens of innocent Norwegians last week, “has a lot to answer for”. The tenuous crux of her blog is that, by insisting on a custody battle when Anders was one and subsequently losing access to his son, he caused Anders to go on to commit the atrocities we have all witnessed. Indeed she goes on, arguing that:
Of course, normally neglected children go on to have difficult adult relationships themselves and maybe they see a therapist. Sometimes they have trouble settling at school. Most do not go on killing sprees which result in 76 dead. Clearly, something else wasn’t quite right with Anders Breivik. But his father is deeply confused. “How could he just stand there and kill so many innocent people and just seem to think that what he did was OK?” Well maybe he didn’t have a father when he was growing up to teach him the difference between right and wrong. What I want to know is why his father isn’t feeling any sense of remorse for having failed his son.
Sorry, what?! Bringing up events Anders Breivik couldn’t possibly remember, the custody battle and then suggesting only fathers can teach children right from wrong is madness, and this woman is a teacher!! To tar all single-parent families with the “difficult adult relationships” is so Telegraph it’s painful, but this is beyond the pale.
You know what Katharine, I didn’t have a male role model and I have a very healthy relationship, in fact most of my friends from one-parent families do. My mother taught me right from wrong far more than anyone else, certainly my father. When you say “Clearly, something else wasn’t quite right with Anders Breivik” you’re competing for the understatement of the century. A man with clear mental illness, Breivik was not turned homicidal by his father’s absence, of which we know little.
What we do know is that Telegraph writers should look closer to home, indeed Breivik quoted extensively from at least four Telegraph articles about immigration. The abhorrent anti-immigrant-baiting articles and the far-right had far more of a spell for Breivik, but as I have said Breivik is insane and his true motives are a box we can put him in afterwards, they actually explain very little. His father’s remorse is for the innocent who were killed which is only right, not for his mass-murdering son.
Of course, like most modern online papers, the Telegraph has a comments list after the blog and it reveals the depth of feeling on this issue, most of it baffling, inaccurate bile, as shown by “thingsarebad”:
It would be more accurate to say that Breivik's mother has a lot to answer for since she's the one who denied his father access to him. Boys growing up in single mother homes are far more likely to get in trouble with the law and have other problems. Boys require a father figure growing up, and the anti-male laws in place that deny fathers access to their children while turning them into nothing more than wallets for mommy to spend on whatever she likes are the real culprit. I'd actually put more blame on women like Katharine Birbalsingh, feminists who hate men and boys so much they are happy to endorse laws that take away fathers from their kids. And then, no surprise, they go ahead and blame the men, when it was feminists anti-male laws that caused Breivik to grow up in a dysfunctional home in the first place. Thanks feminists, you really are amazing!
In fact it would be more accurate to say you have all lost your fucking minds!! The right-wing press perpetually stigmatises the children of one-parent families who have no choice in the matter. Birbalsingh does not hate men but she clearly knows very little about adults from one-parent families, in fact it appears she clearly thinks they are amoral lunatics, or are at least more likely to be. The assumption that children need two parents to succeed is flat out wrong, look who’s the most powerful man in the world (well at least for five more days), Barack Obama. Whilst two parents may be preferable this stigmatism really needs to stop and it certainly has no place in this debate.
Ultimately, it is terrible articles like Birbalsingh’s in the mainstream press that cause hate, not the actions of a single father attempting to see his son grow up. Anders Breivik is a depraved lunatic pure and simple; to band him in with every other neglected child is breathtakingly stupid and shows an ignorance that is unforgivable but disturbingly symptomatic of much of today’s press.
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