Racist emails are bound to backfire

A shocking series of racist emails attacking job applicant Julie Eru on the North Shore, which have been traced back to a Chinese-run company called Brightstar, has been exposed on 3 News.
   It was generally agreed by Brightstar that their computers had been hacked and a police report has been filed.
   The boss of Brightstar has limited English so we can easily rule him out as being the writer of these messages, which point to a native English speaker.
   The question was raised in the report, ‘But why would a hacker attack a small business in East Tamaki?’
   I would have thought the answer very easy. The hacker is a racist.
   I said not too long ago on the blogosphere that those who make accusations of racism so readily, as the writer of these offensive emails does, are usually racists themselves.
   Their motivation is to make an immigrant, in this case, Chinese, company look bad, and to create a rift between Chinese and Māori.
   It was a failed attempt, trying to revive the sort of irrelevant muck that yesterday’s politician, Winston Peters, specialized in.
   It’s less disgusting than the attempts by racist groups some years ago of simultaneously desecrating Jewish gravestones and sending pork to Muslim families, but the ideas are similar.
   That time, we could rule out the perpetrators being Jewish or Islamic; this time, we can rule out the hacker being either Chinese or Māori.
   That time, too, it brought Jews and Muslims closer together in New Zealand; this time, I can only hope that both Chinese and Māori, who have both experienced racism, either as immigrants or in our own homeland, can come closer together, too.