Racism has appeared on a Facebook page making disparaging remarks about Muslim culture last week, according to the Marlborough Express.
Comments include a claim people who live in Muslim countries are unhappy.
The post was removed after people started complaining about the “indefensible” comments on Tuesday night.
The person responsible for the post has since apologised.
A spokesperson for the brand which inspired the Facebook page said they do not want to be associated with racist or political comments.
The article highlights some of the various issues that are prevalent on social media, especially the use of anonymity, particularly when it is aimed at the Muslim community in general.
You can read the article here, Gigitown post racist rant (July 25, 2014).
NZ Media: The Middle East 
[…] I posted about the man who posted racist comments on a New Zealand-based Facebook […]
It turns out the ‘rant’ was a reposting of a meme that is widely circulating on the internet, on blogs and social media, particularly on right wing US sites. It’s hard to verify the original source, although one site that posted it claimed that it was a paraphrase of something on Fox News, although the site provided no reference to support this claim.
‘Racism’ is probably not the right term – more religious intolerance, as not all Muslims come from the middle east, nor are all people from the middle east Muslim.
I never saw the offending post itself, but was able to make inferences from the media coverage, and ended up stumbling upon the offending material on someone else’s Facebook page, and was then able to perform a Google search which confirmed how widespread publication was, and started to give some idea of where it might have originated from.
The posting like most discriminatory material used generalisations and factual inaccuracies to paint Muslims in a negative light, and non-Muslims in a positive light.
Unfortunately the media coverage didn’t dig into the details or explore why something likely to cause offence is being so actively and widely shared, but rather presented this as the work of a single prejudiced individual.
Thanks for commenting Chris. I believe the person/s or reporter/s who landed the story probably didn’t look further into it – you or I might have had the inclination, but there might be a dozen reasons or so why not. But I’ll look out for it, and see if I come up with anything interesting!