At a concert in Toronto on April 26th 2019 Morrissey said on stage:
I’m a very cosmopolitan person. I’m a Christian. I’m very well travelled. I’ve heard of Faith Goldy. (Audience boos) What? I said I’ve HEARD of her!
He later dedicated a song to Marrisa Shen, a child who may have been murdered by a Syrian refugee (as of January 2022, the trial has been adjourned).
https://vancouversun.com/news/trial-of-man-accused-in-the-murder-of-marrisa-shen-adjourned-again
His comments were interpreted as anti-immigrant because that was the press angle, with Vice investigating conservative views in the East Asian community (before Covid gave a campaign against East Asian Hate some media currency).
Liu emigrated from China 15 years ago and is now running for Ward 31 councillor in Toronto. “Chinese social values and beliefs align almost 100 percent with the Conservatives, so it’s a natural fit,” she says. (Steven Zhou, Vice, September 2018)
But as Faith had recently exploited the murder of Marrisa in a failed bid to become Mayor of Toronto, and as Morrissey had recently come to believe that the press, police and governments were ignoring crimes committed by ethnic minorities (even when ethnic minorities were the victims) because it didn’t fit their ideological narrative that ethnic minorities can only be victims, and that they falsely accused anyone who wanted crimes fairly investigated of being a racist – it was very likely something to do with that.
London is second only to Bangladesh for acid attacks. All of the attacks are non-white, and so they cannot be truthfully addressed by the British government or the Met Police or the BBC because of political correctness. What this means is that the perpetrator is considered to be as much of a victim as the actual victim. We live in the Age of Atrocity. (Morrissey, Morrissey Central, April 2018)
We’re primed to interpret the above as a attack on Bangladeshis, because that’s the norm in media rhetoric – but it isn’t any different to Morrissey blaming American and British foreign policy for the 2005 London Terror attack:
All these dead Iraqi children and persecuted people, and every day in Iraq there are 40, 50, 60 dead in car bombs, etcetera. Yet, in Los Angeles they don’t even bother to mention it. They’re absolutely preoccupied with whether Brad and Jen will get back together… My view was, how would anyone be remotely surprised? It’s an obvious retaliation against Blair’s intentions… And you can’t refer to these things as being terrorist attacks and yet assume that the actions of Blair and Bush are not terrorism. They’re worse than terrorism, they’re the actions of egotistical monsters. (Morrissey, March 2008)
https://www.femalefirst.co.uk/music/musicnews/Morrissey-14863.html
The invasion of Iraq having been justified by lies and excused by myths.
The news media appropriately caught a huge chunk of the blame. But a public that had been fooled once was not prepared for the multiple rounds of post-invasion deceptions that followed, issued by many of the same pols and press actors. These were designed to rewrite history in real time, creating new legends that have now lasted 16 years. These have allowed people like Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer — through whose mouth many of the chief lies of the era flowed — to come out this week and claim it was a “myth” that “Bush lied, people died.” The myths had enormous utility to the working press, whose gargantuan errors have been re-cast as honest mistakes of judgment. A lot of the people who made those mistakes are still occupying prominent positions, their credibility undamaged thanks to a new legend best articulated by New Yorker editor David Remnick, who later scoffed “Nobody got that story completely right.” (Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, March 2019)
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq-war-media-fail-matt-taibbi-812230/
And on the basis of one fleeting reference to Tommy Robinson, a far right grifter who had been jailed in 2018 for larping as a journalist during a child abuse trial, the UK press has retrofitted Morrissey into a supporter of the English Defence League, a violent far right protest group that Robinson belonged to between 2009-2013, that blamed Islamic terrorism on Muslims.
On Tuesday journalists who have, for the past decade, boycotted the shop-soiled former legend Morrissey because of his support of the right-wing English Defence League sprang back into print when he finally gave a quote that wasn’t about immigration or the Chinese being a nation of “cruel” people… (Caitlin Moran, the Times, June 2018)
So, the suspicion that the press would lie about an issue for political reasons, isn’t far fetched. In fact, it’s backed up by a review of the concert in which the reviewer lamented that Morrissey hadn’t highlighted a crime where immigrants were victims, even though they were murdered for being gay, and the perpetrator had been jailed, as if the point of talking about a crime isn’t to get justice, but to steer public opinion.
Later, Morrissey dedicated a song to Marrissa Shen, a 13-year-old girl from British Columbia whose accused murderer is a Canadian resident of Syrian descent. The homicide trial has become common fodder for anti-immigration sentiment in Canada. Instead of a seemingly random reference, it felt like a harsh reminder of so many of Morrissey’s troubling political statements. Why not take the opportunity, for instance, to acknowledge the Bruce McArthur case, wherein the victims were largely immigrants?
https://nowtoronto.com/music/concert-reviews/morrissey-sony-centre-toronto
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/23/bruce-mcarthur-toronto-gay-serial-killer
It’s doubtful Morrissey knew much about Faith Goldy.
When he was refusing to appear on Jimmy Kimmel with Duck Dynasty because they kill animals, she was defending their right to hunt and be homophobic (Sun News Network, December 2013).
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/jimmy-kimmel-responds-morrisseys-duck-425046/
When he was denouncing Donald Trump for not comforting the gay community in the wake of the Orlando massacre, she was was disgusted by gay sex and blaming the gay community for being against guns and complaining about homophobia (Rebel News video, June 17th 2016)
By this stage in his North American tour, under pressure from relentless bad publicity, he seemed unwell, defiant, but confused, depressed, and disheveled.
Wherever he was getting his information about (gay, vegan, Irish, feminist, ex-leftie) Anne Marie Waters (who is the Far Right party he’s accused of knowingly supporting) he was also haphazardly picking up alt-right trojan memes about animal cruelty and child abuse (two of his long-term obsessions, since Suffer Little Children and Meat Is Murder) and was reworking them into his left-leaning opposition to institutional violence; while the press was taking everything he said and twisting it into the NME’s homophobic Finsbury Park myth, where he was accused of inciting violence against himself because he found racism sexy.
As with his one reference to Tommy Robinson that the press, as usual, endlessly regurgitates, Morrissey hadn’t mentioned Faith Goldy before, and hasn’t mentioned her since.
Folk Devil 