Why we should treat Katie Hopkins with compassion, by Russell Brand

Russell Brand has urged people to treat Katie Hopkins with "compassion", despite her Sun newspaper column in which she compared immigrants trying to cross the Mediterranean on boats as "cockroaches".

Almost 250,000 people have signed a petition urging the Sun to drop Hopkins as a columnist, while both her and the tabloid's editor David Dinsmore have been reported to police for incitement to racial hatred.

In a video post on his The Trews YouTube channel, Brand described Hopkins as an "irrelevant, vacuous foghorn of hate" and even compared her likening of immigrants to insects with Heinrich Himmler describing Jews as "bedbugs and rats".

But he also urged her to "come back to humanity".

Brand said:

If compassion is not a component then there's no humanity left to save. If we kill the compassion in ourselves then we are all then cockroaches, waiting for the apocalypse, and it can't come quickly enough.

He added:

Find your own humanity. Look for the humanity and connection that you feel to other people, and be kind. Even with the Katie Hopkins', the only choice we have, the only option we have is to treat her compassionately.

We can't look at her the way she looks at immigrants, as some sort of weird disgusting cockroach thing that's dispensable and should be crushed, that's what I feel like, but that's not what we should do. What we should do is be really loving to her because anyone who talks like that, is in pain, there's no way of talking like that unless you're in pain.

Watch the video below:

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