By Mark Egan
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The entire staff of the New York radio show "Miss Jones in the Morning" was taken off the air on Wednesday after broadcasting a song that ridiculed victims of the tsunami in South Asia, the radio station said.

New York FM radio station WQHT, or HOT 97, repeatedly ran the segment last week on the show, hosted by deejay Tarsha Nicole Jones who uses the on-air name Miss Jones.

Jones and her team were suspended indefinitely, according to publicist Lizzie Grubman, who declined to say whether Jones would feature in another show at a later date.

"What happened is morally and socially indefensible," said Rick Cummings, president of Emmis Radio. The station is owned by Emmis Communications Corp .

"All involved, myself included, are ashamed and deeply sorry. I know the members of the morning show are truly contrite. They know their actions here are inexcusable," Cummings said in a statement.

The piece used racial slurs to describe people swept away in the disaster, made jokes about child slavery and people watching their mothers die.

"You can hear God laughing, 'Swim you bitches swim,"' was one line in the song, sung by staff of the show to the melody of the 1985 famine relief song "We Are the World."

On Monday, the hip-hop and R&B radio station and the deejay apologized and the seven-member morning show crew agreed to donate one week's pay to relief efforts. The tsunami struck on Dec. 26, leaving nearly 300,000 dead or missing around the Indian Ocean from Somalia to Thailand.

The incident is not the first time HOT 97 has been accused of racism and poor taste. The station made headlines when deejay Star, now at another radio station, called Jennifer Lopez a "rice-and-bean eater" and satirized the plane crash that killed R&B singer Aaliyah in 2001

By H. L. D. Mahindapala

The frenzied reaction of the Western media, beating up the Nazi fancy dress of Prince Harry, is typical of the sensation-mongering press that ignores the larger concerns of the world and focuses on trivia – and this includes the BBC.

First, the underlying and the unstated logic of castigating Prince Harry is that in wearing the Nazi swastika he is endorsing Hitler’s perverted politics. The media have been very busy digging up archival graves to trace the genealogy of the Windsors going back to their German origins. Nor have they missed the opportunity to reproduce pictures of the Prince of Wales, who gave up the English throne, shaking hands with Hitler. The implication of all this is that Prince Harry is a throwback to German fascism. But the plain fact is that the Prince was not making a political statement. As a rather immature young man – he’s hardly the serious political type – he would have thought that it was a fun thing to go to a fun party in a fun costume. If he is to be berated it should be for linking Nazism with the theme of fancy dress party, “Natives and Colonial”. Fascism was purely a product that came out of Europe and devastated the world. Obviously, Prince Harry did not have the basic political nous to realize that his Nazi costume was as close to the theme as he is to the natives.

Second, the dress theme of the party, “Native and Colonial”, should not be overlooked. Based on this theme, if Prince Harry went as Tarzan’s simian, swinging from one branch to another in the wilds of colonial Africa, no one would have bothered one bit. No political interpretation would have been thrown into this joke. Of course, the fact that this simian, responding to the ululations of Tarzan, symbolized to a generation of colonialists the primitive horrors confronted and tamed by the superior white man, had not even have crossed the minds of the media pundits. But when Prince Harry goes as a Nazi “gorilla” – Nazism is a product of Christian theology that demonized the Jews throughout Christendom – he is vilified and persecuted by the Western media.

Third, the media has never ceased to preach to Royalty that they should not “lose the common touch”. Then when they behave like any other fun-loving commoner they are castigated for not upholding the expected standards of Royalty.

Fourth, highlighting any faux pas of Royalty has been the common pastime of the British media, mainly because it increases sales instantly. The media will not miss an opportunity to cash in on Royalty slipping even on a banana skin. They do not focus with the same degree of persistence and intensity when Blair harbors terrorists devastating the ex-colonies. Example: London-based Anton Balasingham, the leading LTTE apparatchik responsible for the cold-blooded murder of 600 policemen who surrendered to his killing machine on his word that they would be protected. Even the self-righteous BBC skip over the mass murders and the violations of basic human right by Velupillai Prabhakaran ,“the latest Pol Pot of Asia” (New York Times, June 26, 1995).

The BBC reporters in Colombo pretend to be illiterate when it comes to reading and reporting the mass of evidence contained in independent documents exposing the suffering of the Tamils under the fascist rule of Prabhakaran. Not even the segment on Asia cares to deal with the latest LTTE atrocities documented by the leading Tamil NGO, the University Teachers Human Right (Jaffna). The BBC, which responds consistently like a seismograph, picking up the slightest noises made by the agents of Tamil Tigers, has failed to focus on the gross violations of the Tamil Tiger terrorists the way they cover Prince Harry’s contretemps. BBC and the western media in general prefer to divert attention to the peccadilloes of Royalty than to the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the likes of Velupillai Prabhakaran in Asia and Africa.

In short, this whole issue is blown totally out of proportion. Isn’t it time for the Western media to acknowledge that there are more serious, moral and life-threatening issues than a 20-year-old wearing a Nazi costume to a fancy dress party?

- Asian Tribune -