YouTube culls MIA’s ginger genocide video

British rapper MIA's controversial and explicit video which shows ginger-haired people being rounded up, beaten and executed has been pulled from YouTube.
 
The nine-minute promo for MIA's latest single, Born Free, shows a group of red-headed adolescents being forced into an armoured vehicle and driven to the desert. There, one young boy is shot at point blank range, his brains flying across the screen. In another graphic depiction, a red-headed man is shown being blown up by a landmine, while others are beaten with sub-machine guns and fired at by rocket launchers.
 
The Born Free clip was launched online on Monday but has since been censored by YouTube. Only those who have a YouTube account and are over the age of 18 can still access it.
 
The graphic content and meaning of the video has caused confusion among music fans, not least because the 31-year-old rapper is known for her political activism. Hounslow-born MIA - real name, Mathangi Maya Arulpragasam - is of Sri Lankan Tamil descent and her father Arul is a well-known freedom fighter. MIA, who was one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people last year, has not shied away from talking about Sri Lanka's politics and describes herself as the "only Tamil in the Western media".
 
YouTube, which last week pulled all parodies of the German film Downfall from its site, refuses to comment on individual videos. A spokeswoman said yesterday however that content is only removed if users complain.
 
"On YouTube the rules prohibit content like pornography or gratuitous violence," she said. "Our policy is to age-restrict content that has been flagged by the community and identified by our policy enforcement team as content that, while not violating our community guidelines, is not suitable for users under age 18."
 
In a recent interview with the Daily Beast, MIA, who had a worldwide hit when her single Paper Planes featured on the soundtrack of Slumdog Millionaire, described the situation in Sri Lanka as "systematic genocide, ethnic cleansing".
 
Now MIA is being attacked herself, for her depiction of mass redhead genocide. New York's liberal newspaper the Village Voice called the clip a "goofy political allegory". Writing on Twitter one user, 'Hadge', wrote: "I just watched MIA's new music video for Born Free and now I feel like throwing up. What an awful, awful video" while another quipped: "MIA's Born Free video blew me away, along with the actors." ·