An online petition calling for The Sun’s Katie Hopkins to be fired for her anti-migrant column has garnered more than 220,000 signatures.
In her latest column, titled “Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants”, Ms Hopkins likened migrants fleeing from Northern Africa to Italy to “cockroaches”. The column was published shortly before hundreds capsized off the coast of Italy over the weekend.
“No, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care,” she wrote. “Because in the next minute you’ll show me pictures of aggressive young men at Calais, spreading like norovirus on a cruise ship.
She added: “Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit ‘Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984’, but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors.
“What we need are gunships sending these boats back to their own country. You want to make a better life for yourself? Then you had better get creative in Northern Africa.”
The Change.org petition was started in the UK by British woman Izzy Saunders and has attracted nearly 230,000 supporters, as of Tuesday morning.
“I ask The Sun newspaper and editor David Dinsmore to remove Katie Hopkins as a columnist, at the very least to redeem yourselves from publishing this prejudiced article in the first place,” Ms Saunders wrote.
Ms Hopkins' comments have attracted widespread criticism, with TV personalities like Russell Brand and Piers Morgan slamming her views.
Libya chaos
More than 700 migrants are feared dead after a fishing boat capsized off Libya on Sunday and hundreds more are feared dead after another shipwreck on Monday.
The European Union proposed doubling the size of its Mediterranean search and rescue operations on Monday, while three other rescue operations were underway to save hundreds more migrants in peril on overloaded vessels making the journey from the north coast of Africa to Europe.
Speaking in Canberra on Monday, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said people must "grieve for the lost" but take action on people smuggling.
"The only way you can stop the deaths is to stop the boats," he said.
The mass deaths have caused shock in Europe, where a decision to scale back naval operations last year seems to have increased the risks for migrants without reducing their numbers.
Northern EU countries have so far largely left rescue operations to southern states such as Italy. According to the IOM, Italian coast guards, navy and commercial ships had rescued 10,000 migrants in the Mediterranean in the past few days.
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