It is a weird business when stories combine, even if they only do so in the mind of the commentator. On our screens, Tony Blair is about to fret about Jesus, making him look like a loony again. In Oxford, David Irving and Nick Griffin are cast, preposterously, as defenders of free speech. And in Sudan, that poor schoolteacher is banged up for allowing toddlers to call a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’. There is a link here, somewhere, although it’s foggy, and it bothers me. Does freedom of speech entail the right to call a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’? If not, do we have a problem?
Oxford first. Ridiculous situation. What little I really know of Nick Griffin — as a functioning human, as opposed to as a political entity — I know as a result of seeing him on Newsnight twice. Both times, he was interviewed by Gavin Esler. I’m told Paxman has had a crack at him, too, but I missed that one. Still, Esler did fine. First time around, he had him accusing the BBC of ‘giving racism a bad name’. That came across well. Next time, he was defending Stuart Williams, a member of the BNP who told a BBC1 documentary that he wanted to ‘shoot Pakis’. I actually found a transcript of this one. ‘What he said he described as a dream,’ protests Griffin. Hmm, muses Esler, and calmly launches into the full quote: ‘My dream is to have a transit van with a machine-gun in the back, with about a million bullets to fire on people coming out of the mosque on Friday.’ Less Joseph, more Martin Luther King. In, you know, a way.
Give this man a platform, I’m thinking. Invite him to the Oxford Union. Hell, give him a TV show. Build him his own plinth in Trafalgar Square.
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