In Timothy Garton Ash’s new book Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, the historian examines present challenges and threats to free speech. However, it’s the book’s final chapter — titled ‘Courage’ — which is of the most intrigue to Mr S. In the May issue of the Literary Review, Douglas Murray reviews the book. Murray recalls an incident that occurred ten years ago when Ayaan Hirsi Ali — a vocal critic of misogyny in the Muslim world — appeared alongside Garton Ash at an event — after he had ‘written a decidedly sniffy article about Hirsi Ali, dismissing her as, among other things, a “slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist”‘.
In the end, Garton Ash backed down and declared that he ‘had not meant to compare Hirsi Ali to the Islamists’. As the discussion went on, he said ‘a couple of things – by way of demonstration – that left his audience, not to mention him, rather stunned’.
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