Freedom of speech

The row about Lib Dem candidate Maajid Nawaz continues, with some confusion over whether or not one of his critics has a meeting with the party leadership to discuss the matter. While that unravels a little more, it’s worth thinking very briefly about the implications of this row. The protagonists want Nawaz removed as a candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn because he has done something that offends other members of his religion. In doing so, they are arguing that freedom of speech comes with responsibility. Yet oddly, those who make these arguments for curbs on freedom of speech so that no-one gets upset never do so when it comes to

Interesting, isn’t it, this rather worrying statement from the Muslim body, MQI UK on the Mohammed cartoon affair. That, you recall, began when a member of a BBC TV audience showed  a cartoon image from a series called Jesus and Mo on his T-shirt depicting, er, Mohammed and Jesus. Nothing remotely offensive but a full-face depiction of Mohammed nonetheless. The image was duly tweeted by a participant on the programme,  Maajid Nawaz, former Islamist, one of the founders of the Quilliam Foundation and now a LibDem candidate for Kilburn, just to show why it was he wasn’t offended by it and to stimulate debate about what is and isn’t acceptable to

I have an ebook published next Thursday, called The Silence of Our Friends, on the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and the apathy of the West about this tragic and historic event. (A link will appear at the top of this page next week – in the meantime please spread the word.) I say apathy, but lots of people are concerned, and in the past year and a half such books as Christianophobia, Persecuted and The Global War on Christians have tackled worldwide persecution; there has also been increasing awareness following violence in Syria and Egypt over the summer, and last month Baroness Warsi became the first minister

It looks like Boris has offended lots of people by suggesting that some folk are where they are because they’re not very bright, something Nick Clegg calls ‘unpleasant’ and ‘careless’. It’s also, as Clegg must know perfectly well, true, but as Rod Liddle writes this week there are certain things you just can’t talk about, not just despite being true but because they’re true. Rod cites what Dominic Grieve recently said about corruption, which was rude, offensive, insulting to the Pakistani community and of course totally true. Likewise when Richard Dawkins recently pointed out a fact about the relative success of the Muslim world vs Trinity College, Cambridge – that

Whenever a heresy-hunting left-winger fixes me with an accusatory glare and demands to know how can I talk to ‘someone like that’ (the ‘someone’ in question being a right-wing object of righteous denunciation) I reply, ‘I’m a journalist and will talk to anyone – even you.’ Still, I like to have a choice. I did not have one when I was sitting on a platform discussing Silent Conquest – a film about the ‘Muslim’ destruction of free speech in Europe and North America. I was uneasy about what I had seen, and became more irritable when the organisers announced a surprise guest, Tommy Robinson, formerly of the English Defence League.

For a moment I thought someone had spiked my tea with LSD. With escalating levels of disbelief, I read Melanie McDonagh’s bizarre account of last Thursday’s protest at the Barbican against the pro-Putin Russian conductor Valery Gergiev. Then, as her article became ever-more divorced from reality, I wondered if perhaps she had been the victim of an acid prankster. Melanie is usually a fine writer. What prompted her to scribble such tosh? She lambasts the ‘barracking’ and ‘bullying’ of Gergiev, describing him as a ‘Russian composer’. Actually, he’s a conductor and he was nowhere in sight that evening. We were on the pavement outside, not in the ‘concert hall’. It was

If the Leveson Inquiry does nothing else, then it has at least provided a useful guide to the British Left for those of us on the saliva-speckled wastelands of British conservatism. Political tribes are complex but occasionally one issue will neatly divide a movement into easily identifiable clans, of which press regulation is one. And on one side you have one part of the British Left, the liberal tradition that values the liberty of all as a starting principle, and on the other the radical tradition that sees press freedom as a way for the rich to monopolise power. We might call them ‘The Decent Left’ and ‘The Idiots’; and