Freedom of speech

Friday

Tim Marshall

‘Arab Spring’ is a misnomer

What do you do when confronted with a prejudice so strong it takes your breath away? In my case, I did what was immediately necessary. I took a deep breath to replenish lost oxygen, and moved on. It wasn’t the time or place to take on this particularly ugly example of intolerance; but it is an intolerance which needs to recognised. I was giving a lecture at a charity that trains journalists from around the world. Some are already making their way in the industry and are expected to do well. I was talking about my theory that the term ‘Arab Spring’ actually clouds our understanding of what has been

Shiraz Maher

Britain’s illiberal state

It can seem surreal, almost otherworldly, to read about our judiciary these days. Just a few days ago my colleague Douglas Murray wrote about the peculiarity of imposing a custodial sentence on Matthew Woods for posting bad-taste jokes on Facebook about the abduction of April Jones. As if to confirm that the Bar is indeed trading in absurdities, another court has now sentenced Barry Thew to eight months in prison (four of which relate to a bail offence) for wearing a t-shirt on which he scrawled the crude message: ‘One less pig; perfect justice’ and ‘killacopforfun.com haha.’ It should be obvious that one need not laugh at the jokes of

Thursday

David Blackburn

The politics of the Nobel Prize for literature

The Nobel committee have delivered their verdict on the literature prize: Mo Yan is new laureate. Over at the books blog, I explain why this is an important decision politically. Yan is the first Chinese citizen to win the award, a reminder that the country’s culture influence is growing together with its political and economic power. In that sense, the award has recognised that we are living in a new age. Yan’s books have been banned from time-to-time by the Chinese authorities, but he is accused by many of being too close to the party line. Several human rights activists are appalled that he has won the prize. However, others

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Chorley teenager imprisoned for Facebook jokes

I suppose we should not be surprised that the Tweet-police (formerly the British police) have now extended their remit to become the Facebook Police. Today, getting caught for an actual crime is very rare in Britain. As anybody who has ever been robbed will know, most thefts are not even investigated by the police. It is even rarer for criminals – on the few occasions they are caught – to get sent to prison. How strange then that a 19-year old has just been sent to prison for three months for posting unpleasant jokes on his Facebook page. The unemployed man from Chorley, Lancashire admitted to posting offensive jokes relating

Sunday

Rod Liddle

We need a free press more than ever

I’m a bit late with this, as the book has been out a few days or so. But it’s worth getting hold of Mick Hume’s book about newspapers: There is No Such Thing As A Free Press. It’s very good, a timely defence of freedom of the press at the time of Leveson, but rightly critical too of our manifest failings; our narcissism and laziness and sense of self importance. Here’s Hume at the end of the book in admonishing mode: ‘Journalism should be more humble – and take itself more seriously. We need journalism to recognise that its primary responsibility is to report and reflect the world, not to

Friday

Fleur Macdonald

Richard Millet and the nihilism of multiculturalism

It’s the last day of banned book week but perhaps we should spare a thought for banned editors. An editor at Éditions Gallimard, who worked on Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, recently published three essays (with another house). The first, an account of his amorous adventures in Amsterdam, and the second, ‘Ghostly Language’, are, according to the author, to be kept in mind when tackling the final essay ‘Antiracism as the Literary Terror’ and the appendage, his pièce de resistance, ‘The Literary Eulogy of Anders Breivik’. That, in sum, is why Richard Millet is – for all the wrong reasons – one of the most famous essayists in France right

Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

The Pineapple of Hate

We have had the dreaded cartoons, films, teddy-bear and more. But I bet that until now nobody imagined we would ever see a (cue dreaded music) ‘Pineapple of Hate’.  Yet despite the now familiar feeling that this is all some terrible spoof, the fruit has joined the growing list of household items which can be legitimately regarded as ‘blasphemous’. As Student Rights reports, the crime-scene was the recent freshers’ fair at the University of Reading. For it was there that the Atheist, Humanist and Secular Society stall included a pineapple with the word ‘Mohammed’ on it. I always doubted that the Danish or French cartoons looked much like the prophet of Islam.

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

China bans Haruki Murakami’s ‘1Q84’: George Orwell would have seen the irony

Books – or lack thereof – are the latest manifestation of anti-Japanese sentiment in China. The escalating dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands has provoked some Beijing bookshops to remove Japanese books from their shelves. The most prominent book to be made to disappear is Haruki Murakami’s recent novel 1Q84, a critically acclaimed worldwide bestseller. Rather ironically, given the circumstances, the title echoes Orwell’s 1984 – in Japanese, ‘Q’ and ‘9’ are homonyms. Orwell has an uncanny knack of turning up at the choicest moments. Remember the glitch in July 2009 when Amazon deleted 1984 from everyone’s Kindles? People were startled by the realisation that Amazon could remove a book from

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Freedom betrayed

I have a piece in the magazine this week on the disgraceful behaviour of Hillary Clinton and other US officials in the latest round of cartoon wars. During the last week the US Secretary of State turned into a film critic, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – head of the most powerful and expensive military in history – relegated himself to a telephone-salesman offering up his country’s founding principles at a knock-down price, and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney decided that his job included condemning the work of amateur directors. But it gets worse. The same Jay Carney has now decided that his remit extends to

Steerpike Steerpike

No surrender for Salman

As the Middle East reels and Parisian satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo up their security, one man who knows more than most about the absurd over-reaction of vast swathes of the Arab world has offered some advice. Speaking to Sky News, Sir Salmon Rushdie is not backing down: ‘To tell you the truth, I’m a little tired of religion demanding special privileges. I have all sorts of people attacking me, it doesn’t inspire me to go out and commit an act of violence.’ Rushdie points out that any other idea can be discussed, satirised or taken seriously. ‘It’s very important in England, and Europe and America, where we are fortunate enough

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Joseph Anton, a brilliant and important book

I’m halfway through Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie’s memoir of what it was like to be given a death sentence by medieval religious savages. I’m reviewing the book for next week’s magazine. We were, as a country, rather less than unequivocal in our determination to protect Rushdie for his right to exercising free speech; plenty of people who should have known better gave succour to his persecutors. I don’t know if the oleaginous Labour MP Keith Vaz falls into that category, mind; his support for the howling mob was, I suppose, predictable. It’s a brilliant and important book. And there is a surprising amount of humour in it. So I’ll leave

Monday

David Blackburn

Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’ revisited

The publication of Joseph Anton (tomorrow), Salman Rushdie’s much anticipated memoir, has given newspapers cause to revisit The Satanic Verses. The commentary focuses on the bloodthirsty and backward response that the book continues to provoke. The novel has become a totem in various political and religious ‘debates’ (a word that is hopelessly misplaced in this perverse context of fatwahs and feeling). It is appropriate that Rushdie is celebrated as a champion of liberalism and rationality. There is no doubt that The Satanic Verses is among the most important books ever written. But, is it one of the finest? Despite the reams of brilliant and brave writing on the Rushdie affair, the

Saturday

Nick Cohen

Salman Rushdie: He’s still here

Until the launch party for Salman Rushdie’s autobiography, the best story I’d heard about the forced marriage of literary London and the Special Branch came from the night of the 1992 general election. Melvyn Bragg was hosting a party to watch the results. The guests were overwhelmingly left-leaning writers and intellectuals, and had gathered to celebrate an apparently certain Labour victory that would end 13 years of Tory rule. Yet as the evening wore on, nothing went according to plan. Neil Kinnock’s Labour was winning a few seats, but John Major’s Tories were doing far better than the polls predicted. The chatter subsided. Apprehension replaced expectation. Finally, the BBC announced

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Freedom undermined by termites

I have been reading a new book by Theodore Dalrymple which I highly recommend. Readers of the Spectator will need no introduction to the good doctor, his fresh prose or his startling insight. But even for people like me who read most of what Dalrymple writes, Farewell Fear contains a great collection of unfamiliar — and typically brilliant — writings. I particularly enjoyed the essay ‘Of Termites and Mad Dictators’. In analysing the threats to our freedom he says: ‘It is difficult now to imagine a modern university intellectual saying something as simple and unequivocal as ‘I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Channel 4 cancels Tom Holland’s history of Islam, but the extremists will not win

In what may prove to be the most depressingly predictable story of the year, we learn that Channel 4 has chosen to cancel a screening of Tom Holland’s programme ‘Islam: the untold story‘ tomorrow night  because of threats to the author and presenter. If there is a reason why so many stories and facts to do with Islam remain ‘untold’ it is simply because of this. None of the people who threatened Tom Holland even have to mean it — the threat is enough to ensure that Channel 4 don’t go ahead. I don’t blame them, and have seen this happen too many times, in too many different countries, to be

Saturday

Douglas Murray

The history of Islam is not off-limits

I’ve only just got around to watching Tom Holland’s documentary for Channel 4 from earlier this week: ‘Islam: the untold story.’ It had some good things in it, despite suffering from the two problems all documentaries now suffer from: attention-grabbing statements at the end of segments which are not followed up on, and endless shots of the presenter doing strangely unconnected things (travelling on an elevator, sitting on a bed etc.) But Holland was an engaging and pleasant presenter, and the documentary was something of a landmark in that it finally brought to wider public attention a subject which has been almost completely off-limits in recent years. Because of violence

David Blackburn

Karl Rove’s a believer

I’m indebted to John Rentoul for drawing my attention to this report of a talk given by Karl Rove to mega donors at the Republican National Convention. Rove is an advisor to American Crossroads, a Republican fundraising organisation; and, having been one of Dubya’s chiefs, he remains a vital strategic voice in the party. He explained how Mitt Romney might win: “’The people we’ve got to win in this election, by and large, voted for Barack Obama,’ Rove said, in a soothing, professorial tone, explaining why the campaign hadn’t launched more pointed attacks on the president’s character. ‘If you say he’s a socialist, they’ll go to defend him. If you

Tuesday

Nick Cohen

RIP Robert Hughes: Enemy of the Woozy

Few books have had a greater effect on me than Robert Hughes’ Culture of Complaint. The clarity of Hughes’ style in his dissection of the discontents of the 1980s was enough to make me love him. In his political writing, histories and art criticism he never descended into theory or jargon, but imitated his heroes, Tom Paine, George Orwell and EP Thompson, and talked to the reader without condescension or obscurantism Critics denounce and admirers celebrate the ‘muscular style’, but I find it more courteous than macho. Hughes tackled hard and often obscure subjects, the rise of modern art, the penal colonies in early Australia, and made a deal with

Monday

Douglas Murray

Peter Hitchens vs Mehdi Hasan

A fascinating column in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday by Peter Hitchens asks ‘Am I an “animal”, a “cow” — or just another victim of BBC bias.’ The spur for asking this otherwise surprising question is a BBC radio programme presented by the former New Stateman writer, Mehdi Hasan. While presenting ‘What the Papers Say’ a couple of weeks ago Hasan found the opportunity to misquote a column by Hitchens, who promptly complained to the BBC. For its part, the BBC seems to have accepted that the quote was doctored and has tried to make up for this. But now Hitchens asks some questions about Hasan’s own opinions. For, as Hitchens

Wednesday

Sebastian Payne

The censorship Olympics

The Olympics may just 16 days away but will the spectators be able to find chips? The shocking picture above shows the real effect of the Censorship Olympics. Thanks to a lucrative sponsorship deal with McDonalds, all other catering teams are forbidden from serving chips anywhere within the area of London categorized as Olympic Park — unless they come with fish.   The Soviet-style roadlanes are bad enough, but the right to sell a bag of chips to anyone who wants one is fairly fundamental in Britain — and Nick Cohen writes the cover story tomorrow on how many other fundamental rights have been flogged to the IoC and their sponsors.