Dark times for freedom of speech in the UK?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Andrew on February 23, 2009 at 4:20am

Links: Westminster Press conference

Christopher Hitchens on free speech

Permalink Reply by John Bunyan on March 16, 2009 at 10:25am

I have just watched the You Tube presentation of "Fitna" and can understand why Muslims wouldnt want this video being
shown. I think it is up to the Muslims themselves to prove that Fitna isnt just showing the hate filled diatribs of their so called holy book. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and swims like a duck ...

I listened to that apologist for the Government Keith Vaz on a Newsnight feature recently where he admittted he hadnt even watched the video but justified banning Mr Wilders on the basis of his "past behavior". What about the many Muslim 'clerics' living in the UK at OUR expence preaching their medieval hatred for the West? Is their past and present behavior not enough to have them dealt the same treatment? - it seems not.

I know people who being Muslim never stop harping on about Israel and the Jews, about how Gaza is a disgrace and that the USA and the UK are complicit in the murder of Arabs there. At the same time, they deny the holocaust even though I have sent them a powerfull PPS file that spells it out for them.

More to the point of this thread however, is that the UK Govt has removed Holocaust studies from the National School Curriculum in case it "offends Muslims". So now history really is being re-written by our liberal Muslim loving leaders in the name of what? Racial equality? I think not. These useless bastards really do not know the depth and extent of the ill feeling their misguided multi cultural experiment is engendering in the indigenous British Population. Recent events in Luton, where Muslims were allowed to abuse returning troops from Afghanistan just about sums up the depth of caring this establishment has for the British People. Ie, Nil.

Freedom of Speech - only if you are a fucking immigrant to our shores as the people born and raised here seem to get precious litle of it.

I apologise for the language in this post but I cant help it - I think I am suffering from that well known condition of feeling powerless and forgotten by those that are MEANT to represent my point of view.

I'v also attached the PPS file for anyone whos interested. (Open in Powerpoint )

Attachments:

• It-Seems-Impossible.pps, 1.2 MB

Permalink Reply by Kingsley on April 25, 2009 at 9:16pm

I have to object to the claim that holocaust education has been dropped to appease muslin groups. Both the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6517359.stm) and Snopes.com (http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/holocaust.asp) show this to be false. Some teachers were (and probably still are) failing to teach it adequately but this has been identified and is (or should be) in the process of being corrected.

Whilst holocaust denial is hideous, repugnant and utterly without foundation in evidential fact, the principals of free speech are such the it must be allowed. I personally regard David Irrving as an utterly reprehensible excuse for a human being but wholeheartedly condemn the Austrian government for jailing him. Voltaire was right!

Permalink Reply by Kingsley on April 25, 2009 at 10:04pm

The decline in the rights of free speech, freedom of conscience and freedom of association in the UK over the last decade or so have been truly frightening. What's worse, our supposedly free press have acquiesced in this.

We have seen people arrested for reading the names of war-dead at The Cenotaph - our national war memorial, and the cowardice shown by our newspapers in failing to reprint the Jyllands-Posten cartoons is utterly unforgivable. How are we, the British people, supposed to make informed decisions when we are not given the basic information in the first place?

The whole idea of there being laws regarding "Incitement to Religious Hatred" are an anathema to me. I can understand restrictions on free speech such as the US "shouting fire in a crowed theatre" or incitement to cause assault, violence, murder or theft, but hatred is an emotion not an action, and religion is a matter of personal choice. This is a thought-crime on two levels!

Geert Wilders should definitely have been allowed in. He is most certainly NOT far-right and anyone who has read the Hadith of Bukhari will struggle to make arguments with anything he says regarding Islam. His position strikes me as being similar to Churchill's during the 30's when he was the only major parliamentarian to have read Mien Kampf.

Phelps and the Westboro scum, I find harder to agree their admission to the country. But agree I do, despite my personal revelations. As I said earlier on this thread, Voltaire was right! Phelps and co, should be given the oxygen of publicity they need, just like David Irvine, precisely because that oxygen is needed for us to burn them in flames of their own making in the court of public opinion.

The restrictions on free speech that have been brought in over the last decade or so are intolarable to any thinking person. It is a case of treating the population as children.

The one major gripe I have with your post is that you equate these things with 'liberals'. I am a self-identified liberal, taking the roots of my political ideas from people like John Stuart-Mill and Thomas Jefferson. What you have posted about comes from socialism. There never has been and never can be anything liberal about that controlling, authoritarian ideology.

Permalink Reply by Andrew on May 18, 2009 at 10:20am

I don't disagree, I think you misread my intent with the 'liberals' remark. There have been a number of people who call themselves liberals who have been among those calling for Geert Wilders and others to be barred entry to the UK, and who have put up little if any resistance to the increasingly censorious impulses of the government.

Hence I used the phrase "so-called 'liberals'" to indicate that these people are liberals in name only.

Given the way that certain sections of the media constantly heap scorn upon liberalism, I can see how my comment might have been interpreted in the way you did. I should have been clearer

Permalink Reply by Baphomet (AIM Soldier) on August 24, 2009 at 1:19pm

The whole Fitna ting was ridiculous. The film was actually pretty accurate and Wilders is a good guy in my opinion. I saw a Muslim website da other night with a green Union Jack on it with the Islamic crescent moon and I've seen a few others like it. The Islamification of da UK grows and none of us can say jack shit about it without being labelled racists or conspiracy theorists. Radical Muslims are just non-Western Nazi boot boys with a fake God and warrior prophet to justify their sick ideas and violence. I may be a black male immigrant myself but given da choice of being lynched by da BNP or da Muslims then Griffith is gonna have to make me some strange fruit cos Islam is da worst of two evils. My best mate is an atheist ex-Muslim and even he knows dat salam has f**k all to do with Islam.

Permalink Reply by Enlightened Observer on September 9, 2009 at 4:09am

An interesting response Baphomet. What is an"AIM Soldier"?