Tag: freedom of speech

This Ex-Radical Islamist Just Won a Great Victory for Us All

JOHN D MCHUGH/AFP/Getty

Who would have guessed that the most important victory in the culture wars against the hard left this year would be won by a former radical Islamist?

British Muslim Maajid Nawaz – once arrested and imprisoned in Egypt for five years for his membership of the proscribed Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir; now a campaigner against radical Islam – is probably far from most conservatives’ idea of a natural hero.

But the $3.4 million settlement Nawaz has just won in a defamation action against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is a victory for us all.

And I really don’t just mean people who identify as conservative.

I mean the broad coalition that embraces moderate Muslims, Brexiteers, Trump voters, internet shitposters, Breitbart readers and writers, libertarian bloggers, European populists, Nigel Farage, Lionel Shriver, Paul Joseph Watson, Sargon of Akkad, Count Dankula, Morrissey, Thomas Sowell, Douglas Murray, Kanye West, Ann Coulter, the Imam of Peace, Andrew Bolt, Andrew Neil, Eric Weinstein, Joe Rogan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jordan Peterson, Christina Hoff Sommers – anyone, in fact, whether they’re on the left or the right, who has been called a “Nazi” or “far right” or an “extremist” or a “fascist” or an “Uncle Tom” or similarly vile, reductive, hysterical, hate-filled, sometimes even life-threatening epithets by the increasingly aggressive forces of the radical left.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

From Farage to Freud: How the Cultural Marxists Are Murdering Our Language

The other day on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions, I made a point which unfortunately went right over the heads of my booing audience. It had to do with the way lefties like my fellow panelists Chuka Umunna MP and TUC leader Frances O’Grady too often choose to misrepresent the meaning of perfectly harmless words and language for nefarious political ends.

We were discussing Labour’s confected furore over Lord Freud’s remarks on the disabled. As is now abundantly clear to anyone even halfway acquainted with the background to the story – the fact, for example, that his comments were addressed sympathetically to the father of a severely disabled daughter – Lord Freud’s intentions and meaning were unimpeachably honourable and decent.

So instead his critics resorted to that well-tested lefty fallback position: distortion and misrepresentation. In this case, Lord Freud’s remarks about disabled people being thought by employers to be not “worth the full wage” were twisted so as to mean that he thought disabled people were “worthless.”

This is a weasel trick and when Labour MP Chuka Umunna tried it on Any Questions, I called him out on it. Umunna has his faults but unutterable stupidity is not one of them. Suppose, I put it to him, that he had heard someone in the pub after a rugger match boasting about having “murdered” the opposition. Would he call the police?

Of course he wouldn’t because like anyone born into our richly allusive English-speaking culture he would have understood that our language depends as much on tone and context as it does on the words themselves. That verb “murder” is a perfect example of this. Sometimes, it can indeed mean literally “kill”. But on many other occasions it can mean something innocuous like desperation for a drink (“I could murder a pint”) or abject defeat in a board game (“he murdered me at Scrabble”).

And the amazing thing is that despite the fact that depressingly large sections of our population have low IQs, are functionally illiterate, and are almost totally uneducated thanks to our dumbed-down education system, even the most unutterable thickos among us are yet capable of grasping these semantic nuances – even though they wouldn’t know what a “semantic nuance” was if it bit them on the arse.

So if even the thickest of thick native English speakers can understand basic concepts like the fact that even though “worth less” and “worthless” sound the same but actually mean something different – why can’t a bright, articulate, Manchester- and Burgundy-University-educated, City lawyer like Chuka Umunna?

The answer, of course, is that it suits him not to – in much the same way it suited Nigel Farage’s various lefty-feminist critics not to at the time of his supposedly contentious remarks earlier this year about women in the City.

What Farage said, you may remember, was this:

“And if a woman has a client base, has a child and takes two or three years off work, she is worth far less to the employer when she comes back than when she went away because her client base will not have stuck rigidly to her.”

This is a fairly straightforward economic point which, I’m quite sure, any City employer would tell you (albeit guardedly, lest they seem in any way “discriminatory”) is no more than the ground truth.

Yet the truth was no defence for the likes of Labour MPs such as Harriet Harman who naturally piled in to accuse Farage of saying something he had never actually said: that female employees are, to some degree, “worthless.”

Of course I understand why the Harmans and the Umunnas of the world play this game: it’s a useful way of circumventing the awkward fact that the left rarely has any useful arguments.

But what astonishes me is our cultural tolerance for it…

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Related posts:

  1. How the malign, totalitarian left played the ‘disability’ card to brand an innocent man a thought criminal
  2. The fake disabled are crippling our economy
  3. Treating Islam with special reverence is cultural suicide and just plain wrong
  4. If we’re going to rage against cultural atrocities, let’s make sure we target the right ones

 

Luvvies for Hypocrisy, Intellectual Dishonesty and Lazy Groupthink

When Caitlin was fun!

The story so far: Caitlin Moran (yes, all right: I know lots of you claim never to have heard of her, but she’s a bestselling author on both sides of the Atlantic and one of our most fluent and entertaining columnists) has been fighting a war to clean up the social media site you never use, Twitter.

But now she has been rumbled as a major source of offensive, potty-mouthed, insensitive Twitter chat herself.

And now, in response, Caitlin has felt compelled to launch into one of her increasingly tedious apologiae pro vita sua (Caitlin, Caitlin, you were SO much more fun in the days when you stuck to celebrities and vajazzling) to justify why, like, it’s OK for Caitlin Moran to make flip, glib, matey in-jokes about AIDs and gays and suchlike but not OK for anyone to be horrid to members of the righteous sisterhood like Mary Beard and Stella Creasy and Caroline Criado-Perez.

And now, Caitlin’s essay has been retweeted in a “put that in your pipe and smoke it, evil, right-wing Caitlin-doubters!” way by celebrity comedian David Baddiel, and celebrity comedian Dom Joly. And quite soon, I think we can fairly safely guarantee, it will also have been retweeted by celebrity astronomer Brian Cox, celebrity mathematician Simon Singh, celebrity Times whimsyist Hugo Rifkind, celebrity lefty and occasional scriptwriter Graham Linehan, et al. Why? Because they’re all part of the same great big self-affirmatory gang of the impeccably liberal-left-leaning luvviehood, is why. Once you become a part of this gang, it’s great because you never have to worry about saying the wrong thing on any issue ever again. You know what to think on “climate change”, because all you have to do is check what fellow club member Marcus Brigstocke thinks. You know what to think about bees and neonicotinoids because of what Vivienne Westwood says. You know what to think about fracking because Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon and Chrissie Hynde’s daughter don’t like it. Etc.

This is the same phenomenon I described when having a go in the Spectator at the ineffably tedious and oh-so-predictably lefty Russell Howard’s Good News.

What’s really irksome about Howard, though, is the mind-numbing, soul-sapping conventionalism of his politics. You just know that the first day he went to the subsidised bar on his economics degree course at the University of the West of England (Bristol Poly, in old money, I believe), he got handed the usual Middle-Class Student ****er’s starter pack marked ‘This is what you think’. There’ll have been a long section on how bad racism is, probably the worst crime in the world; one on Tories (‘tossers’); others on Israel and Palestine, the great recession (all the fault of greedy bankers and tax-dodging corporations, basically), the environment (v.v important!!), and so on. And young Russell will have gone, ‘Hey, I like the sound of this. It means not only can I spend the rest of my life feeling morally superior over all the scumbags who don’t agree with the Middle-Class Student ****er’s starter pack but also that I’ll never have to use a single one of my brain cells ever again.’

This morning – not as a trolling gesture, but in all sincerity – I invited my old mucker Caitlin to join in my Twitter campaign to #keeptwittertasteless (or #keeptweetstastless – I can’t decide which is better). The point I was trying to make is a serious one: that if you genuinely believe in freedom of speech, then an inevitable part of that freedom is the freedom to offend, be it Guardian hacks writing disobligingly about transvestites, or ungallant louts insulting Mary Beard’s looks, or Caitlin’s AIDS quips. After all, one person’s flip, daringly near-the-knuckle, mini-rebellion against our stifling culture of PC is another person’s dire, report-worthy offence. And since it’s all a matter of opinion, where do you draw the line? Who decides what is and isn’t “appropriate”? (Direct threats of violence are, of course, another matter. But those were already proscribed by the law long before Caitlin and her pals began their Twitter clean up campaign)

I find it slightly weird that I should need to explain this. (A similar problem exists with Leveson.) Why is it mainly just us right-wingers who are sticking up for the principles of free speech? Why don’t the left-liberal luvviehood get it too? Are they even capable of thinking an original, let alone brave, thought on any subject, ever?

Related posts:

  1. Murdoch, Hackgate, Climategate, the Guardian and the vile hypocrisy of the Left
  2. I’m trying to block out the suppurating vileness of Twitter
  3. Twitter: ‘Tweet’ went the birdy, and we did
  4. In praise of patrons – particularly mine

 

Why I owe Aussie QC Raymond Finkelstein a pint | James Delingpole

March 5, 2012

Gratuitous saltwater crocodile picture

Today’s column is dedicated to Raymond Finkelstein QC. Raymond who? Well, he’s the kind of left-leaning activist lawyer I’d normally run a mile from – especially since he’s behind a scary new report which, if implemented, will kill what’s left of freedom of speech in Australia and pretty much criminalise climate scepticism. (H/T John O’Sullivan; Peter Dun)

But as far as I’m concerned, the man’s a total bloody hero and when I come to Oz in mid-April I’d like to buy him a pint. Why? Because thanks to good old Raymond I’m going to sell loads more copies of my book Killing The Earth To Save It: How Environmentalists are Ruining the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Jobs (Connor Court).

Raymond – or Pinkie Finkie, as I’m sure he’d preferred it if I called him, because the Aussies do love a bit of informality, don’t they? – has produced a report on media regulation in Australia so terrifyingly authoritarian it makes the Leveson Enquiry look like a model of balance, sanity and restraint. (According to Mark Steyn – via Jo Nova – the Chinese have been eyeing Pinkie Finkie’s report with gobsmacked admiration, wondering whether they could ever get away with producing something quite so extreme…)

You can read the full 400 pages here, if you’re feeling masochistic. But Australian Climate Madness has a pretty good summary of the key issues of concern, starting with Pinkie Finkie’s proposal to create a new super-regulator called the News Media Council [missed a trick there, didn’t he? surely Ministry of Truth would have been more appropriate] which will impose its idea of fairness and balance not only on newspapers but even on blogs with as few hits as 15,000 a year.

But whose idea of fairness and balance?

It’s an astonishing fact that of the 10600 submissions received by the inquiry no fewer than 9600 were boilerplate submissions from left-wing pressure groups, led by Avaaz “a global civic organization launched in January 2007 that promotes activism on issues such as climate change, human rights, poverty and corruption.” (See Andrew Bolt for further details)

This bias is certainly evident in its attitude to climate change. It cites a December 2011 report by the left-leaning Australian Centre for Independent Journalism on media coverage of climate change policy in Australia. The report – A Sceptical Climate – had found that “negative coverage of government policy outweighed positive coverage by 73 per cent to 27 per cent” and that the preponderance of negative coverage was even greater among Murdoch-owned newspapers.

To which the only sane and sensible response is: “Yeah? And???” Of course a left-wing think tank is going to find climate scepticism objectionable. Of course it’s going to seize every opportunity to have a dig at papers owned by Rupert Murdoch. But had Pinkie Finkie been wearing his scrupulously neutral wig of blind justice – rather than his I HEART George Soros hat – it might have occurred to him that there was a much more plausible reason than media bias as to why the Gillard Government’s carbon tax got such generally negative coverage.

Maybe the carbon tax was just a bloody stupid idea and everyone with an ounce of sense could SEE it was a bloody stupid idea!

Pinkie Finkie, however, takes the view that any newspaper that takes a firm line against an iniquitous, wrong-headed, economically suicidal, unscientifically-based, activist-driven, morally bankrupt new carbon tax system must perforce be in need of stricter regulation.

4.38 However, to have an opinion and campaign for it is one thing; reporting is another, and in news reporting it is expected by the public, as well as by professional journalists, that the coverage will be fair and accurate.

4.39 Nonetheless, there is a widely-held public view that, despite industry-developed codes of practice that state this, the reporting of news is not fair, accurate and balanced.

“Widely-held public view”. Yes, well I suppose it really is “widely-held” if you ignore the fact that 86 per cent of those submissions were the result of leftist astroturfing, much of it – not unlike the Leveson Inquiry – motivated mainly by a desire to get Murdoch.

(Lest you doubt it, here’s what Avaaz said to its mob: (H/T Andrew Bolt)

The media inquiry we fought hard to win is under threat — Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers are working to discredit and limit the investigation into his stranglehold on our media. But a flood of public comments from each of us will set an ambitious agenda and save the inquiry.)

Anyway, you get the idea. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, and all that. We’ve saw in the Andrew Bolt aborigines case that freedom of speech in Australia was already on its last legs, thanks to the way the system has been hijacked by activist judges. If Finkelstein gets his way, this could be the final nail in the coffin.

I personally don’t think it will be. I think the Carbon Tax, the Bolt trial and now this are going to lead to the mother of all political backlashes, and that when it comes to the next general election the avowedly climate sceptical Tony Abbott is going to be a shoo-in.

But let’s allow lefties like Pinkie Finkie and Gillard and Tim Flannery and Bob Brown their hour in the sun because the longer they stay there, the more damage they do and the more damage they will be seen to have done. This is important. (The same applies to Obama’s US; sadly it’s not going to work here, not with Cameron poisoning the wells for Conservatism for ever). If Australia is to get the government it needs (and deserves) it must first experience the full horror of the government it doesn’t deserve. The more easily ordinary people can see just how authoritarian, petty-minded, bullying, meddling and grotesquely biased the left can be when it holds the reins of power, the more enthusiastic they’ll be about throwing the bastards into the croc pit come 2013. (Or sooner, if we’re lucky.)

Related posts:

  1. Climategate: five Aussie MPs lead the way by resigning in disgust over carbon tax
  2. Aussie sceptics destroy EU carbon commissioner
  3. Global warming: red-faced climatologist issues grovelling apology
  4. Julian Assange is not a Climategate hero

3 thoughts on “Why I owe Aussie QC Raymond Finkelstein a pint”

  1. Nige Cook says:5th March 2012 at 10:15 pmJames, let me explain: anyone who points out the fact that the emperor’s clothes are threadbare is a menace to freedom of speech and needs to be muzzled. Freedom of speech cannot work in a dictatorship of lefties. You should know that, having seen the struggles good olf Brezhnev had to muzzle dissidents.

    There is nothing illogical for a lying dogmatic orthodoxy to suppress freedom of speech when it disproves the lies. Quite the contrary, it would be criminally insane for them not to try to ban the facts. Fortunately, in England there is no need for a law to be passed by Parliament here, banning a scientific journal’s peer reviewers from permitting publication of facts. They’re sufficiently corrupt that it’s simply not needed. Oz is different…

  2. Finbar says:8th March 2012 at 11:27 pmNow that you’re all sweary, may I call you an obnoxious cunt?
  3. Openwifi says:9th March 2012 at 3:25 pmThis is a bit of a shame:

    http://www.delingpolestudio.co.uk/Design_Portfolio/Pages/WWF.html

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Freedom of Sspeech Is Dead in Australia

Except for the right kind of speech

Andrew Bolt: world’s greatest blogger?

For my money probably the best political blogger in the world is Australia’s Andrew Bolt. He was one of the first journalists onto Climategate (he got there before me) and his takedown earlier this year on his radio show of an EU Climate Commissioner spouting nonsense was magisterial. But he’s by no means a single issue commentator: he has strength in depth. His war, like mine, is against those who would constrain our liberty by imposing on us more tax, more regulation, more control. He’s firm but fair: one of the good guys.

This is why we should all worry greatly about the latest bizarre ruling from the Australian federal court, which has found Bolt in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Ozboy has the details:

Newspaper columnist and blogger Andrew Bolt was today found guilty in the Federal Court of breaches of the Racial Discrimination Act. Justice Mordy Bromberg in his ruling, found two articles written by Bolt in 2009—claiming that self-proclaimed aborigines of caucasian descent and appearance were “political aborigines”, who used their legal “indigenous” status to intrigue themselves into lucrative positions open only to indigenous Australians and further their (predominantly activist) careers—left it

…reasonably likely that fair-skinned Aboriginal people (or some of them) were offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated…

What this precedent means, is that the legal test of vilification now turns on the degree of offence experienced in the mind of the claimed victim—an impossible legal criterion, one which is open to any imaginable distortion of meaning, and one which opens the way to the tyranny of the hypersensitive.

This sounds to me very much like our own Macpherson Report’s perfectly ludicrous definition of a “racist” incident as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”. That definition – I wonder if Sir William Macpherson will ever come round to recognising this – has done immeasurable damage to social cohesion in Britain, further encouraging a poisonous culture of victimhood, grievance and entitlement, as well as serving to increase the racial tension it was supposed to diminish. And now the Australians are following our idiot example.

“Nothing in the orders I make should suggest that it is unlawful for a publication to deal with racial identification, including by challenging the genuineness of the identification of a group of people,” Justice Bromberg said.

Oh well that’s all right then. Australians are still allowed freedom of speech. So long as it’s the right kind of speech, blandly expressed, offending no one, as decided by such perfect arbiters of truth as Mordy Bromberg. Presumably he’s never read Milton’s Areopagitica, which addressed these issues with an intelligence and subtlety and nice sense of judgement decidedly lacking in this culturally suicidal court ruling.

UPDATE: check out this brilliant Mark Steyn speech, sticking up for Bolt, Free Speech and our unalienable right to sing Kung Fu Fighting to whomsoever we choose – up to and including the extended disco mix.

Related posts:

  1. How Australia surrendered to the wowsers
  2. There was nothing ‘illiberal’ about David Cameron’s speech on multiculturalism
  3. Australia counts the cost of environmental lunacy – and plots its sweet revenge
  4. Press regulation only helps the bad guys

6 thoughts on “Freedom of speech is dead in Australia”

  1. Sue Gant says:29th September 2011 at 11:24 pmThe right are so dishonest. Your argument is all fine and dandy if you leave out the fact that Bolt lied and distorted facts to make his point. Is that what freedom of speech is to you? Here you are on your very own platform, free to run an agenda and play the victim rabbiting on about free speech in a very selective manner which you really don’t believe in at all because you know in your heart that you fully accept the limitations set on it, happy to see films banned, television and the press regulated and controversial politicians and historians banned from the country. Freedom of speech is not the freedom to lie. If you think freedom of speech here is dead then move to China.
  2. Bob Meyrick says:1st October 2011 at 4:17 pmSee also Mr. Delingpole’s column about “How the BBC fell for a Marxist plot to destroy civilisation from within” which is a lot of manufactured indignation about a non-story. Never let the facts get in the way of a good rant, and hope your audience can’t be bothered to check on the veracity of your claims. A technique much in favour in the 1930s in Central Europe.
  3. D. Phillips says:3rd October 2011 at 2:14 am“A technique much in favour in the 1930s in Central Europe.” Don’t be coy, Meyrick, just come out and call us Nazis for insisting on our rights in the face of glacial leftist encroachment. I hear that the Weimar republic was very big on banning speech to favour “Human Rights”, as opposed to mere legal rights, and that worked out so well for them, didn’t it?
  4. Bob Meyrick says:5th October 2011 at 8:33 amI take it, Phillips, that you actually believe what Delingpole writes even when it can be shown to be a lie? “Glacial leftist encroachment”? What a joke, or perhaps not in the paranoid world of the extreme right.
  5. D. Phillips says:6th October 2011 at 1:48 amHey, Meyrick! In truth, only off-kilter extremists consider minor mistakes or arguable differences of opinion to be evidence of gross dishonesty. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the left has produced many a gag-worthy, unnutritious mash.
  6. John Fourie says:20th October 2011 at 11:13 pmJust came to your website to say that you are the lowest form of life. Lying and over exaggerating without even understanding the basics. Dont read anything this man says people he only wants you to go to his website to get some click, he is what we call an internet troll and does not deserve a second of your time. Please die so that the world can be a better place.

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