An astonishing exchange took place on GB News earlier this week, following former Labour Party advisor Mike Buckley’s claim not to have heard about the Batley Grammar School teacher, who remains in hiding more than three years on from showing his students a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammed during a religious education (RE) class.
When GB News presenter Michelle Dewberry and panellist Matthew Goodwin explained that the teacher’s lesson had provoked several days of demonstrations outside the school gates by a Muslim mob, as well as several credible death threats – ultimately leading to him being placed in police protection – the former Labour advisor rhetorically shrugged his shoulders.
The teacher’s behaviour was “unwise and unnecessary” and “bound to provoke a reaction”, he said.
“If he’s an RE teacher, he must have known that within Islam, it’s blasphemous to depict the Prophet Muhammed in visual form,” he sniffed, before adding: “I’m not glad that he’s in hiding, but he made a mistake.”
But where is it, exactly, that Mr. Buckley and his fellow “progressives”, with similar views about supposedly “offensive” or “hateful” speech, draw the line? Put another way, in the hierarchy of punishment options available for blasphemers, where is the threshold at which they would condemn a “provoked reaction”?
This isn’t just an academic question, either, since earlier this week eight people went on trial in Paris on terrorism charges in connection with the beheading of Samuel Paty, a history teacher who showed pupils cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad after their publication in Charlie Hebdo.
Paty, 47, was killed outside his school in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine in broad daylight by an 18 year-old assailant of Chechen origin who arrived in France aged six with his Chechen parents and had been granted asylum.
Abdullah Anzarov stabbed Paty repeatedly, before beheading him and posting a picture of the severed head on social media, with a message from “Abdullah, the servant of Allah” addressed to “Macron, leader of the infidels”.
“I executed one of your hellhounds who dared to belittle Muhammad,” Anzarov boasted.
So was Paty’s behaviour “unwise and unnecessary”? Should he have known his lesson was likely to “provoke a reaction”? Are Mr Buckley and his like “not glad” that he’s dead, but disappointed in him for making such a culturally insensitive “mistake”?
And in an increasingly complex, interconnected and multicultural society, do progressives acknowledge that their beloved mantra, “free speech does not mean freedom from consequences”, can only ever devolve into appeasement of those prepared to wreak the most extreme forms of violence on those with whom they disagree?
Frederick Attenborough is the Digital Communications Director of the Free Speech Union.
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The BBC is a political propaganda organisation – of that there can be no doubt. There merely remains the question of who they are working for – their own sincerely held beliefs, string pullers in UK government or string pullers further afield, or some unholy combination of all three. The only positive outcome for this country is for it to be dissolved.
We’ve seen how the FBI put pressure on Twitter. Is it so far-fetched to believe it couldn’t happen to our state-funded broadcaster?
Michael Shellenberger on Twitter: “1. TWITTER FILES: PART 7 The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop How the FBI & intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020” / Twitter
It is highly unlikely any establishment party will ‘ dissolve’ the BBC. The Tory Party can be relied on to raise the anti towards the BBC when elections loom for its own electoral benefit but that’s all. But we the public can ‘defund’ the BBC by not paying the licence fee. Very slowly more of my friends are admitting to not paying the licence fee. Of course this needs to be torrent for it to be effective.
“And now for something completely different.”
If you love good facts that are easy to digest give this a go.🙈🍼
https://newworldhumor.substack.com/p/liquifact-daily-facts-in-a-bottle
Anybody making predictions about what’s going to happen in 2100 (78 years from now) is trying to pull a fast one as this means neither he nor anybody from his present audience will likely still be around in order to find out how things actually are in 2100.
I see the scientifically dumb, histrionic doom peddler Justin Rowlatt hyperventilating about Churchill polar bears on BBC. In between adverts from the WWF about how elephants are in danger of dying out tomorrow. The only thing that’s really dying out is journalists with a sense of integrity and proportion.
Are they not all dead already?
They’re on the critically endangered list….
The silence from Marianna Spring the BBC Disinformation reporter will be deafening of course.
The BBC once had a reputation for accurate reporting, which has now gone. The problem is many people still believe what they say. So many of the claims they make about climate have been proven wrong, its time they were forced to correct them and return to being an organisation to rely on for the truth. Unfortunately that will never happen unless they get someone in charge with the guts to insist it does.
I thought this Polar Bear nonsense had been put to bed years ago. Apparently not. But does a species that has grown five fold from about 5000 bears to 25,000 bears in the last 60 years sound like a species that is in trouble to you?
Hey, Will, good stuff. But the skeptical polar bear in my libertarian satire ‘Grandpa Bear Goes to Washington’ has known the untruth about polar bear endangerment for more than a decade. Check it out. It’s an epic tale for all true lovers of polar bears and freedom and a shameless steal of Orwell. https://clips.substack.com/p/an-epic-tale-for-all-true-lovers