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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