Douglas Murray said of last Saturday’s attack on Israel: “Sometimes a flare goes up, and you see exactly where everyone is.” He was referring to the response by some members of the anti-colonial Left, such as Novara Media’s Rivkah Brown, who tweeted: “Today should be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide, as Gazans break out of their open-air prison and Hamas fighters cross into their colonisers’ territory. The struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless and we shouldn’t apologise for it.” (She later apologised.)
Rivkah was far from alone, with equally appalling reactions by an assistant professor at the LSE, the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matters and Dr Ashok Kumar, a Professor at Birkbeck, who said the murder of more than 250 young people at the Supernova outdoor rave was a “consequence” of “partying on stolen land”.
But the reaction to the attack also shone a light on something else – namely, the double standards of those who penalise people for exercising their right to lawful free speech.
At the Free Speech Union, we’re constantly being assured that no-platforming visitors to universities with heterodox opinions is justified because allowing them to speak will make vulnerable people feel ‘unsafe’.
That was the argument for stopping Dr Kathleen Stock speaking at the Oxford Union and the reason for trying to cancel Prof Alice Sullivan and Prof Selina Todd’s book party at Edinburgh University. On college campuses, we’re told, preserving the psychological wellbeing of members of ‘oppressed’ identity groups must take priority over academic freedom and free speech, hence the need for ‘safe spaces’ and ‘trigger warnings’ – and woe betide anyone who commits a ‘microaggression’.
Yet the same activists who are so quick to silence others in the name of ‘safety’ have been openly celebrating the terrorist attacks on Israel. For instance, the Women’s Officer of Sussex University Students’ Union addressed a pro-Hamas rally in Brighton on Saturday night, describing the massacres that had taken place that morning as “beautiful” and “inspiring”. Not much concern there for the safety of Sussex’s Jewish students. And in what moral universe is it acceptable to behead a baby for the sin of being born Jewish, but asking someone where they’re from or touching their hair is beyond the pale? It’s almost as if woke activists have only been pretending to care about psychological harm as an excuse to silence their political opponents.
The police, too, have been revealed as deeply partisan by their failure to arrest any pro-Hamas protestors – at least initially. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, given that last year the police decided to drop all charges against a group of men who spat at a bus full of Jewish teenagers on Oxford Street. At a demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy on Monday night, thousands of protestors let off flares and chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – code for wanting to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. Yet the only arrests made were for criminal damage.
A man who was holding up a Palestinian flag in front of the Embassy complained about being told to move on by the police – “I thought this was supposed to be a free country?” – but he got off lightly, considering a person is guilty of an offence under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 if he “displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening… within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress”. Apparently, it’s a section 5 offence to wear a football shirt referencing the Hillsborough disaster in which 97 people were killed – as one crass Manchester Utd fan discovered at the FA Cup final – but not to taunt Israeli Embassy staff by celebrating a tragedy in which 10 times that number were killed.
The police don’t show anything like the same restraint when faced with much more menacing individuals, such as the elderly woman who took a photograph of a feminist sticker on a trans pride poster outside the headquarters of Hebden Valley Pride. Greater Manchester constabulary used CCTV footage and face recognition technology to track her down and then hauled her in for questioning.
And what about non-crime hate incidents? According to the FSU’s calculations, these have been recorded against the names of over 250,000 people in England and Wales since 2014, including four boys at Kettlethorpe High School for not treating the Quran with sufficient respect. Yet to my knowledge, none of the people celebrating a mass casualty attack by a proscribed terrorist organisation in Britain’s cities have had NCHIs recorded against them.
Could it be that the police’s determination of what constitutes ‘hate’ is entirely dependent on how ‘oppressed’ the so-called victims are perceived to be? Apparently, you can say what you like about murdered Jews, but if you breach an Islamic blasphemy code you’re for the high jump.
Don’t misunderstand me. This isn’t a call to silence anyone expressing sympathy for the Palestinian people or waving the Palestinian flag. I’m just pointing out that in the past week numerous actual speech crimes have gone unpunished, whereas the police are constantly harassing people for exercising their right to lawful free speech on the grounds that they’re being ‘hateful’ – and the same double standard applies to the self-appointed guardians of ‘psychological safety’ on campus.
A flare has gone up, as Douglas Murray says, and we can see more clearly than ever before that the attack on free speech in the name of protecting the vulnerable from harm – “Hate speech is not free speech” – is just a rhetorical smokescreen.
What it’s really about is forcing anyone you disagree with to STFU.
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“The right to a fair trial presupposes the existence of impartial judges.”
For once, I find myself agreeing with the unconscious bias industry. No such thing as impartiality. The arbiter is part of the outcome.
Trying to politicise it?
That happened when the Rule of Law was abandoned with Acts of Parliament – such as race, sex discrimination – giving some groups of society advantages backed by the State and legal system that others don’t have, and which can be used by the State or others for political, ideological reasons, gain, or just malice and spite.
Under the Rule of Law, it must be clear when a particular action by a citizen breaches the law, so they know they are acting illegally and in any case their action can be shown in a Court to be in breach.
The so-called hate crime act makes it an offence if just one person is offended by an action. So it is not the action that causes the breach, it is the reaction. This leaves it entirely unclear to a citizen whether their action is illegal. If nobody claims offence it isn’t, if someone does it is – and there is no time limit. The Gestapo can turn up weeks, months, years later because somebody read or heard about what was said and is “offended”.
The Rule of Law, like our other Common Law Rights no longer exists.
Yes, I think David Starkey makes this point too that “rights” laws give minorities a higher level of “justice” than everyone else: that is, if I understand him, that the minority rules the majority. For instance, a rapist who can’t be deported and the majority are expected to subsume him.
Off-T.
No articles dealing with this so it has landed here.
An absolutely fascinating article which outlines were this country is headed if we don’t pull our fingers out in the next few years. Target date is 2030 as i keep stating.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/uk-leading-global-test-bed-ai-enforcement/5877274
“Klaus Schwab convinced him – as well as his compatriot the King of England – that this is the future. “If you want to keep your job for the next four years you had better set about it right away” warn his minders.
An upright turbocharged goose step march into state controlled surveillance; big data; central control and a subservient brain damaged social constituency – is what is actually being announced by the British prime minister.
The Guardian newspaper boldly announces
“Keir Starmer will launch a sweeping action plan to increase twenty fold the amount of AI computing power under public control by 2030.”
Hello, there’s that infamous 2030 date looming up again. Everything is supposed to be in place to have achieved full spectrum dominance over freedom loving members of the human race by that date”
The area where AI seems to have the most potential is in snooping and censoring and generally making our lives more difficult – it doesn’t matter too much if it makes mistakes one way or another, it’s a case of “never mind the quality, feel the width”.
Luckily (!) we won’t have enough electricity to keep the lights on in 2030, let alone run AI systems
Lol
The internet is powered by unicorn farts
Correct.
Interesting to see that nuclear reactors are OK for powering AI installations but not steel plants or chemical works… which actually create real wealth and proper jobs.
It would be extremely helpful if the author had at least summarized what he’s criticizing. Or maybe at least provided a link. As It stands, I have no idea what he’s writing about save that he’s opposed to something.
The nice thing about human rights is that their definition is often vague enough that it can be interpreted to mean anything. The COVID era right to life included force masking people, enforcing certain distances between them and regulating who might legally meet whom under what circumstances, all claimed to be motivated by the state protecting people’s right to life by ensuring that they wouldn’t come into harmful contact with other people.
Likewise, a right to life, that is, to enjoyment of human rights, had the ECHR find that the Swiss state was not doing enough to combat climate change to protect elderly climate activists from the dreadful consequences of heat waves in summer in Switzerland, a country not exactly known for its hot climate because it’s location in the Alps.
Hence, if Hermer wants to intertwine rule of law and human rights, he most likely simply wants to make arbitrary unaccountable political decisions about stuff, eg, end all deportations of foreign criminals because of their right to whatever suggests itself and – at the same time – send any British people who critcize this to jail for incitement to whatever comes to mind first.
To import ‘human rights’ into the notion of the rule of law is misconceived
The important thing for our rulers about “rights” is that they are in the gift of the government. This is in contrast to freedom, which belongs to each individual. This is the reason for the interesting modern fact that as “rights” proliferate, freedom diminishes, and government power increases.
I like what the incomparable US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has to say about “human rights” and the law: that rights should be understood as conferring freedom from government interference rather than entitlement to government benefits.
What they want is courts run by and for the elites. That way lies perpetual socialism snd no freedom.
Surely, the law was politicised by Blair in 1997?
ECHR, Supreme Court? Lefty judges?
Wasn’t Lord Hermer the guy who pressed for the prosecution of Tommy Robinson for a civil offence which is unusual for the AG to
do? Presumably Robinson had no human rights to appeal to such as being kept in perpetual solitary confinement!
Going to the source of Human Rights, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I can find no actual rights at all, only well meaning aspirations. No wonder they have become so malleable for politicians and so lucrative for lawyers.
The last paragraph and Southport so much for lawyers