I have today added the following text to my post of Hitchens’ speech to the University of Toronto in 2006 proposing the motion “freedom of speech includes the freedom to hate”.
UPDATE: 03/08/2013
I am currently drafting an epic post reviewing all of Hitchens’ public debates available to see/hear on the Internet and have finally come across the full version of this debate.
It looks as though Hitch was debating students from the University of Toronto (as opposed to other prominent writers and public commentators) and was given twice as much speaking time as his opponents (!).
manicstreetpreacher reports on the latest case of religious views receiving special treatment.
I bet you thought that the UK finally did away with blasphemy in 2008? The National Secular Society held a party featuring gay actor Ian McKellen reading aloud James Kirkup’s poem The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name, which was the subject of “Scary” Mary Whitehouse’s prosecution for blasphemous libel against Denis Lemon, the editor of Gay News in 1977. A ridiculous anachronism finally buried in these progressive times, right?
Well, think again. Harry Taylor, 59, from Manchester was convicted at Liverpool Crown Court on 3 March 2010 of causing “religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress”, which carries a maximum seven-year prison sentence, by leaving obscene material depicting figures from Christianity and Islam in the multi-faith room at Liverpool John Lennon Airport on 2, 26 November and 12 December 2008.
Taylor, who labelled himself a “militant atheist” admitted placing the items in the prayer room on three separate occasions, but insisted he was simply practising his own religion of “reason and rationality”.
Taylor told jurors he had left the items in the room in memory of “his hero” John Lennon before reciting the words from the song Imagine.
He said: “The airport is named after one of my heroes and his view on religion was pretty much the same as mine. I thought it was an insult to his memory to have a prayer room in his airport.”
Giving evidence in his own defence, Taylor admitted being “strongly anti-religious” after being treated badly by the Catholic brothers as a boy growing up in Dublin.
The first reaction of the airport chaplain, Nicky Lees, was to call the duty manager and the airport police, saying that she was “insulted, deeply offended and alarmed” after seeing one of the cartoons Taylor left:
This is a disgraceful verdict, but an inevitable one under this pernicious law. It seems incredible in the 21st century that you might be sent to prison because someone is ‘offended’ by your views on their religion. The blasphemy law was abolished three years ago, but it lives on under the guise of religiously aggravated offences and is several times more dangerous.
However, plenty of bloggers who have disowned Taylor as a fringe lunatic. Paul Sims on New Humanist concluded:
If free speech has its limits at the point where it becomes something like harassment, surely Taylor’s behaviour was fairly close to that line? But at the same time, it hardly seems like something worthy of a jail sentence. Certainly at the age of 59 he should have known better (and for that matter have better things to be doing with his time). If he had an objection to the airport prayer room on account of his own “religion of reason and rationality”, why didn’t he express it rationally and write a letter?
I was in two minds on whether I should support Taylor. On the one hand, he seems to be a bit of a crank. There is a time and place for talking people out of their faith and there are ways and means of doing it. Perhaps leaving deliberately provocative cartoons in a prayer room is not the best way to go about it.
But then again, I’ve spoken about Wahhabi extremists brainwashing their children into becoming suicide bombers at a university Islamic society hosted event in front of a crowd mostly wearing headscarves and was very nearly lynched for it, so what do I know?
While I don’t agree with Taylor’s methods, I think this is an appalling infringement of free speech. Taylor didn’t kill anybody or even threaten violence. That’s a vast improvement on what happens when religious people get annoyed straight off. He expressed a view. He made his true feelings known. He challenged presupposition and dogma. As the controversial film director Ken Russell once pointed out, subtly does not work on people these days; if you kick them in the balls, you’ll find you have their complete attention.
Cartoons of pigs excreting sausages labelled “Qur’an”? I’ve read the book for myself and quite frankly, “excremental” is rather kind. I am insulted and offended every time someone tries to tell me that these books are miraculous and can only be explained by the authorship of the all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing Thing That Made The Things For Which There Is No Know Maker. Is anyone going to demand a criminal prosecution for “religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress” to remedy my hurt feelings?
…slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush…
Yesterday, I posted the YouTube videos of Intelligence Squared’s debate on whether “Europe is failing its Muslims” held in London on 23 February 2010. Douglas Murray has commented further on the debate on his Telegraph blog with these scathing remarks:
The debate has been edited down for broadcast. My one gripe about this (except for the BBC’s inevitable censorship of my criticisms of the Muslim Council of Britain among other government-paid Muslim-groups – as reported by the Evening Standard here) is that they cut one crucially relevant case study I gave.
One of the two clerics who whipped up hatred against Denmark around the world, in the wake of my colleague Flemming’s commission of depictions of the historical figure Mohammed, arrived in Denmark from Lebanon in the 1990s. He went to Denmark because he has a disabled son. The country which he came from could not look after his child but he knew that Denmark would. And it did. He repaid the society by inciting hatred and violence against it. When such cases can be repeated ad nauseum, it should hardly even have to be pointed out how obscene the motion Flemming and I found ourselves debating really was.
It is grotesque to argue that Europe has failed its Muslims. It has been made repeatedly obvious that it is Islam that has failed Europe, indeed that it is Islam that has failed Muslims. I am delighted that the audience in the hall on the night agreed. And that most of the audience around the world who have emailed me since transmission – currently including people from as far afield as Nigeria, Pakistan and Iraq – appear to agree with that too.
The extracts in the debate transcript to which Murray refers are as follows. Firstly, the maniac cleric who organised the cartoon protests against the country that gives him state benefits:
They also receive all the benefits, thank you, all the benefits, all the benefits of the welfare state. Sure there are things that people have got wrong, but it’s not a bad sign I would suggest, that people who come to this country with nothing, receive, in this country, National Health Service, receive welfare payments. Let me give you two examples quickly. Raed Hlayhel, a Danish Imam, one of the two incidentally that started the worldwide protest against my co-panellist, arrived in Denmark in the 1990s, he arrived there from Lebanon because his son was disabled, and he knew that Denmark would support his son. Denmark did. How did he repay it? By organising worldwide riots, lootings, murders and burnings. However, Denmark paid for his son. What happens in Britain? We have jokers, I hope that most of you’ll agree with this, like Anjem Choudary, of the now, finally banned group Al-Muhajiroun, Islam4UK, who for years has been sitting here, on the welfare state, taking money from tax payers in this country, supporting his children, his wife and anyone else, whilst plotting and hating the people of this country. We have been paying people here, who hate us. I’d have thought that was an example of some considerable generosity, I’d say suicidal generosity, but there we go.
The former head of the Muslim Council of Britain supported the death penalty for the World’s most famous apostate and critic of Islam, while the current head doesn’t seem to be much better:
We’ve also had, from the Muslim communities in Europe a terrible failure of leadership. It’s striking to me that the Muslim Council of Britain, for instance, in this country, the last leader of that organisation said that death was too good for Salman Rushdie for the crime of writing a work of fiction. The current head of the Muslim Council of Britain, who I think if not here tonight, is certainly coming to dinner afterwards I see, seems not to be able to condemn stoning in all circumstances, for all time. I don’t know why even people paid by the government many millions of pounds can’t do this. Last year, when the Gaza operation began, paid people, including the heads of the Quilliam Foundation, a government funded organisation, signed a letter, co-signed a letter to the British Government saying that unless the British Government distances itself from Israel and American foreign policy, they couldn’t promise that other members of their religion mightn’t step outside the political process. What other organisation, what other religion blackmails the British state like this? Does any other minority in Europe behave like this? No, ladies and gentlemen, none.
Edmund Standing also posted a very helpful reply to my original post with two pieces by Daily Mail and Spectator journalist, Melanie Philips, exposing the two faces of Tariq Ramadan. In fact, Ramadan is a master of Islamist doublespeak who is in league with the jihadists:
Ramadan has been banned from entering the US because of his alleged association with extremists. The Geneva Islamic Centre, with which he is closely associated, has been linked to terrorists of the Algerian FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) and the GIA (Armed Islamic Group). A Spanish police report claimed that Ahmed Brahim, an al-Qa’ida leader jailed in Spain, was ‘in frequent contact’ with Ramadan, a claim he has denied.
Yet the Swiss activist has not only been allowed into Britain but is ensconced at St Antony’s College, Oxford as a research fellow and is much lionised by the British establishment, appearing at security seminars on Islamism and even serving as an adviser to the British Government on tackling Islamic extremism…
Ramadan’s message is highly seductive to a Western world terrified by Islamic radicalism. For Ramadan preaches the comforting message of an unthreatening Islam that can accommodate itself to modernity and to the West. He does so in a charismatic style combining high intellect, a winsome French accent and impossibly hip glamour. To the desperate British establishment, the picture he paints so beguilingly of a way out of the Islamist nightmare has made him into the rock star of the counter-terrorism circuit.
But closer scrutiny of what he actually says – and perhaps even more importantly, does not say – suggests the talented Mr Ramadan is an Islamist wolf in moderniser’s clothing. To the Islamic world he says one thing; to credulous Western audiences quite another in language that is slippery, opaque, manipulative and disingenuous…
Behind the honeyed words about reform and tolerance which have entranced his Western fan club, Ramadan has consistently lined himself up with the forces of obscurantism, intolerance, hatred and violence.
The first association he set up in 1994, the Muslim Men and Women of Switzerland, promoted confrontation and stirred up tension. He wrote the preface for a compilation of fatwas by the European Council for Fatwa whose president, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, has said human bomb operations in Israel and Iraq are a religious duty…
The desperation to embrace this most devious ‘reformer’ is gravely misplaced. Truly moderate Muslims are undermined and indeed endangered by Ramadan at every turn. Far from offering a way to modernise Islam, he proposes instead to Islamise modernity.
I was tempted to comment on Ramadan in the original piece, but left him out for fear of making the post too long. However, these articles do not surprise me all. Anyone who reads Standing’s blog and Harry’s Place will know that so-called “moderate” Muslims usually have a dark side to them. Ingat Bunglawala and the Muslim Council of Britain anybody?
As I railed in my post on religious moderates, the central tenants and texts of Islam simply do not invite moderation in any way shape or form. Anyone who argues that the Koran and the Hadith are compatible with 21st century secular society is simply playing “hide the ball” with people who are ignorant of their contents. Alternatively, they are as brainwashed as those head-scarfed Muslim women in the audience. It seems that the only way Islam can be “liberalised” is to abandon it altogether.
Finally, I was one of the people from around the world who emailed my support to Murray after seeing the debate. I received a charming email in reply thanking me for blog post.
Douglas Murray has a new fan in manicstreetpreacher.
I concluded my review of the Hitchens/ Fry debate on whether the Catholic Church was a force for good in the world by ever-so-slightly lamenting that they went after too a soft target and suggested that next time they should debate the same motion in respect of Islam.
I am pleased to report that I have had my wish granted in a manner of speaking and now post the edited highlights of a debate hosted by Intelligence Squared in association with BBC World News and the British Council: “Europe is failing its Muslims?” that took place at Cadogen Hall, London on 23 February 2010.
Speaking for the motion
Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Islamic Studies and Senior Research Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford and prominent Muslim commentator. (Homepage)
Petra Stienen, former Dutch diplomat who worked for more than ten years in the Arab world in the field of development cooperation, human rights, refugees and migration; currently works as a Senior Advisor in Social Development for BMC management consultancy.
The iTunes podcast can be downloaded here. The YouTube videos begin below.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Voting results
Before
After
Change
For:
327
249
+ 2%
Against:
320
346
+ 18%
Undecided:
218
84
– 20%
While the spectacle does not compare to Fry or Hitch in the oratory stakes, this is still a very entertaining and heated debate. I hope Intelligence Squared release the full tape sooner rather than later. For now, we’ll to make do with the full 1 hour 45 minute transcript which contains some very amusing exchanges.
The subtitle to this post may have given it away, but the standout in the debate was most definitely Douglas Murray. The man generates as much vitriol as praise and on this showing it’s not difficult to see why. His red-raw, no-holds-barred criticism of the core of Islam was as daring as anything by Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens. While he attracted boos and whistles from the Muslim audience members, the fact that the vote went his way after being slightly down in the initial vote shows that outspoken commentators like Murray say what many people think privately but are too afraid of offending religious sensibilities to make it known.
Murray’s write-up of the debate on his Telegraph blog says it all:
The fact that Flemming was my number two wasn’t publicised in the run-up to the debate because of the security threat around him. Just last October two men were arrested in Chicago for another alleged plot to murder him. And on the first day of this year an axe-wielding Somali Muslim broke into one of the cartoonist’s houses and attempted to decapitate him. So there were more police than usual and Flemming and I had more burly security men than we usually would for a discussion.
In a way this proved a lot of the argument that Flemming and I were making…
[O]ne of the most striking aspects of the evening was that the Muslims who turned out en masse, rallied by certain organisations, let themselves down appallingly. Continually cat-calling, jeering and hissing. They made a very bad impression.
What was most striking of all however was the level of complete denial. I pointed out that the reason Europeans often associate Islam with violence (as Ramadan complained) is that Islam is often associated with violence. I pointed out that it wasn’t Sikhs or Buddhists who flew the planes into the twin towers. This was welcomed by an extraordinary level of anger. I don’t know, maybe some of them thought it was Jews who did it.
A number of headscarf-covered women stood up to criticise what I had said about Islam’s despicable record on women’s rights and tried to claim that the Koran and Islam are just great for them. Levels of denial like this bode very ill.
The reason so many Muslims like to blame Western societies for all the ills of the world is that it means they never have to engage in self-criticism or even self-analysis. The result is that what problems do exist will not be dealt with. No good can ever come from lies, and as last night’s debate showed, a lot of young British Muslims are living lives based on the most deadly concoction of self-pity, wilful blindness and outright delusion.
Feel free to spare us of our delusions with more like this, Douglas.
UPDATE 10 MARCH 2010
Click here for further comment and reaction to the debate.
Wolpert’s main line of attack is there is absolutely no evidence for God and he doesn’t seem to have done very much since raising Jesus from the dead over two millennia ago. I have to agree with him here: people get all choked up every time a baby falls out of a window and is saved by the soft roof of a passing car – they remain oddly silent at all the ditches that are full of dead babies when no one did a thing. I thought that Cowburn’s objections that Wolpert and the rest of the world’s non-believers ought to believe what was written down 2,000 years ago and it is irrational and unreasonable to expect God to appear in to each and every one of us were very weak.
As Thomas Paine argued in The Age of Reason (First Part, Section 1 – 2), we are perfectly entitled to reject Moses’ account of meeting God atop of Mount Sinai (if such a place even exists; no geographer has ever been able to identify the biblical Sinai from the true geographical location!) then I am perfectly entitled to reject his account, because to me it is hearsay and not direct revelation:
No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.
It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication – after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.
When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so. The commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention.
When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it.
Cowburn should also read my disgracefully unscholarly piece about Richard Bauckham’s erm, “arguments” in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses for my full thoughts. That quote at the end from Sam Harris about how the evidence for Christianity would still not be good enough even if we had multiple contemporary eyewitness accounts empties all “scholarly” discourses about the reliability of oral tradition from direct observers and who-first-started-to-believe-what-when.
Of course, the atheist will always complain about the hiddenness of God. Why can’t God just reveal himself in the middle of the World Cup final when most of the humans on the planet will be watching and put the matter beyond doubt rather than appearing to stupefied illiterates in remote parts of Middle East in the pre-scientific past? If you can’t believe what you read last week in The Sunday Times, then fail to understand Cowburn’s scepticism when confronted with a collection of disjointed and contradictory documents from the ancient past.
And I’m still waiting for a convincing response to Christopher Hitchens’ 94,000 – 98,000 Year Wait Gambit as to the Almighty being rather tardy and allowing of a great deal of suffering and death before finally deciding to step in with an offer of salvation:
Perhaps Cowburn can now supply it.
Finally, I would recommend that Cowburn investigates the work of Victor Stenger, American cosmologist, atheist and author of Has Science Found God? and God, The Failed Hypothesis who debunks the idea that “whatever begins to exist has a cause” as the kind of common sense logic that tells us that the Earth is flat. Particles produced by nuclear decay come into existence without a cause. The universe was like a subatomic particle at the time of the Big Bang, so this example could well apply to the beginning of the universe.
Stenger also debunks the fine-tuning argument that carbon-based life in the universe cannot have come about naturally because it was too “improbable”. Firstly, virtually all every day events are “improbable” when you state them a priori and then crunch the numbers, such as a person’s very existence in this world. And secondly, what is the probability that this universe is the result of a divine design? It could be even lower than the naturalistic alternative. What data do we have in order to make the calculation? Not very much, it would appear.
I have recently posted my own analysis of Stenger’s debate against William Lane Craig at the University of Hawaii in 2003, as well as the transcript of Stenger’s three main speeches, which provides further comment and elaboration.
UPDATE: 26/12/2009
I emailed this piece to Lewis Wolpert and Russell Cowburn for their comments. “Lewy” replied saying that he liked the piece and hoped that I liked his theory about the origins of human religious behaviour. I realise now that the piece neglects somewhat Lewis’ book on religion! Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast is less a polemic against the untruths of and crimes of religious faith, but an explanation of why Homo sapiens practise religion if there is no God. I replied to Lewis that such theories come ten-a-penny, but his is as good as some and better than most.
Essentially, Lewis thinks that religious behaviour is an extension of humans’ interpretation of “cause and effect”, such as shaking a tree to make its fruit fall off and using tools to make other objects. The offshoot of this is that we see agency and patterns in practically everything, even whether no such invisible guiding hand (i.e. God!) exists. Lewis says that animals show the seeds of this behaviour to a very limited extent. They know that shaking a tree will get the fruit down, but aren’t intelligent enough to use tools.
However, a few days after posting my original piece I came across this article on the BBC News website which says that certain groups of chimpanzees in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea, Africa, are now using both stone and wooden cleavers, as well as stone anvils, to process Treculia fruits:
The apes are not simply cracking into the Treculia to get to otherwise unobtainable food, say researchers.
Instead, they are actively chopping up the food into more manageable portions.
I emailed the article to Lewis, saying that they’ll be worshipping the sun and sacrificing their cubs to ensure it rises every morning in no time! Lewis replied that the chimps are beginning to learn how to use tools, but it is very limited. Perhaps there won’t be any Blessed Virgin Marys and weeping statutes for a while after all.
For more on the evolution of religious faith, I would strongly recommend watching or listening to J Anderson “Andy” Thomson’s superb lecture at the American Atheists 2009 conference and Thomson and R Elizabeth Cornwell’s paper, “The Evolution of Religion”.
Finally, I have often been asked what evidence that I as an atheist would accept for the existence of God. Up until now, I have jumped in with both feet and then made a bit of a fool of myself. This is partly due to theists always being able to re-invent their God to conform to the empirical data and then accusing me of merely citing reasons not to believe in God.
However, I thought that Lewis’ example of having his departed wife returned to him was a wonderfully moving example of possible evidence for the supernatural that would make a sceptic reassess his or her non-belief. While I have not lost anyone close to me up to now in my life, I might just use that one in future when I am asked the question again.
I am currently drafting an epic post reviewing all of Hitchens’ public debates available to see/hear on the Internet and have finally come across the full version of this debate.
It looks as though Hitch was debating students from the University of Toronto (as opposed to other prominent writers and public commentators) and was given twice as much speaking time as his opponents (!).
Enjoy.
Original post continues…
Sad as it sounds; I must have watched this speech about 200 times and counting! An absolutely brilliant piece of rhetoric; it changed at a stroke my views on hate speech, Holocaust denial laws and the value of being a misfit. I listen to it when I’m angry at the world and feel like I’m conforming too much. I even typed out the transcript. Voilà:
The transcript of a speech by Christopher Hitchens from a debate at Hart House, University of Toronto, 15 November 2006. “Be It Resolved: Freedom of Speech Includes the Freedom to Hate.” Hitchens argued the affirmative position.
FIRE!!! Fire… fire… fire. Now you’ve heard it. Not shouted in a crowded theatre, admittedly, as I realise I seem now to have shouted it in the Hogwarts dining room. But the point is made. Everyone knows the fatuous verdict of the greatly over-praised Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who, asked for an actual example of when it would be proper to limit speech or define it as an action, gave that of shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre.
It’s very often forgotten what he was doing in that case was sending to prison a group of Yiddish-speaking socialists, whose literature was printed in a language most Americans couldn’t read, opposing President Wilson’s participation in the First World War and the dragging of the United States into this sanguinary conflict, which the Yiddish-speaking socialists had fled from Russia to escape.
In fact, it could be just as plausibly argued that the Yiddish-speaking socialists, who were jailed by the excellent and over-praised Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, were the real fire fighters, were the ones shouting “fire” when there really was fire in a very crowded theatre indeed.
And who is to decide? Well, keep that question if you would – ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, I hope I may say comrades and friends – before your minds.
I exempt myself from the speaker’s kind offer of protection that was so generously proffered at the opening of this evening. Anyone who wants to say anything abusive about or to me is quite free to do so, and welcome in fact, at their own risk.
But before they do that they must have taken, as I’m sure we all should, a short refresher course in the classic texts on this matter. Which are John Milton’s Areopagitica; “Areopagitica” being the great hill of Athens for discussion and free expression. Thomas Paine’s introduction to The Age of Reason. And I would say John Stuart Mill’s essay “On Liberty”, in which it is variously said – I’ll be very daring and summarise all three of these great gentlemen of the great tradition of, especially, English liberty, in one go.
What they say is it’s not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard, it is the right of everyone in the audience to listen, and to hear. And every time you silence somebody, you make yourself a prisoner of your own action because you deny yourself the right to hear something. In other words, your own right to hear and be exposed is as much involved in all these cases as is the right of the other to voice his or her view.
Indeed, as John Stuart Mill said, if all in society were agreed on the truth and beauty and value of one proposition, all except one person, it would be most important – in fact it would become even more important – that that one heretic be heard, because we would still benefit from his perhaps outrageous or appalling view.
In more modern times this has been put, I think best, by a personal heroine of mine, Rosa Luxembourg, who said freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently.
My great friend John O’ Sullivan, former editor of the National Review, and I think probably my most conservative and reactionary Catholic friend, once said – it’s a tiny thought experiment – he says, if you hear the Pope saying he believes in God, you think, well, the Pope’s doing his job again today. If you hear the Pope saying he’s really begun to doubt the existence of God, you begin to think he might be on to something.
Well, if everybody in North America is forced to attend, at school, training in sensitivity on Holocaust awareness and is taught to study the Final Solution, about which nothing was actually done by this country, or North America, or by the United Kingdom while it was going on, but let’s say as if in compensation for that everyone is made to swallow an official and unalterable story of it now, and it’s taught as the great moral exemplar, the moral equivalent of the morally lacking elements of the Second World War, a way of distilling our uneasy conscience about that combat.
If that’s the case with everybody, as it more or less is, and one person gets up and says, “You know what, this Holocaust, I’m not sure it even happened. In fact, I’m pretty certain it didn’t. Indeed, I begin to wonder if the only thing is that the Jews brought a little bit of violence on themselves.” That person doesn’t just have a right to speak, that person’s right to speak must be given extra protection. Because what he has to say must have taken him some effort to come up with, might contain a grain of historical truth, might in any case get people to think about why do they know what they already think they know. How do I know that I know this, except that I’ve always been taught this and never heard anything else?
It’s always worth establishing first principles. It’s always worth saying what would you do if you met a Flat Earth Society member? Come to think of it, how can I prove the Earth is round? Am I sure about the theory of evolution? I know it’s supposed to be true. Here’s someone who says there’s no such thing; it’s all intelligent design. How sure am I of my own views? Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you’re bound to be OK, because you’re in the safely moral majority.
One of the proudest moments of my life, that’s to say, in the recent past, has been defending the British historian, David Irving, who is now in prison in Austria for nothing more than the potential of uttering an unwelcome thought on Austrian soil. He didn’t actually say anything in Austria. He wasn’t even accused of saying anything. He was accused of perhaps planning to say something that violated an Austrian law that says only one version of the history of the Second World War may be taught in our brave little Tyrolean republic.
The republic that gave us Kurt Waldheim as Secretary General of the United Nations, a man wanted in several countries for war crimes. You know the country that has Jörg Haider, the leader of its own fascist party, in the cabinet that sent David Irving to jail.
You know the two things that have made Austria famous, given it its reputation by any chance? Just while I’ve got you. I hope there are some Austrians here to be upset by it. Well, a pity if not, but the two great achievements of Austria are to have convinced the world that Hitler was German and that Beethoven was Viennese.
Now to this proud record they can add, they have the courage finally to face their past and lock up a British historian who has committed no crime except that of thought in writing. And that’s a scandal. And I can’t find a seconder usually when I propose this, but I don’t care. I don’t need a seconder. My own opinion is enough for me and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, any where, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.
Now, I don’t know how many of you, don’t feel you’re grown-up enough to decide for yourselves and think you need to be protected from David Irving’s edition of the Goebbels Diaries for example, out of which I learned more about the Third Reich than I had from studying Hugh Trevor-Roper and A J P Taylor combined when I was at Oxford. But for those of you who do, I’d recommend another short course of revision.
Go again and see, not just the film and the play, but read the text of Robert Bolt’s wonderful play, A Man for All Seasons – some of you most have seen it. Where Sir Thomas More decides that he would rather die than lie or betray his faith. And at one moment More is arguing with the particularly vicious witch-hunting prosecutor; a servant of the king and a hungry and ambitious man.
And More says to this man, “You’d break the law to punish the devil, wouldn’t you?”
And the prosecutor, the witch-hunter, says, “Break it?” he said, “I’d cut down every law in England if I could do that, if I could capture him!”
And More says, “Yes you would, wouldn’t you? And then when you’d cornered the devil and the devil turned round to meet you, where would you run for protection, all the laws of England having been cut down and flattened? Who would protect you then?”
Bear in mind, ladies and gentleman, that every time you violate – or propose to violate – the right to free speech of someone else, you in potentia, you’re making a rod for your own back. Because the other question raised by Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes is simply this: who’s going to decide, to whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful, or who is the harmful speaker? Or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom you’re going to award the task of being the censor?
Isn’t a famous old story that the man who has to read all the pornography, in order to decide what’s fit to be passed and what is fit not to be, is the man most likely to become debauched?
Did you hear any speaker in the opposition to this motion – eloquent as one of them was – to whom you would delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read? To whom you would give the job of deciding for you? Relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear? Do you know any one? Hands up. Do you know any one to whom you’d give this job? Does anyone have a nominee?
You mean there is no one in Canada good enough to decide what I can read? Or hear? I had no idea… But there’s a law that says there must be such a person – or there’s a sub-section of some piddling law – that says it. Well the hell with that law then. It’s inviting you to be liars and hypocrites and to deny what you evidently know already.
About the censorious instinct: we basically know already what we need to know, and we’ve known it for a long time, it comes from an old story about another great Englishman – sorry to sound particular about that this evening – Dr Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer, complier of the first great dictionary of the English language. When it was complete, Dr Johnson was waited upon by various delegations of people to congratulate him. Of the nobility, of equality, of the Commons, of the Lords and also by a delegation of respectable ladies of London who attended on him in his Fleet Street lodgings and congratulated him.
“Dr Johnson,” they said, “We are delighted to find that you’ve not included any indecent or obscene words in your dictionary.”
“Ladies,” said Dr Johnson, “I congratulate you on being able to look them up.”
Anyone who can understand that joke – and I’m pleased to see that about 10 per cent of you can! – gets the point about censorship, especially “prior restraint” as it’s known in the United States, where it’s banned by the First Amendment to the Constitution. It may not be determined in advance what words are apt or inapt. No one has the knowledge that would be required to make that call and – more to the point – one has to suspect the motives of those who do so. In particular, the motives of those who are determined to be offended, of those who will go through a treasure house of English – like Dr Johnson’s first lexicon – in search of filthy words to satisfy themselves and some instinct about which I dare not speculate…
Now, I am absolutely convinced that the main source of hatred in the world is religion, and organised religion. Absolutely convinced of it. And I am glad that you applaud; because it’s a very great problem for those who oppose this motion isn’t it? How are they going to ban religion? How are they going to stop the expression of religious loathing, hatred and bigotry?
I speak as someone who is a very regular target of this, and not just in rhetorical form. I have been the target of many death threats. I know within a short distance of where I am currently living in Washington, I can name two or three people whose names you probably know who can’t go anywhere now without a security detail because of the criticisms they’ve made of one monotheism in particular. And this is in the capital city of the United States.
So I know what I’m talking about, and I also have to notice that the sort of people who ring me up and say they know where my children go to school, and they certainly know what my home number is and where I live, and what they are going to do to them and to my wife and to me, and who I have to take seriously because they already have done it to people I know, are just the people who are going to seek the protection of the hate speech law, if I say what I think about their religion, which I’m now going to do.
Because I don’t have any what you might call “ethnic bias”, I have no grudge of that sort, I can rub along with pretty much anyone of any, as it were, origin or sexual orientation, or language group – except people from Yorkshire of course, who are completely untakable – and I’m beginning to resent the confusion that’s being imposed on us now – and there was some of it this evening – between religious belief, blasphemy, ethnicity, profanity and what one might call “multicultural etiquette”.
It’s quite common now for people now to use the expression – for example – “anti-Islamic racism”, as if an attack on a religion was an attack on an ethnic group. The word “Islamophobia” in fact is beginning to acquire the opprobrium that was once reserved for racial prejudice. This is a subtle and very nasty insinuation that needs to be met head on.
Who said, “What if Falwell says he hates fags? What if people act upon that?” The Bible says you have to hate fags. If Falwell says he is saying it because the Bible says so, he’s right. Yes, it might make people go out and use violence. What are you going to do about that? You’re up against a group of people who will say, “You put your hands on our Bible and we’ll call the hate speech police.” Now what are you going to do when you’ve dug that trap for yourself?
Somebody said that anti-Semitism and Kristallnacht in Germany was the result of ten years of Jew-baiting. Ten years?! You must be joking! It’s the result of 2,000 years of Christianity, based on one verse of one chapter of St John’s Gospel, which led to a pogrom after every Easter sermon every year for hundreds of years; because it claims that the Jews demanded the blood of Christ be on the heads of themselves and all their children to the remotest generation. That’s the warrant and license for, and incitement to, anti-Jewish pogroms. What are you going to do about that? Where is your piddling sub-section now?! Does it say St John’s Gospel must be censored?!
Do I, who have read Freud and know what the future of an illusion really is and know that religious belief is ineradicable as long as we remain a stupid, poorly evolved mammalian species, think that some Canadian law is going to solve this problem? Please!
No our problem is this: our prefrontal lobes are too small. And our adrenaline glands are too big. And our thumb-finger opposition isn’t all that it might be. And we’re afraid of the dark, and we’re afraid to die, and we believe in the truths of holy books that are so stupid and so fabricated that a child can – and all children do, as you can tell by their questions – actually see through them. And I think it should be – religion – treated with ridicule, and hatred, and contempt. And I claim that right.
Now let’s not dance around, not all monotheisms are exactly the same – at the moment. They’re all based on the same illusion, they’re all plagiarisms of each other, but there’s one in particular that at the moment is proposing a serious menace not just to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but to quite a lot of other freedoms too. And this is the religion that exhibits the horrible trio of self-hatred, self-righteousness and self-pity. I’m talking about militant Islam.
Globally, it’s a gigantic power. Globally, it’s a gigantic power. It controls an enormous amount of oil wealth, several large countries and states with an enormous fortune, it’s pumping the ideology of Wahhabism and Salafism around the world, poisoning societies where it goes, ruining the minds of children, stultifying the young in its madrases, training people in violence, making a cult of death and suicide and murder. That’s what it does globally, it’s quite strong.
In our society it poses as a cringing minority, whose faith you might offend, which deserves all the protection that a small and vulnerable group might need.
Now, it makes quite large claims for itself, doesn’t it? It says it’s the final revelation. It says that god spoke to one illiterate businessman in the Arabian Peninsula three times through an archangel, and the resulting material – which as you can see when you read it – is largely plagiarised from the Old and the New Testament. Almost all of it actually plagiarised – ineptly – from the Old and the New Testament, is to be accepted as a divine revelation and as the final and unalterable one and those who do not accept this revelation are fit to be treated as cattle, infidels, potential chattel, slaves and victims.
Well I tell you what; I don’t think Mohammad ever heard those voices. I don’t believe it. And the likelihood that I’m right, as opposed to the likelihood that a businessman who couldn’t read, had bits of the Old and New Testament re-dictated to him by an archangel, I think puts me much more near the position of being objectively correct.
But who is the one under threat? The person who promulgates this and says “I’d better listen because if I don’t I’m in danger”, or me who says “No, I think this is so silly you could even publish a cartoon about it”?
And up go the placards and up go the yells and the howls and the screams, “Behead those…” This is in London, this is in Toronto, this is in New York. It’s right in our midst now. “Behead those…” “Behead those who cartoon Islam”.
Do they get arrested for hate speech? No. Might I get in trouble for saying what I’ve just said about the prophet Mohammad? Yes, I might. Where are your priorities ladies and gentlemen? You’re giving away what’s most precious in your own society, and you’re giving it away without a fight and you’re even praising the people who want to deny you the right to resist it. Shame on you while you do this. Make the best use of the time you’ve got left. This is really serious.
Now, if you look anywhere you like. Because we had invocations of a rather drivelling and sickly kind tonight of our sympathy – what about the poor fags? What about the poor Jews, the wretched women who can’t take the abuse and the slaves and their descendants and the tribes who didn’t make it, and were told that land was forfeit?
Look anywhere you like for the warrant for slavery, for the subjection of women as chattel, for the burning and flogging of homosexuals, for ethnic cleansing, for anti-Semitism, for all of this, you look no further than a famous book that’s on every pulpit in this city, and in every synagogue and in every mosque.
And then just see whether you can square the fact that the force of the main source of hatred is also the main caller for censorship. And when you’ve realised that you’re therefore this evening being faced with a gigantic false antithesis, I hope that still won’t stop you from giving the motion before you the resounding endorsement that it deserves. Thanks awfully.
manicstreetpreacher 