Michael Bloomfield

The speech that got Robert Spencer banned from the UK

From Spiked by Patrick Hayes:

Message to UK liberals: if you’re campaigning to bar two right-wing US bloggers from Britain, you’re no liberal.

Earlier this year, the UK anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate (HNH) adopted a refreshing new stance (commended by spiked): it declared that ‘No Platform’---the practice of denying people on the far right a public platform to express themselves---was ‘outdated’. When it comes to combating far-right groups, said HNH, it’s better to do it through ‘argument’ and to ‘expose their ideas’.

Yet now, HNH has reverted to its earlier ‘No Platform’ stance: it has been at the forefront of a campaign calling on UK home secretary Theresa May to bar Geller and Spencer---who write the Atlas Shrugs and Jihad Watch blogs, and who were behind a New York subway ad campaign implying Muslims are ‘savages’---from entering Britain. The pair are due to speak at an EDL rally in Woolwich, scene of the recent ‘jihadist’ knife attack, on Saturday.

In a petition to May, signed by 2,000 supporters in the first 24 hours alone, HNH writes a sentence that must surely be a shoo-in for Doublespeak of the Year: ‘We believe in freedom of speech and the rights of people to hold and express different views. However, in a democracy there have to be limits on people abusing these freedoms to incite hatred, and we believe that Geller and Spencer are seeking to do just that.’

In the strange minds of HNH campaigners, it seems you can believe in free speech yet lobby to ban individuals from entering your country to speak freely. You can believe in the right of people to hold and express different views, except views you personally dislike. And you can do all this in the name of democracy, presumably because the UK public itself, the demos, is so volatile and manipulable that it has to be sheltered from the poisonous views of Geller and Spencer...

Rob's comment:
British "progressives" show the same reading disorder as San Francisco progs when they condemned the Geller/Spencer ads on Muni buses:

Geller and Spencer are the most prominent anti-Muslim activists in the United States and their organisation, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, is widely considered a hate organisation. It recently placed adverts on the transport systems of several cities calling Muslims “savages.”

The ad (below) of course didn't call all Muslims "savages," just jihadists:

Below is the reality Spencer is addressing:

For more on free speech and the UK, go to Spencer's Jihad Watch.