Freedom of speech

It seems that  there is a growing trend, especially in the UK, that is trying to hinder vigorous intellectual debate in certain sensitive areas.  We are becoming as a nations increasingly mealy-mouthed.  The idea of Hate Crime has  been  put on the statute book.  This would ban nearly all serious critical debate on cultures and religion.  Our country. which  has always prided itself on its insistence that there should be freedom of expression, is lurching in a strange direction. 
Today, for example, a conservative, who  gets into a fierce debate with a revolutionary Marxist and the latter takes an offence to the remarks made, can be prosecuted.  Recently two hoteliers were taken to court in Liverpool as a result of an argument they had with a Muslim guest.  Fortunately the case was thrown out by the judge.  If this law was stringently applied to the letter then Prime Minister's Question Time would undoubtedly be banned! 
George Orwell in his book Nineteen Eighty Four was uncannily prescient.  The only thing he got wrong was the timing. He was about 25 years too early.  He mentions Thought Crime and an artificial language called Newspeak.  In the dictatorship he described, the ability to think and to speak unacceptable thoughts was thoroughly crushed.  He makes the remark that Newspeak, the artificial language created by the tyrant, was the only language in the world that has a shrinking vocabulary.  All dangerous words would be excised from the dictionary.  
I have been surprised  by the freedom that Americans seem to enjoy in this area. Recently I watched a series of videos, originally given in public, made  by a rabbi concerning the chaotic situation in the Middle East.  As I sat there I thought, this guy would never get away with giving these lectures in a public arena in the UK  Then I saw a very funny spoof debate about Islamic terrorism that would be totally banned over here.


In Holland a fascinating event took place recently.  The controversial politician Gert Wilders, who has been a thorn in the side of the liberal establishment for his anti-Islam stance,  has been taken to court, charged with inciting religious hatred.  But the whole thing has misfired.  Such is the public interest in the case that the trial has been given lots of time on TV.  His defence was very powerfully and eloquently put.  He said that for years now the Christian religion has been mocked and traduced and blasphemed in the media.  Jesus has been portrayed as a homosexual, a pop-star, as the lover of Mary Magdalene and even as a baby in nappies.  Yet no hue and cry has been made and, even more significantly, no one has been taken to court.  Wilders went on to say that he had made a short video on the inherent violence of the quran and he finds  himself in court. 
Such was the public interest and sympathy in the case, the authorities seemed to have panicked and made the surprising move of stopping it.  It will be resumed after the election, they say.


The following quotation was written by Winston Churchill in one of his earlier books.  No newspaper or magazine or publisher would touch it today.

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine - must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.”