Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?. Mick Hume
for many in the supposedly liberal-minded West, who also want to rein in ‘unfettered satire and free speech’. No sooner had they got the niceties of paying respects to the dead out of the way than they embarked on wholesale free-speech fraud.
There were loud accusations of hypocrisy after the appearance of autocratic governments from the Middle East and Africa at the Paris ‘Je Suis Charlie’ demo. As one US professor at George Washington University tweeted, ‘Glad so many world leaders could take time off jailing and torturing journalists and dissidents to march for free expression in France.’4
Yet double standards flourished much closer to home.
The French authorities led the way, responding to the murderous assault on free speech in their capital by ordering a crackdown – on those whose speech they found offensive. The Justice Ministry sent a letter to all French prosecutors and judges ‘urging more aggressive tactics’ against suspected hate speech and those accused of defending terrorism. A week after the Charlie Hebdo attack, more than fifty people had been arrested for speech crimes.
Among those scooped up was the notorious anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, arrested as an alleged ‘apologist for terrorism’ after he posted on Facebook that: ‘Tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly’ – a fusion of ‘Je Suis Charlie’ with the name of the assassin in the kosher supermarket, Amedy Coulibaly. Whether you consider that an ironic joke or an attempted justification for violence, it was only words – and only one word, ‘Coulibaly’, made it controversial. Yet that word could have cost Dieudonné up to seven years in prison. In fact he was convicted of ‘condoning terrorism’ and given a two-month suspended jail sentence. The French authorities thus spelled out their version of standing up for free speech: they would fight to the last for the people’s right to say things that government and judges approved of.
Across the Channel, the free-speech fraudsters turned out in force in the UK. Some overcooked their disdain for Charlie Hebdo: the European editor of the Financial Times sparked a backlash by writing a column which accused the ‘stupid’ satirical rag of ‘editorial foolishness’.5 In an apparently irony-free move, the Financial Times then felt obliged to ‘update’ (meaning censor) his column for paying too little heed to Charlie Hebdo’s right to freedom of expression.
At least he was trying to be honest about it. If anything, it was more objectionable to witness the display of double standards from UK politicians and liberals who have led the campaigns to criminalise ‘offensive’ speech and sanitise the scurrilous, dirt-digging British tabloid press in recent years, yet now expected us to believe that they are freedom fighters for the satirical and scandal-mongering French press’s right to offend.
Straight after Charlie Hebdo, Conservative prime minister David Cameron told parliament that ‘we stand squarely for free speech and democracy’. In later interviews Cameron even said that ‘in a free society there is a right to cause offence’. This was the same UK prime minister whose government was presiding over a state where people were being arrested and jailed for posting unpleasant jokes and messages online or singing naughty songs at football grounds, and whose justice secretary had just pledged to quadruple prison sentences for offensive internet ‘trolls’ found guilty of speech crimes.
Cameron also insisted after Charlie Hebdo that as a politician ‘my job is not to tell newspapers and magazines what to publish or what not to publish’. That would be the same prime minister who in July 2011 set up, with the support of all party leaders, the Leveson Inquiry not merely to probe the phone-hacking scandal but to cleanse the entire ‘culture, ethics and practices’ of the offensive UK tabloid press and propose a new system to tame it. On that occasion Cameron had a very different message for parliament about what he could tell the press to do, asserting that: ‘It is vital that a free press can tell truth to power … it is equally important that those in power can tell truth to the press.’6 One can imagine what the increasingly offence-sensitive British authorities would have said to any Charlie-type magazine whose front covers had dared to mock Muhammad in the UK.
On the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Labour Party leader Ed Miliband stood with prime minister Cameron in the House of Commons and vowed to resist all attacks on ‘our democratic way of life and freedom of speech’. Away from the cameras, Miliband’s Labour team was busy finalising plans to create an official ‘blacklist’ of those convicted of speech offences online that would warn prospective employers not to hire them – the sort of thought-policing measure some might think has more in common with McCarthyism and witch-hunts than democracy and freedom.7
A month after parliament had united in support of Charlie, an all-party committee of UK MPs went further still down that slippery slope and called for persistent online ‘hate speech’ offenders to be issued with ‘internet ASBOs [Anti-Social Behaviour Orders]’ that would ban them from Facebook and Twitter, a punishment currently reserved for convicted sex offenders. It is not too hard to imagine the name of the allegedly racist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, sexist and homophobic Charlie Hebdo being among those nominated for any such state hit-list of ‘haters’ to be denied free speech.8
And let us not leave out Harriet Harman, deputy Labour leader and the party’s self-styled champion of press freedom. In a statement after the Paris murders Harman expressed her concern that ‘this crime will cause a chilling effect and undermine free speech’. She declared that ‘free speech is a basic human right for every individual and no democracy can function without freedom of the press’, that the ‘right to satirise, to lampoon and to criticise is a freedom which we must celebrate and defend’, and pledged ‘to take all the steps necessary to assure our journalists and media that we will do everything we can to defend that right of free speech’.9 Strong and admirable words. A few weeks later, however, Harman was back to using slightly less freedom-loving words when she appeared at a Hacked Off rally in Westminster to warn those same journalists and the media that Labour was ‘absolutely committed’ to implementing Lord Justice Leveson’s proposals for state-back regulation of the UK press and that, if elected, a Labour government would ‘follow through on Leveson’ with laws to bring a free press to heel. As well as Harman’s promise/threat, that rally featured former funnyman John Cleese of Monty Python fame comparing journalists opposed to state-backed regulation to murderers, who would also ‘like to regulate themselves’. ‘The murderers would make a very good case,’ said Cleese. ‘They’d say we murdered a lot of people, we know people who have murdered people. We really are best qualified to regulate …’ No doubt the surviving satirical journalists at Charlie Hebdo would have found the comparison hilarious.10
Alongside the political campaign to tame the UK press, the police and prosecutors have been conducting their own war on the tabloids. British police chiefs stood outside Scotland Yard in solidarity with the officers and journalists killed in Paris. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Metropolitan Police had arrested more than sixty tabloid journalists in what amounts to a three-year witch-hunt.
Much of the cultural elite in the UK wrestled with its liberal conscience in response to Charlie Hebdo, and lost. The novelist Will Self wrote that the murderers were ‘evil’ (while insisting that we all share their ‘murderous, animal instincts’). Yet Self could not stop himself also complaining about how ‘our society makes a fetish of “the right to free speech” without ever questioning what sort of responsibilities are implied by this right’, as if there was something perverse about extending ‘free speech’ to irresponsible cartoonists.11 Higher still in the literary stratosphere, the London Review of Books, a self-proclaimed champion of artistic expression, could barely disguise its lack of empathy with the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. A ‘deeply disappointed’ reader wrote to ask why the