Western values both in evidence and in decline in today’s UK [updated]

 

“Political correctness is fascism
pretending to be manners.”
~ George Carlin

Good law should allow free speech including the display of religious symbols. It should disallow theocracy, sharia and incitement to murder. This is what western values look like in this context

What does this look like in practice? This week in Britain offers two ideal instances of what to do, and what not to do.

Here’s what to do:

"Choudary and his co-defendant, Mohammed Rahman, 33, told their supporters to obey Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Isis leader, who is also known as a caliph, and travel to Syria to support Islamic State or “the caliphate”, the court heard. They were convicted in July but details of the trial, including the verdict, could not be reported until now."

Choudary and his co-defendant were inciting and coordinating murder, on the internet and in person. Their arrest of these thugs is long overdue.

And here’s what not to do:

Scotland Yard is to set up a £1.7m “troll-hunting” unit to target online hate crime, it has emerged… “By establishing this unit, we are sending a strong message to those who use online forums to spread hate that their actions will not be tolerated. The Metropolitan police service continues to have a zero-tolerance approach to all forms of hate crime. The Met encourages all victims of hate crime to report any incident to the police and will make every effort to hold offenders to account and bring them to justice.”

Actually, by establishing this unit they are sending a strong message that Twitterers, Facebookers, bloggers et al must conform to whatever views the authorities command them to conform to – that “hate” against scum like Choudary is not wrong, but illegal.

“Pure rants, very childish [people online] are increasingly criminalised,” explained Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, on BBC Radio 4 this morning, “and as a result of that the police is becoming more and more involved in controlling our morality.”

UK law already outlaws internet activity “causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another.” Today’s announcement gives that vile law more teeth. This is the very opposite of the western values we should be defending. It is very literally fascism pretending to be manners.

If it means anything at all, free speech includes the freedom to offend. It’s the speech everyone disagrees with that needs the legal protection. Defending speech we agree with is easy; defending opinions we disagree with is hard.

Harder still is getting back free speech when it’s been taken away. Britain is now well down that treacherous slope.

UPDATE: Many signs of western weakness made the most of by this piece of murdering shit. Because murdering Sharia merchants always make the most of a vacuum …

• Choudhary was allowed to claim over £150,000 a year in welfare while inspiring at least 100 British jihadis, ISIS fighters the murderers of drummer Lee Rigby.
• To “raise viewer numbers,” a complaisant media made this piece of shit their “go to” person for every story on extremism, radicalisation, or Islam. “This not only elevated him in the eyes of some sympathisers, it lionised him in the minds of sympathisers who were overseas who saw him as some form of Muhajideen (or holy warrior), ‘sitting in the land of the disbeliever and standing firm.’ What it did for community relations, was simply to toxify perceptions of wider  British Muslim communities many of whom called for his arrest and conviction many years ago.”
• And the British Muslim who has been warning the UK for years about Choudhary and his sick anti-western propaganda says the tale has a very important moral:

Anjem Choudhary’s extremist freefall mirrors what happened to so many within Britain’s Muslim communities throughout the Nineties. Choudhary’s story highlights the dangers of theocratic Islamism morphing into violent jihadism, because that cancer was left unchecked to spread within our communities for so long.
    Once legitimacy rests on who is deemed a“credible” or “authentic” Muslim, the conversation can only slide downhill. It was this “not Muslim enough” game within our communities that Anjem was destined to win. By definition, such a game is stacked in favour of the fanatic. As a nation, we came to tolerate such incredible intolerance. Too many on the left simply assumed Islamism was “Muslim culture, so let’s enjoy it.” Too many on the right said “it’s Muslim culture, let’s keep it at arm’s length,” while Islamists told Muslims “this is your culture, you have no choice but to follow it.” Very few were actively engaged in challenging Islamism, as they would racism or antisemitism.
    Mass calls for a caliphate followed by a jihadist murder on London’s streets in 1995 should have acted as a clear warning of the Isis brutality that was set to befall us all. If only there had been civil society resistance against Islamism back when I was 17. Perhaps we would not have lost an entire generation to those who laid the groundwork for Isis to reach our continent.

• And a message from Thomas Sowell for the commentariat to ponder:

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