Not so long ago I accepted a post for teaching law at one of Britain’s prestigious Universities. On my first hour of arriving I was taken in to meet the Head of Department.
I was told that a student had made a complaint about my appointment, and that the complaint was being investigated. The complaint related to some things I had said in a recent by-election.
I was a little taken aback, not so much because there was a complaint but because it warranted an investigation that would unnecessarily use up taxpayers’ money.
This was also a concern from the perspective of the important right to freedom of speech. We were here, after all, talking about matters spoken during an election campaign, which ought not in a democracy, be subject to censure.
What had come out in the by-election was my statement that Islam was ‘morally flawed and degenerate in its treatment of women’.
This was supported by the following statement of facts: that Sharia courts now operate in the UK where a woman’s evidence is worth significantly less than a man’s and where women are not afforded the right to speak in divorce proceedings.
It was also highlighted that the Equality and Human Rights Commission had pointed out that a disproportionate number of Muslim women were unemployed (75%) and it was not right that they were missing out on employment opportunities due to the likely rigidly subservient role women play in Islamic, and also other ethnic minority cultures.
This was not in keeping with the strong movement towards female equality in this country going back to Wollstonecraft, and more recently, Emmeline Pankhurst. The latter fought hard to get women the right to vote.
Sharia courts were desired by immigrants in the UK, due to mass immigration without assimilation. Some immigrants had no need or desire to assimilate, and instead wanted what should be unacceptable, their own laws and culture to govern them.
However it was accepted, and even promoted, by the Labour party as a part of the grand multicultural project for a diverse (i.e. divided) Britain.
Last year a British freedom of speech society that I chaired (then called the ‘Birkenhead Society'; now called ‘Discourse UK’) overturned the Labour Home Secretary Jacqui’ Smith’s Ban on the Dutch MP Geert Wilders speaking in Parliament on the subject of multiculturalism and Islam.
I was shocked that the Labour Government was willing to ban speech in Parliament (reasoned debate being a clear expression, and an embodiment, of the best of British culture) in order to preserve multiculturalism and alien cultures through political correctness.
Fearing that we were going down the road of Medieval censorship (I had recently read that Elizabeth I used to cut the ears of playwrights who poked fun at her), we desperately sought to raise funds to litigate against the Home Secretary.
Fortunately the judges were not as daftly and lightly dismissive of freedom of speech as the Labour government had been and the ban from discourse in Parliament was removed.
However what Geert Wilders’s ban by Labour’s Jaqui Smith demonstrates is that multiculturalism has been used, and still is, by governments to censor discussion of important social issues within immigrant groups.
These issues include the treatment of women, teaching antisemitism, and physically assaulting homosexuals.
Of greater concern now regarding censure is the recently created ‘All-Party Parliamentary Committee on Islamophobia’.
This is exactly what it sounds like. A Soviet style panel of censorship, promoting political correctness built on the sensitivities of a few immigrant minorities.
The word ‘Islamophobia’ is not just broad and ambiguous; the phrase ‘phobia’ is clearly suggestive of censuring thought in the Orwellian sense.
All in all the Committee is a classic, worrying, multicultural gift that seeks to curtail existing and traditional liberties to accommodate alien cultures sensitivities through political correctness.
Furthermore, it aids some alien cultures in using their subjective sensitivities to create a more illiberal land through censorship and curtailment of freedom of speech.
What concerns me most of all about this ‘Islamophobia Committee’, is that, due to political correctness, the debate as to the mistreatment of women and gays in amongst some ethnic groups could be censored.
Neither the existence of this daft committee, nor the censoring of discussion about the impact of immigration our culture, can be justifiable. It merely aids Labour’s grand multicultural project of destroying British culture.
We must never cower into giving away our liberties, such as freedom of speech, by political correctness brought about by the few that seek to be sensitive to discussion, whether immigrants or not.