All over the shop

Brendan O'Neill has written one of the most ridiculous blogs I've read in some time on today's Guardian Comment is Free site.

As a way of background, Brendan is a member of the deeply suspect Living Marxism sect details of which can be found here, here and here.

Brendan today writes about the cancellation of a concert in Brighton, UK due to be performed by the Jamaican reggae artist Buju Banton. This has given Brendan an excuse, like he ever needs one, to rant and rave against the liberal left which he claims is hypocritical and racist.

The reason the gig was cancelled was because of protests from gay rights groups about the hateful anti-gay lyrics that are contained in Banton's work (and in many songs performed by Jamaican performers.) These aren't just anti-gay but actually encourage people to go out and harm homosexuals. Banton himself was charged in 2005 with gay bashing (and acquitted after a botched police investigation).

Now, we can have a debate about how far free speech should be extended and whether people like Banton have a right to air such views in a public concert. That's a fine debate to have.

But Brendan, being Brendan, can't help using the whole episode as an excuse to attack the liberal left. According to him the real reason white liberal (for some reason he associates liberalism with being white) people wish to see these performances stop is because they are racist. They believe that young black music fans are 'a potentially excitable horde whose access to inflammatory material must be restricted by the authorities.'

It is interesting to see how Brendan is injecting a racial element to this when he has absolutely no evidence at all to suggest it is true - all that is guiding him is his pathological hatred of the liberal left. In fact I think this theory exposes his own ingrained prejudices towards black people. This has nothing to do with the fact that the reggae scene is 'black', if these songs were bought by exclusively white people there would still be a valid argument made by the 'liberal left' against them.

The really ridiculous thing about his article though is that he tries to draw a parallel between the left's attempt to clamp down on anti-gay performers and their opposition to religious hatred laws. The two things though are not comparable and Brendan knows it full well. He states that liberals like Rowan Atkinson and Joan Bakewell were against the religious hatred laws - and yes they were. They were concerned, rightly in my opinion, that the law would prevent people from insulting someone's religious beliefs or mocking them. None of the terms in the shoddy bill were defined and so it had the real potential to end free religious debate in the UK. There are a couple of important points to make here:

1) There is no contradiction at all between wanting to prevent a law that may have criminalised valid criticism and comic parody of religion and wanting to clamp down on entertainers that espouse the murder of gays. If a singer produced songs that advocated the killing of Muslims then I somehow doubt that the 'liberal left' would be rallying to their defence. The point is that it's fine for people to criticize homosexuals but when they start to incite hatred and violence towards them it really is on a different level. The liberal argument against the Religious Hatred bill wasn't that it sought to criminalize inciting hatred but because it was an attempt to prevent critical discourse about religious belief. The Religious Hatred bill sought to criminalize 'insulting' religion - the term 'insulting' was left undefined. The liberal objectors to the bill did make clear that if this was removed and the bill was more tightly drafted to just cover incitement to hatred and violence against religious people then this would have been acceptable. Banton has expressed the desire to douse gays in acid, that's not an 'insult', that's threatening behaviour and incitement to violence which is illegal in all decent societies.

2) How does Brendan know that just because the likes of Rowan Atkinson and Joan Bakewell protested against the religious hatred laws that they are also for preventing homophobic reggae singers performing in the UK? Has he asked them? Or is he just stupidly suggesting that all liberal people have exactly the same views on each subject?

I had no firm opinion on whether these performers should be banned from performing in public. Then I thought about if a singer was due to perform in a concert in which they advocated killing all black people or dousing Jews in acid . Would they be banned from performing public concerts? Of course they would and I would agree with such a decision. Why is vitriol against gays deemed less bad?

No country in the world has pure free speech. The debate to be had is how free the speech should be - that's a debate worth having. I think that Western countries probably have it about right. But Brendan is not seriously interested in having this debate. He is only interested in creating straw man arguments so he can rant about the 'liberal left'.

What a cunt.