Category Archives: Free Speech

SHOULD OFFENCE BE BANNED? OR HATE?

March 25, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay was the main part of my Observer column this week. (The column included also a shorter piece on the necessity of abortion rights). It was published in the Observer, 25 March 2018, under the headline ‘The ‘Nazi pug’: giving offence is inevitable and often necessary in a plural society’. Does making a film of a dog giving a Nazi salute constitute a hate crime? And should high street retailers stock racist and Nazi books? Two questions raised this week […]

Categories: Britain, Free Speech • Tags: anti-racism, anti-semitism, censorship, free speech, hate speech, hope not hate, left, offence, pluralism

DONALD TRUMP AND BRITAIN’S LIBEL LAWS

February 15, 2018 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times on Donald Trump’s fancy for stricter libel laws. It was published under the headline ‘Trump Wants British Libel Laws. America Does Not.’ While American lawmakers once sought to protect their citizens from the clutches of British libel law, Mr. Trump now wants British-style laws in the United States. . After a long campaign by free-speech organizations, the British libel law was finally amended five years ago. The 2013 […]

Categories: Britain, Free Speech, International • Tags: british libel laws, british politics, donald trump, first amendment, free speech, libel, libel tourism, usa

FAKE NEWS AND THE GATEKEEPERS OF TRUTH

February 11, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay was the main part of my Observer column this week. (The column included also a shorter piece in response to a Treasury tweet on how British taxpayers ‘helped end the slave trade‘.) It was published in the Observer, 11 February 2018, under the headline ‘Fake news has a long history. Beware the state being keeper of “the truth”‘. . Before Facebook, there was the coffee house. In the 17th-century, panic gripped British royal circles that these newly established drinking […]

Categories: Free Speech, Politics • Tags: censorship, donald trump, emmanuel macron, fake news, free speech

LESS A DEBATE THAN POLITICAL TROLLING

December 3, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of an article published in the Observer, 3 December2017, under the headline ‘When crude tweets set the global agenda we are surely in a new age of politics’. The most powerful leader in the world tweets like a teenage Nazi on 4chan whose sole aim is to create outrage. Three retweets of anti-Muslim hatred first tweeted by the deputy leader of a British neo-Nazi group do indeed cause global outrage. British politics becomes consumed by […]

Categories: Free Speech, International, Politics • Tags: alt right, anti-muslim hatred, donald trump, far right, islamophobia, muslims, racism, twitter, usa

IN SUPPORT OF OSMAN KAVALA

October 26, 2017 by Kenan Malik

Imagine a seminar in Washington. Around the table are Bernie Sanders supporters and alt right activists, fans of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump voters, auto workers and Wall Street bankers, abortion activists and Evangelical Christians. And all discussing the question of America’s political future, civilly and articulately, with deep disagreements but also with mutual respect. It would be difficult to imagine this in Washington. Still less that a similar seminar could take place in Istanbul. Yet, when I gave a […]

Categories: Free Speech, International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: armenia, censorship, free speech, kurds, liberties, osman kavala, turkey

FROM THE SATANIC VERSES TO CHARLIE HEBDO

October 19, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is a talk I gave to the Integrity 20 conference in Brisbane, on 19 October 2017. On 14 February 1989, Valentine’s Day, the Ayotollah Khomeini issued his infamous fatwa against Salman Rushdie. It was a brutally shocking act that forced Salman Rushdie into hiding for almost a decade. 26 years later, on 7 January 2015, came an even more viscerally shocking act, when two gunmen forced their way into the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, sprayed […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, Free Speech, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: censorship, charlie hebdo, free speech, identity politics, islamism, left, multiculturalism, muslims, racism, salman rushdie, the satanic verses

FREE SPEECH AND UNSAFE SPACES

April 10, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is the transcript of a talk I gave on ‘Free speech on campus’ at a conference entitled ‘Forever Young?’, exploring questions about universities, shifts in generational attitudes and the meaning of adulthood. The conference was held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, on 8 April 2017. . In February 2015, Zineb El Rhazoui, a Moroccan journalist at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, spoke at the University of Chicago Law School, having been invited by the French Society. It was […]

Categories: Academia, Free Speech • Tags: censorship, charlie hebdo, free speech, identity politics, laura kipnis, left, moral autonomy, offence, radicalism, safe space, self-censorship, students, therapeutic society, trigger warnings, universities

THOU SHALT NOT GIVE OFFENCE

March 23, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is an extract from the Afterword to the new edition of my book From Fatwa to Jihad: How the World Changed From The Satanic Verses to Charlie Hebdo. This extract looks at the free speech debates around the Danish cartoons and Charlie Hebdo. You can buy the book from most bookshops, or from Amazon or from the Book Depository. In December 2009, about nine months after From Fatwa to Jihad was first published, Index on Censorship, one of the world’s foremost […]

Categories: Free Speech, International • Tags: charlie hebdo, danish cartoons, france, free speech, index on censorship, islam, jytte klausen, liberal hypocrisy, liberalism, muslims, racism, salman rushdie, the satanic verses

ALL THE NEWS THAT WAS FIT TO PRINT

December 6, 2016 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times on the panic about fake news: In the past, governments, mainstream institutions and newspapers manipulated news and information. Today, anyone with a Facebook account can do it. Instead of the carefully organized fake news of old, there is now an anarchic outflow of lies. What has changed is not that news is faked, but that the old gatekeepers of news have lost their power. Just as elite institutions […]

Categories: Free Speech, History, Politics • Tags: fake news, free press, news, post-truth

BEFORE FACEBOOK WAS THE COFFEE HOUSE

December 1, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Today it’s Facebook. 350 years ago it was the coffee house. In the late seventeenth century, as Markman Ellis tells in his book on the cultural history of the coffee house, there was panic in British royal circles that these newly-established drinking salons had become forums for political dissent, rebellious attitudes and the spreading of untruths. In June 1672, Charles II issued a proclamation ‘to restrain the Spreading of False News, and Licentious Talking of Matters of State and Government.’ […]

Categories: Free Speech, History • Tags: censorship, facebook, fake news, free press, free speech

JYLLANDS-POSTEN AND THE AYATOLLAH WITHIN

November 17, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Flemming Rose is the former culture editor of Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten who, in 2005, published the Muhammed cartoons and launched a global controversy. In a new book, De Besatte (The Possessed), Rose claims that far from defending freedom of expression, Jyllands-Posten attempted to gag him and to prevent him from saying or writing anything controversial. The Danish paper Information interviewed me about the case. This is a (rough) translation of the article. ‘Jyllands-Posten viste sin indre ayatollah’ Hans Henrik Rasmussen, […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: censorship, danish cartoons, denmark, diversity, flemming rose, free speech, geert wilders, index on censorship, jytte klausen, rushdie affair, self-censorship, the satanic verses

WHO IS APPROPRIATING WHAT?

September 14, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Last week the novelist Lionel Shriver gave the keynote address at the Brisbane Writers Festival. It did not go well. She addressed the question of ‘Fiction and identity politics’ (apparently the organizers had originally asked her to talk about ‘community and belonging’, but she had submitted to them a different topic), providing a robust critique of identity politics and of the idea of ‘cultural appropriation’. Beginning with a story about colleges attempting to ban the wearing of sombreros as an […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: cultural appropriation, cultural ownership, free speech, herder, identity politics, immigration, lionel shriver, racism, romanticism

AND IF MY THOUGHT-DREAMS COULD BE SEEN…

July 31, 2016 by Kenan Malik

‘A poet’s work’, he answers. ‘To name the unnameable, to point a frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.’ And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses And if my thought-dreams could been seen They’d probably put my head in a guillotine But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only. Bob Dylan, It’s alright Ma, I’m […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech, International • Tags: apostasy, ashraf fayadh, blasphemy, culture, palestine, poetry, saudi arabia

ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND ACADEMIC COWARDICE

July 22, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is in response to the decision of the University of Cape Town to ‘disinvite’ Flemming Rose, former cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten responsible for publishing the Danish cartoons, from giving this year’s TB Davie Lecture on Academic Freedom. Last year, I was honoured to be invited to the University of Cape Town to give the 2015 TB Davie lecture. It was a privilege to have been able to become part of the history that is the TB Davie lecture, a history of resistance […]

Categories: Academia, Free Speech, International • Tags: academic freedom, danish cartoons, flemming rose, free speech, islamophobia

CONNECTEDNESS AND DISCONNECTEDNESS

May 25, 2016 by Kenan Malik

In 2010, I spoke at a seminar in Oxford when Timothy Garton Ash launched his Free Speech project to explore the state of free speech in the contemporary world. Now, out of that project has come Garton Ash’s new book, called, unsurprisingly, Free Speech. So, it was a pleasure to be invited to discuss the issues again this week at a Guardian debate, at Conway Hall in London, to launch the book, together with Rowan Williams, Joanna Williams, Jonathan Freedand and, of course, […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: censorship, diversity, free speech, identity politics, timothy garton ash

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