Tag: anti-terror laws

WHO HAS THE RIGHT TO SPEAK?

May 31, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave at the Bristol Festival of Ideas, 21 May 2019, as part of the Coleridge Series. ‘Who has the right to speak?’ It is the key question in debates around free speech. Who should be allowed to speak? What should be permitted to be said? And who makes the decision? Historically, the issues were relatively clear. Censorship was imposed from the top. Its aim was to deflect, contain or deem illegitimate any […]

Categories: Free Speech, War on terror • Tags: anti-terror laws, blasphemy, censorship, corporate censorship, fake news, free speech, gill valentine, hate speech, incitement laws, iqbal sacranie, muslim, offence, prevent, racism, self-censorship, social media, tariq modood, universities

TO RENDITION JUSTICE

February 15, 2012 by Kenan Malik

By next Monday William Hague and Phillip Hammond could be behind bars. In December, the Court of Appeal ruled that the foreign and defence secretaries had by February 20th to produce before the court a Pakistani rice merchant, Yunus Rahmatullah; if they did not, then the court would ‘be moved to commit you to prison for your contempt in not obeying the said writ’. Hague and Hammond will not, of course, be sent down. But the Rahmatullah case does reveal, yet […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: anti-terror laws, barack obama, britain, guantanamo bay, liberal hypocrisy, liberties, rendition, usa, war on terror

MYTHS AND REALITIES OF 9/11

September 9, 2011 by Kenan Malik

A recent poll by the Pew Trust showed that virtually every American can remember where they were on the morning of 11 September 2001. Most recognize the profound changes that 9/11 has wrought to the nation. But America is divided down the middle on the question of whether the USA brought the attack upon itself. Forty-three percent of those polled thought that 9/11 was caused by US ‘wrongdoing’; 45% disagreed. Perhaps no set of statistics better expresses the confusions and ambiguities […]

Categories: International, War on terror • Tags: 7/7, 9/11, 9/11 commission, anders breivik, anti-imperialism, anti-terror laws, charles kurzman, clash of civilizations, culture of fear, ground zero mosque, guantanamo bay, identity politics, imperialism, islamism, islamophobia, jason burke, jihadism, liberties, mary beard, muslims, osama bin laden, phillip zelikow, stephen howe, tariq ali, terrorism, tzvetan todorov, usa, war on terror, western civilization, western policy

THE TRAGIC IRONIES OF BREIVIK’S TERROR

July 30, 2011 by Kenan Malik

Three weeks ago London marked the sixth anniversary of the 7/7 tube bombings. Now Oslo will have its own heart-wrenching day of remembrance every year. Even for those who lived through 7/7 – not to mention countless other bombings, from IRA to neo-Nazi, that London has witnessed in the past few decades – there was still something viscerally shocking about Anders Breivik’s murderous rampage through Oslo and Utoya, the mindlessness of the massacre combined with its cold-eyed homicidal brutality. It […]

Categories: Multiculturalism, War on terror • Tags: 7/7, anders breivik, anti-terror laws, christianity, diversity, far right, identity politics, immigration, islamism, jihadism, liberties, multiculturalism, muslims, racism, terrorism, war on terror

INVASION OF PRIVACY WE SHOULD TRULY WORRY ABOUT

May 16, 2011 by Kenan Malik

Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, a seminal account of the CIA, extraordinary rendition and torture, has an interview in the New Yorker with Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency who is about to be tried for violating the Espionage Act by leaking to a journalist secret documents about America’s covert surveillance of its own citizens. Drake, as Mayer puts it, is effectively being charged with being ‘an enemy of the state’. But it’s a state […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: anti-terror laws, cia, jane mayer, liberties, privacy, usa, war on terror