Tag: censorship

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

100 DAYS BEHIND BARS

February 9, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This week Osman Kavala spent his 100th day in prison. Kavala is one of most important public intellectuals in Turkey, has played a prominent role both in defending the rights and liberties of all in Turkey, including Kurds and Armenians, and in bringing together people of different political viewpoints to discuss their differences in civil debate. He was arrested in October, and now faces trumped-up charges of organizing the June 2013 Gezi Park protests, of supporting the failed coup of […]

Categories: International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: censorship, erdogan, free speech, osman kavala, repression, turkey

LETTER FROM OSMAN KAVALA

January 18, 2018 by Kenan Malik

Osman Kavala, one of the most important intellectual and cultural figures in Turkey, was arrested in November. He remains in detention, in solitary confinement. He recently put out a statement through his lawyers. This is an English translation, first published by the Free Osman Kavala campaign. The situation, not just for Osman, but for hundreds of academics and others who have been detained in recent months, remains dangerous. Earlier this month Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s claimed in a speech that […]

Categories: Academia, International, Justice & Liberties • Tags: academic freedom, censorship, erdogan, free speech, osman kavala, turkey

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

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

TALKING SATANIC VERSES

October 13, 2016 by Kenan Malik

The copyediting of the Afterword for the new edition of From Fatwa to Jihad is complete. It’s inching towards publication… In the meantime I am reposting here two videos about the original edition that I made for Faculti, a website that publishes videos of authors and academics talking about their work. The first film is a reading from the final section of From Fatwa to Jihad, the second an exploration of the themes and arguments of the book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGjz9xWwnsw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYRy4yyUpFU

Categories: Culture & Books, Kenan Malik • Tags: censorship, free speech, islam, islamism, left, multiculturalism, rushdie affair, salman rushdie, the satanic verses

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

WARNING: THIS MAY INJURE YOUR MODESTY

May 19, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Ahmed Naji is an Egyptian novelist and journalist who, in February, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for ‘injuring public modesty’. In August 2014, Akhbar al-Adab, a state-funded literary magazine, had published an excerpt from his third novel, Istikhdam al-Hayah (Using Life), which had been previously approved by Egypt’s censorship authority. In the excerpt, the narrator smokes hashish, drinks alcohol with his friends, and enjoys a sexual relationship with a woman. Hani Saleh Tawfik, a 65-year-old Egyptian, filed a case against Naji, […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: ahmed naji, censorship, egypt, fiction, free speech

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE VENUS AND THE COVER-UP

April 28, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Back in January, when Iranian President Hassan Rouhani made an official visit to Rome, something strange happened to the statues he might have seen. Giovanni Tiso, a New Zealand-based writer and translator, tells here the story. Rouhani’s visit, and the Venus cover-up, might have taken place three months ago, but it is worth retelling the story, and putting it into context, because this is the kind of casual censorship that in many ways defines our time. As Giovanni writes, ‘this kind […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: art, censorship, italy, nudity

TALKING OF FREE SPEECH…

January 21, 2016 by Kenan Malik

Last year I gave a talk at the Oslo Freedom Forum on free speech and self-censorship. I also gave an interview to Google Ideas. It has now been published as part of a series of Google Ideas interviews from the Oslo Freedom Forum called Censored. Here is the original speech I gave, followed by the Google Ideas interview. . .

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: censorship, free speech, google ideas, islam, liberties, oslo freedom forum, racism, self-censorship

BIGOTRY, DEBATE, CENSORSHIP AND THE LEFT

January 17, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of my last column for the International New York Times on Maryam Namazie, Donald Trump and censorship, originally published on 21 December 2015. Donald J Trump and Maryam Namazie are divided by more than the width of the Atlantic. One is a reactionary, with bigoted ideas seemingly about everyone from Mexicans to Muslims. He is also currently a leading candidate to be the next president of the United States. The other is an Iranian feminist, […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: censorship, donald trump, free speech, islamism, islamophobia, left, maryam namazie, populism, racism

CHARLIE HEBDO, ONE YEAR ON

January 7, 2016 by Kenan Malik

It is a year today since Islamist gunmen burst into the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people, including eight of the magazine’s staff. A few days after the attack I was interviewed by the BBC. ‘Don’t you think’, the interviewer asked, ‘ that the degree of solidarity expressed towards Charlie Hebdo represents a turning in attitudes to free speech?’ ‘I doubt it’, I replied. ‘There may be expressions of solidarity now. But fundamentally little will change. If anything, […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: censorship, charlie hebdo, france, free speech, garry trudeau, hate speech, islam, islamism, laicite, left, racism, secularism