first amendment | Pandaemonium

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

THE WRONG SOLUTION TO THE WRONG PROBLEM

December 1, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Everybody believes in press freedom. But what is it to have a free press? And how do we protect it? These are the questions raised by the publication of the Leveson report into the ‘culture practice and ethics’ of the British press and the debate that has both preceded and followed it. In his report, Lord Justice Leveson talks of his ‘outrage’ at the ‘havoc wreaked on the lives of innocent people’ by the unethical and criminal behaviour of sections of the British […]

Categories: Britain, Free Speech • Tags: first amendment, free speech, journalism, leveson inquiry, liberalism, liberties, murdoch

FAREWELL, FIRST AMENDMENT?

April 26, 2012 by Kenan Malik

in 2004, Tarek Mehanna traveled from America to Yemen with a friend. He claims he was searching out schools at which to study classical Islamic law. The US government insists that he was looking for a jihadi training camp. What all agree is that, even if he was looking for jihadis, he never found any. The US authorities accept that Mehanna never joined the jihadi groups he never found, nor ever funded any such groups. He did, however, on returning to the […]

Categories: Free Speech, War on terror • Tags: first amendment, free speech, jihadism, tarek mehanna, war on terror

‘YOU CANNOT TAKE AWAY THE RIGHT OF FREE SPEECH, NO MATTER HOW VILE’

March 16, 2011 by Kenan Malik

The Westboro Baptist Church is among the nastiest of the nutty, publicity-demanding evangelical churches that litter the American landscape. Its leader Fred Phelps makes Pastor Terry Jones seem positively calm, measured and rational. Phelps is deeply anti-Semitic, having in 1996 organized a picket of Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum claiming that Whatever righteous cause the Jewish victims of the 1930s–40s Nazi Holocaust had, (probably minuscule, compared to the Jewish Holocausts against Middle Passage Blacks, African Americans and Christians—including the bloody persecution of […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: first amendment, fred phelps, free speech, hate speech, homophobia, usa, westboro baptist church