Maajid Nawaz Must Be Free to Offend Muslims – and Christians Must Be Free to Offend Gays

Maajid Nawaz

TELEGRAPH BLOGS – BRENDAN O’NEILL: Yesterday, two very striking things happened on the freedom-of-speech front. First, the campaign in defence of Maajid Nawaz, the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate who has been harassed by an online mob of Islamists for saying he did not think the Jesus and Mo cartoons were offensive, stepped up a gear. Numerous newspaper columnists, bloggers and tweeters have rallied to Mr Nawaz’s defence, and a petition calling for the Lib Dems to offer him their full support now has close to 7,000 signatures. And second, the High Court in London ordered an investigation into the banning of an allegedly homophobic advert from British buses by Transport for London (TfL) in 2012. The Court said the ban might have been unjust and said it is now time to “re-examine whether… the poster could be used”.

Let me guess: you’ve heard a lot more about the first case, about Mr Nawaz’s travails, than you have about the second – right? Certainly there’s been far more coverage of the liberal online uprising in defence of Mr Nawaz’s right to tweet the secularist, mickey-taking Jesus and Mo cartoons than there has been of the High Court’s green light for an investigation into the banning of an anti-gay poster by TfL. Which is weird, because these cases are actually very similar. In both, an army of offence-takers sought to scrub from public view something they found repulsive – whether a tweet about Jesus and Mo or a poster putting forward a Christian take on homosexuality – and in both it was casually assumed that the rights of the offended should take precedence over the freedom of everyone else to tweet, read, see and hear certain risqué (allegedly) ideas. But only one case – Mr Nawaz’s – has become a cause celebre [sic] among liberals who profess an attachment to freedom of speech. Why? » | Brendan O’Neill | Tuesday, January 28, 2014