Several days ago three extreme right-wing nativists, Lauren Southern, Brittany Pettibone, and Martin Sellner, were refused entry to the UK (they are Canadian, American, and Austrian, respectively). The reason was that Pettibone and Southern set up a booth in Luton handing out pamphlets claiming that “Allah is a gay god,” while Sellner was going to make a speech at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. (Isn’t there supposed to be free speech there?) As the BBC reports:
Brittany Pettibone and her boyfriend, Martin Sellner, were refused entry to the UK when they landed at Luton Airport on Friday. They were detained for two days, and then deported. Another activist, Lauren Southern, was refused entry by the Border Force near Calais on Monday. She had planned to meet with the couple and the former leader of the English Defence League, Tommy Robinson.
Sellner, an Austrian and prominent figure in the anti-migration group Generation Identity, was due to make a speech in Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. He was the leader of a “Defend Europe” campaign last summer, responsible for targeting boats run by NGOs trying to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean.
On his social media accounts, Robinson says he plans to deliver Sellner’s speech in Hyde Park on Sunday.
In a statement about the activists, a Home Office spokesperson said: “Border Force has the power to refuse entry to an individual if it is considered that his or her presence in the UK is not conducive to the public good.”
Pettibone, an American, tweeted an image of the letter she says was handed to her by an immigration officer. It states that her planned activities posed “a serious threat to the fundamental interests of society and are likely to incite tensions between local communities in the United Kingdom”.
. . . Southern says she was questioned under the Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, on her political views and her opinion on right-wing terrorism. She tells BBC Trending that she was refused entry on the grounds of her involvement “in the distribution of racist material in Luton”.
In February, the Canadian activist displayed flyers saying “Allah is a gay god” outside a restaurant in the town centre. Southern, who has nearly half a million subscribers on YouTube and regularly posts politically charged stunts, says this was part of a “social experiment” video.
I deplore the activities of Pettibone, Southern, and Sellner. The latter two were involved in a scheme trying to turn back boats full of immigrants trying to reach Europe, and the booth in Luton was meant to be confrontational. Here’s a tweet showing the booth that got them put on the “do not allow” list of the UK:
I consider all three of these people anti-immigrant nativists, verging on racists, pure and simple. Still, such people have a right to speak, and it seems to me unwise for Britain to ban them from temporary entry. Yes, it preserves the peace, but at the expense of free speech—which is not as strongly supported in the UK as in the US. And although I don’t know how one can make a case that Allah is gay—after all, homosexuality is demonized by Islam, and is a capital crime in several Muslim countries—it’s valid and valuable to point out that Islam is homophobic, a view that goes against progressive sentiments. Saying “Allah is gay” is one way to express that. Whether Southern et al. wanted to drive that point home is beyond me. But this is why we shouldn’t suppress those who purvey what we see as “hate speech”. Indeed, even Muslim outrage at such shenanigans shows that intolerance cannot be allowed to lapse into violence, and fear of that violence shouldn’t drive censorship.
In an editorial at Spiked, editor Brendan O’Neill, who (like me) despises Southern and Pettibones’s views, nevertheless defends their right to express them:
That someone has been banned from Britain for, among other things, saying ‘Allah is gay’ should send shivers down the spine of all genuine liberals. It is testament to the long and difficult and strange struggle for free speech in Britain that people have actually been dragged to court and sentenced to prison in this country for the right to imply that deities are gay. It was in 1976, when Gay News published a poem titled ‘The love that dare not speak its name’, which was a fantasy involving a Roman centurion fellating Jesus Christ and bringing him to orgasm. Mary Whitehouse brought a private blasphemy case against Gay News and won: the publisher of the magazine was fined £500 and sentenced to nine months in jail (suspended). In 1976. In many people’s living memory.
. . . Liberals and gay-rights activists were outraged by this case. . . Fast forward 40 years and the authorities are once again telling us it is unacceptable to say a god is gay. In this case, Allah. Yet again we seem to have been whisked in a time machine back to the Middle Ages. Only now it is Islam rather than Christianity that is protected with the forcefield of censorship. We must be free to say anything we like about Allah, Muhammad, Islam and every other religious faith and figurehead. That more leftists and liberals are not insisting on this suggests they have abandoned the fight for freedom of speech and conceded that territory entirely to the hard right, who can now pose as defenders of great Western ideals. What a terrible, historic error.
Now the UK has a right to ban anyone it wants—there was talk of not allowing Trump himself into the UK—and I find it ironic that Southern and Sellner, who were trying to prevent immigrants from entering Europe, are beefing about being denied entry to the UK. Nevertheless, I see Europe, more than the US, going down the path of speech suppression (I’ll give another example later today). The police and politicians (except for the odious extreme right-wingers) seem reluctant to even speak about Muslim crimes or “grooming gangs”, much less to take action against them, all for fear of inflaming the Muslim faithful (note that the preceding link is to a Guardian piece). But no religion should be coddled if its tenets encourage bad behavior, and nobody should be reluctant to prosecute (much less mention) odious crimes because such persecution causes “offense.”
I’ve gone back and forth on the idea of whether there should be a special class of “hate crimes”: that crimes motivated by bigotry should be prosecuted more strongly, and offenders punished more severely, than those who commit identical crimes but from other motives. A justification for treating “hate crimes” differently would be that the perpetrators are less likely to be reformed, that punishing “hate criminals” has a stronger deterrent effect than punishing those who do the same deed but from different motives, or because society needs more protection from “hate criminals” than from “regular criminals.” I don’t think any of these have been empirically demonstrated. Rather, the extra animus against “hate crimes” seems to be one of retribution—that haters deserve extra punishment because they made especially onerous choices. As a determinist, I can’t buy that, though if the empirical data that’s missing supports a need to treat “hate criminals” differently, I’d reconsider.
In the meantime, the London Police have published a page on “What is hate crime?” They cover physical assault, incitement to hatred, and verbal abuse. The former is prima facie a crime, but the latter two, at least in America, are questionable. Incitement to immediate violence—”clear and present danger”—is illegal speech in America, but not simple “incitement to hatred”, which could of course be stretched to cover statements against religions and other things (those accused of “hate speech” in America have included Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray, Jordan Peterson, and others who should have been allowed to speak). The same goes for “verbal abuse”, which should be prohibited if it involves personal threats and harassment, but is one of those terms that has a tendency to stretch.
The most worrisome bit of the London Police report is this bit:
Leaving aside the dubious need to punish people more for the “hate” behind their crimes, what bothers me is the bit that says an incident that is not normally a crime can become one “if the victim or anyone else believes it was motivated by prejudice or hate.” That means that no real evidence is needed to turn an incident into a crime—just someone’s belief about what was motivating the perp. Further, they add that “though what the perpetrator has done may not be against the law, their reasons for doing it are.” This is thoughtcrime, and it’s both weird and unconscionable to punish one act and not an identical one based on what seemed to be motivating the perpetrator. Even if the perp admits a motivation, doing something legal surely cannot become illegal because it’s motivated by prejudice.
Can you name any incident that should be treated like this? If you stick out your tongue at somebody out of nastiness, and that’s not a crime, does it become so if you stick out your tongue at a black person, Jew, or Muslim?
At any rate, the UK, out of what can only be called “political correctness” (a term I use infrequently, but which seems appropriate here), is going down the path of censorious authoritarianism. If a legal act can be turned into a crime because of the perceived motivations of the actor, then Britain is in trouble.
