Queen’s University in Belfast was scheduled to hold a conference on June 4 and 5 on the Charlie Hebdo affair. Its title, “Understanding Charlie: New perspectives on contemporary citizenship after Charlie Hebdo Symposium,” shows clearly that it was an academic symposium, but journalists and novelists were also invited to speak; and I gather its aim was to discuss issues about the magazine’s satire and the terrorist attack that killed its writers and cartoonists.

Sadly, Queen’s University has followed many of its peer schools by canceling the symposium. They did so on two grounds: a supposed “security risk” and worries about the University’s “reputation.”

As the Guardian notes:

An email circulated from the vice chancellor’s office to staff earlier this week said: “The vice chancellor at Queen’s University Belfast has made the decision just this morning that he does not wish our symposium to go ahead.
“He is concerned about the security risk for delegates and about the reputation of the university.”

The university, which is based in the south of the city has declined so far to elaborate further on the decision.

Vis-à-vis the “security risk,” what evidence is there that that was the case? Were there threats? If so, why didn’t the university mention them? And even if there were, are we to cancel all conferences where an offended group (you know who they are) threatened violence? To even consider canceling a conference because of “security risk” in Belfast, of all places, is ridiculous. That city has experienced real violence, and has weathered it, making it seem silly to cower before unstated risks that could easily be managed.

The bit about “the reputation of the university” is simply embarrassing. Seriously, how would that have been damaged by this meeting? In my eyes, it would have been enhanced, for the issues raised by the Charlie Hebdo affair are among the most pressing for Western democracies who must deal with an increasing population of Muslims whose religious tenets conflict with Enlightenment values.

What this is really all about, and why the University has really damaged its reputation with the cancellation, is fear. And while perhaps some of those fears involve attacks by Muslim terrorists, it seems to me that its greatest fears are of offending others, including nonviolent Muslims. Instead of being a beacon of free speech, and a symbol of how such speech must be defended against even violent detractors, the Charlie Hebdo issue has become an embarrassment to academics and leftists—something to be avoided at best.

Why? Because Charlie Hebdo, and the whole issue of Muslim terrorism and that faith’s demonization of critics and apostates, as well as its invidious repression of women and gays, puts two characteristics of leftism into direct conflict: our general embrace of Enlightenment values, and a particular one of those values—concern for the oppressed. Muslims are seen as oppressed, a label that many of them encourage, and therefore are heartened when, out of guilt, we jettison the criticism that many of their religious values deserve. When the trope of oppression comes up against free speech, the former seems to win. Guilt, it seems, is stronger than reason.

As Jason Walsh noted, who was scheduled to speak at the conference:

The only conceivable reason this conference would be cancelled is that someone — someone like me, for instance — might say something that might upset someone else. That is what passes for reputational damage today? Back when I was knee-high to a parking meter we called that debate, and isn’t that what the university is all about?

The real reason for the cancellation was given away with the mention of reputation. What damage to Queen’s reputation could have happened, though? That it would develop a reputation for tackling difficult subjects?

 Clearly, the “reputational damage” involved perceived offense, or so I think.

Queens University had no requirement to hold such a conference. But once it planned to, and then called it off, they exercised a form of censorship. (This also goes, by the way, for the revocation of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s invitation to speak at Brandeis.)

In the end, this kowtowing to “hurt feelings”, and its effect on freedom of speech, will harm us all. It encourages other groups to adopt that tactic to avoid being criticized. Christians are already learning this trick, as are some feminists (see what happened when Christina Hoff Sommers spoke last week at Oberlin College). In the the end, the “hurt feelings” trope will produce a society in which nobody can voice criticism for fear of offending others.  And that kind of society is incompatible with democracy.

Over at his Spectator column, Nick Cohen (whom I’m coming increasingly to admire as a latter-day Orwell) comments on the Queen’s Uni kerfuffle. I’ll leave you to read what he says about that, but I want to highlight what he said about freedom of speech in a talk he gave at King’s College London on Monday. (He says the talk did not go down well!):

The only justification for censoring opinion is when it incites violence. You can use every other weapon a free country gives you to confront speakers you oppose. You can fact check them, mock and undermine them, expose their fallacies and overwhelm their defences. But you cannot ban them. Give up on that principle, and you lay yourself open to every variety of dictator and heresy hunter rigging debates and suppressing contrary opinions.

They seemed to like that. But where, I continued, might the state have got the idea that it was acceptable to ban speakers, who were not advocating violence. The question was so obvious it answered itself. To me, at any rate.

For years the National Union of Students blacklisted feminists because they had once said in frank language that trans-sexual women weren’t real women. In recent months, Oxford University cancelled a debate on abortion because protesters objected to the fact it was being held between two men; officials at London Southbank took down an atheist society’s “flying spaghetti monster” poster because it might cause religious offence; the students union at UCL banned the Nietzsche Club after it put up posters saying “equality is a false God”; and Dundee banned the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. Meanwhile half the campuses in Britain have banned the Sun. You may be transsexual, God-bothering, pro-abortion, egalitarian, supporter of the Leveson inquiry. But you cannot pretend that any of these individuals, groups or images promoted violence.

Nope, for every one of those incidents of censorship involved “hurt feelings.”

h/t: Coel