Mehdi Hasan at The New Statesman points out the glaring contradictions in the free speech orthodoxies of the liberal establishment:

“Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.

Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No?

[Lila: Consider the following joke:

“Question: How many Jews can ride in a Bentley?

Answer: Six million. Two in the front, three in the back, and 5, 999, 995 in the ash-tray.”

How “brave” would it have been to publish this joke on the front-page of a magazine, while Jews were being rounded up and exterminated by the state?

Would it have been brave free speech or vile Nazi incitation?

If someone had murdered the “humorist,” would decent people have been inclined to shrug and say, “one less idiot,” or would they have marched in solidarity on the streets?]

Mehdi Hasan (cont.):

“How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers?

I didn’t think so (and I am glad it hasn’t). Consider also the “thought experiment” offered by the Oxford philosopher Brian Klug. Imagine, he writes, if a man had joined the “unity rally” in Paris on 11 January “wearing a badge that said ‘Je suis Chérif’” – the first name of one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. Suppose, Klug adds, he carried a placard with a cartoon mocking the murdered journalists. “How would the crowd have reacted? . . . Would they have seen this lone individual as a hero, standing up for liberty and freedom of speech? Or would they have been profoundly offended?” Do you disagree with Klug’s conclusion that the man “would have been lucky to get away with his life”?