Heretics and Halfwits: Furedi’s Freedom-Fighters and the Lethality of Libertarianism

Enigmas. I’ve been beset by them recently. Last week, I added six piranhas to my big tropical-fish tank. The piranhas were going to look magnificent, sliding in a sleek silver school between the gleaming, multicolored shoals of gentle neon tetras and guppies. But I didn’t have time to watch the piranhas right then. No, I had to rush off to a “Moderate Muslim March” organized by my libertarian heroes at Spiked, the online forum for disciples of the Jewish freedom-fighter Frank Furedi. The march was intended to oppose the “shameful censorship” of the film The Lady of Heaven, which “Islamist mobs” have intimidated off all cinema screens in the UK because they regard it as heretical and blasphemous.

Islam + Freedom = Islam

Spiked were expecting a big turn-out at their Moderate Muslim March. After all, as that great libertarian intellect, the Spiked editor Tom Slater, has so ringingly put it: “I’m sure” that “the vast majority of [British Muslims] would have no truck with this extremist fringe.” Well, for technical reasons I can’t disclose exactly how many moderate Muslims turned out for the Spiked march in defense of free speech. Let’s just say that the turn-out was a big disappointment. And an enigma. But not as big as the disappointment and the enigma that awaited me back home. To my horror, I discovered that my tropical fish-tank was ruined. Only the piranhas were left alive in a haze of blood, scales and fish-fragments. What on earth had happened? I still don’t have a clue. Perhaps I should ask the libertarians at Spiked whether it was a good idea to introduce piranhas to a tank full of gentle neon tetras and guppies.

Two bad mixes: piranhas and guppies; Muslims and free speech

Well, satire and sarcasm over. I’m sure that even the libertarians at Spiked would tell you that it isn’t a good idea to house piranhas with guppies. In fact, I’m sure they would tell you that it’s a fucking stupid idea. But it’s nowhere near as stupid as an idea that Spiked and other libertarians have supported for many decades: the idea that Muslims should enter and inhabit Western nations without limit or restraint. Muslims are cultural piranhas and they devour free speech. They also devour every other freedom that libertarians claim to be passionately concerned about. But Spiked won’t admit this or be honest about the true nature of Islam. I was joking above when I said that Spiked had organized a “Moderate Muslim March” in defense of free speech. They’ve done no such thing, because they know it would be a complete failure. When Tom Slater, the current head halfwit at Spiked, expresses his certitude that the great majority of British Muslims would never think of limiting free speech what he means is: “I’m not sure at all and I have no intention of finding out.” In the rest of his editorial, Slater alternately postures about being tough on Islamism and plugs an even stupider version of the old “Anti-racists are the real racists” line. According to Slater, it’s “racist” to think that Muslims can’t handle free speech and need protecting from offense.

Muslims need no guidance from bluehairs

This halfwitted argument will have precisely no effect. As a not-so-former Trotskyist, Slater should recall Trotsky’s polemics against Stalin. How effective was Leon in arguing that Uncle Joe wasn’t a true Leninist? Spoiler alert: Not effective at all. Leon ended up with an ice-ax in his head while Uncle Joe sat snug in the Kremlin, supreme ruler of a mighty empire. But the halfwitted rhetoric of the Spiked collective is made worse by their dishonesty about Islam. Here’s Brendan O’Neill, former head halfwit at Spiked, first being dishonest about the Lady-of-Heaven controversy, then refuting his own dishonesty:

What is most striking about the noisy protests outside the cinemas showing this supposedly sinful film is how much the protesters sound like the godless woke mob. … Radical Muslims who believe they should have the right to crush culture that offends their religious sensibilities have clearly learned a thing or two from the secular cancel-culture brigade. They’ve dispensed with the fire-and-brimstone case for punishing those who blaspheme against their faith. Instead they’ve embraced the very modern idea that we all have the right to be protected from offence. Which we don’t, by the way.

This confirms that today’s censorious culture, in which everyone from gender-critical feminists to pro-life societies on campus are being cancelled for causing offence, has emboldened regressive elements in society. The cancellation frenzy has resuscitated ideas that really ought to have died out in the 20th century, if not earlier. This includes the idea of blasphemy, the notion that it ought to be a punishable offence to mock or simply just depict gods and prophets.

Alarmingly, cinema managers have capitulated to the theocratic mobs that have gathered outside their premises. In one of the most disturbing video clips I have seen so far this year, a cinema employee in Sheffield uses a megaphone to tell protesters that the film has been withdrawn from the schedule. ‘Allahu Akbar!’, the crowd yells in victory.

This is chilling. Call me an old-fashioned secular democrat, but isn’t it completely wrong, and morally perverse, to allow small numbers of religious hotheads to determine what the rest of us can see and watch? This grants a veto to fundamentalists, allowing them to shape public culture to their own tastes and prejudices. It is profoundly illiberal.

… It isn’t The Lady of Heaven that is shocking (and anyway, moviemakers should be perfectly at liberty to shock as much as they please). No, it’s the fact that in modern Britain, small numbers of Islamic activists can compel an entire cinema chain to dump a movie that they don’t like. This suggests our culture is being held hostage to intolerant minorities. And people say cancel culture is a myth. …

The Lady of Heaven controversy hasn’t caused much media or political traction yet, but it really should. This feels like a sequel to the Salman Rushdie affair. Cinemas ditching a film at the behest of furious theocratic protesters? What have we become? More importantly, what has become of freedom? (Shame on Cineworld for cancelling The Lady of Heaven, The Spectator, 7th June 2022)

So the libertarian Brendan O’Neill is “alarmed,” “disturbed,” “shocked” and “chilled” by the sight of Muslims behaving like Muslims, as Francis Carr-Begbie put it at the Occidental Observer in 2014. But Brendan isn’t just “alarmed” and “chilled”: he’s also deeply dishonest. Muslims have not “learned from” or been “emboldened” by the “godless woke mob” and “secular cancel-culture brigade.” Brendan knows perfectly well that “the Salman Rushdie affair” began in 1988, long before those censorious battalions of blue-haired SJWs and bearded transwomen became a noisy part of Western culture. Brendan also knows perfectly well that the death-sentence on Salman Rushdie was proclaimed from Iran by the Ayatollah Khomeini (1900–1989). The “godless woke mob” had no influence on Khomeini and the illiberalism of modern Iran owes nothing to Western secularism and everything to Islam. It’s the Islamic Republic of Iran, after all, not the Trans-Friendly Safe Space of Iran.

Ayatollah Khomeini, not much influenced by the “godless woke mob”

I also recommend that Brendan and Spiked investigate the culture of Pakistan, where “Islamist mobs” have often imposed impromptu death-sentences on alleged blasphemers and rallied in support of Islamic heroes like Mumtaz Qadri, who machine-gunned a Pakistani politician to death for daring to question Pakistan’s harsh anti-blasphemy laws. I can assure Brendan and the other libertarians at Spiked that Islamist mobs in Pakistan are not influenced by the “godless woke mob” in the West. But I think Spiked already know that, which is why, despite their incessant posturing about “free speech,” they ignore very interesting (and unpleasant) stories like this:

A mob in Pakistan tortured, killed and then set on fire a Sri Lankan man who was accused of blasphemy over some posters he had allegedly taken down. Priyantha Diyawadana, a Sri Lankan national who worked as general manager of a factory of the industrial engineering company Rajco Industries in Sialkot, Punjab, was set upon by a violent crowd on Friday.

In horrific videos shared across social media, Diyawadana can be seen being thrown on to the floor, where hundreds began tearing his clothes, violently beating him. He was tortured to death and then his body was burned. Dozens in the crowd can also be seen taking selfies with his dead body. The incident began when rumours emerged that Diyawadana, who had been manager of the factory for seven years, had taken down a poster bearing words from the Qur’an. By the morning, a crowd began to gather at the factory gates and by early afternoon they had charged into the factory and seized Diyawadana. (Man tortured and killed in Pakistan over alleged blasphemy, The Guardian, 3rd December 2021)

The “godless woke mob” in the West had no influence on those righteous incinerators in Pakistan or on the Pakistan-born Muslim hero Tanveer Ahmed, who murdered a heretic called Asad Shah on British soil in 2016.  However, Brendan O’Neill and other libertarians would doubtless be very puzzled by the recommendation that they investigate the cultures of Pakistan, Somalia, Bangladesh and other Muslim countries that have supplied millions of vibrant new citizens to the West. Libertarians would ask: What possible influence could culture in Muslim countries have on the behavior of Muslims in the West? Muslims would have long ago embraced the Enlightenment and bought “I ♥ Liberty” T-shirts if it weren’t for “multiculturalism” and the “godless woke mob” leading them astray. Or so libertarians like Brendan O’Neill keep on saying. If Brendan really believes that, he’s halfwitted. If he doesn’t really believe it, he’s deeply dishonest.

The Second Hungarian Uprising

I go for the second option myself. And I think that Brendan is deeply dishonest whether he’s condemning censorship or celebrating contrarianism. Here, for example, he celebrates the contrarianism of some Hungarian schoolchildren:

It’s only June and already we’ve had the funniest news story of the year. Following some iffy behaviour by Hungarian football fans during Euro 2020, UEFA instructed Hungary to play its next few games behind closed doors. No crowds, no fans, no noise — this was to be Hungary’s punishment. But Hungary, in its clash with England in Budapest on Saturday, exploited a UEFA loophole to allow 30,000 schoolkids to attend the game. After all, what kind of trouble could a few thousand fresh-faced under-14s cause? Well, a lot, it turns out. As soon as the England players took the knee — as they’re still robotically doing, more than two years after George Floyd was murdered 4,000 miles away from England – a chorus of boos filled the stadium. It was an extraordinary noise: an army of children registering their disdain for the puffed-up performative virtue of 11 adults from overseas.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh. The tutting moralists of UEFA who thought that banishing the gruff men of Hungary from football games would make for a safe, sanitised experience clearly hadn’t reckoned with the rebellious streak in Hungary’s youth.  …

[But the] booing of those Hungarian schoolkids was entirely rational, and even quite heartening. It was not a crescendo of racial prejudice. It was a statement of youthful revolt against lofty outsiders who seem to have gone to Budapest as much to educate the rabble as to play some football. Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán has a point when he says the taking of the knee is a ‘provocation’ and that it has ‘no place on the pitch’. For a while now it has been clear that knee-taking is less an anti-racist gesture than a signifier of moral supremacy. … Football fans, contrary to the prejudiced delusions of the chattering classes, are not dumb. Neither, it seems, are Hungarian schoolchildren. They know when they are being demeaned, when they are being reduced to problematic creatures requiring neo-colonial correction. And guess what? They don’t like it. … Those Hungarian kids were not being brattish hooligans – they were simply rebelling against the colonising instincts of the West’s woke elites. Good on them. I wish we had more kids like them in the UK. (The cultural imperialism of taking the knee, Spiked, 6th June 2022)

Brendan celebrates in that article but doesn’t explicate. So tell me, Brendan: What explains the “rebellious streak in Hungary’s youth” and their “youthful revolt” against “cultural imperialism”? Why don’t we have “more kids like them in the UK,” ready to resist the “diktats of identity politics” and “rebel” against the “woke elites”? Well, Brendan made no attempt to answer those questions. After all, if he’d answered honestly, he would have exploded his own libertarian lunacy. So I’ll explain on his behalf. Hungary’s youth is “rebellious” and resists the “diktats of identity politics” for one very simple reason. It’s because Hungary’s youth is stale and pale. That is, Hungary’s youth is White.

No anti-White Blight

So are Hungary’s grown-ups, of course. This is because Hungary hasn’t been enriched by mass immigration by non-Whites from the Third World. Consequently, there is no pressure from non-Whites and their leftist allies to create a cult of minority-worship in Hungary that blames all non-White failure on racism by Hungarian Whites. It’s the large numbers of Black players in English soccer that justify the “robotic” anti-racism of the “woke elites.” Unlike children in England, Hungarian children aren’t taught to idolize Black players who could never have created soccer for themselves and contribute nothing to soccer but their athleticism. Just as in American football, the brainpower and tactics in soccer are supplied by Whites, not by Blacks. Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a big thing in Britain because Blacks are a big thing in Britain.

But Black Lives Matter is not a big thing in Hungary because — guess what? — Blacks themselves aren’t a big thing in Hungary. Suicide-bombing and rape-gangs aren’t a big thing in Hungary either, because — guess what? — Muslims aren’t a big thing in Hungary. It’s that simple. With no non-Whites, Hungary has no anti-White blight: no identity politics, no rape-gangs, no suicide-bombers, no acid-throwers and no non-White schoolchildren hacking at other schoolchildren with machetes. Instead, Hungary has White schoolchildren booing a Black-enriched England soccer-team as it “takes the knee” in worship of Blacks before playing the overwhelmingly White Hungarian soccer-team.

V for Viktory

Whoever could have guessed that not having non-Whites would enable Hungary to avoid the endless cultural and social problems caused by non-Whites? Well, the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — approvingly quoted by libertarian Brendan in his article — guessed that very thing. But get this: Orbán isn’t a libertarian. In fact, he’s an illiberal reactionary and the “godless woke mob” in the West call him a racist. But if Orbán were an anti-racist libertarian and had followed the Spiked recipe for societal bliss, he would have opened Hungary’s borders long ago and allowed non-Whites to flood in. After that, Hungary would have swiftly acquired all the cultural pathologies so loudly and often condemned by the freedom-fetishists at Spiked. And Hungary would also have had a suicide-bombing or two by now, even as vibrant rape-gangs flourished in enriched cities like Budapest, Szeged and Pécs.

Fortunately for Hungary, Viktor Orbán isn’t a libertarian. And if an illiberal reactionary like him defends Hungary’s freedom and independence so successfully while libertarianism fails completely in Britain, I can reach only one conclusion: that libertarianism is lethal for liberty. Libertarianism is, in fact, far more stupid than putting piranhas into tanks of neon tetras and guppies. Piranhas will only devour other fish. The core principles of libertarianism, like love of open borders and belief in racially mixed societies, will devour entire nations. And they are indeed devouring entire nations, because — surprise, surprise! — those core principles of libertarianism are also the core principles of the “woke mob.” It’s almost as though libertarianism and leftism are allies in the war on the West.

But how can libertarianism be so harmful to the West, when libertarianism is such a heavily Jewish movement? I’ll leave you to ponder that enigma as I go to feast my eyes on the guppies and neon tetras in my piranha-free fish-tank. And while I feast my eyes, I’ll dream of the day when the West is free again of piranhas in human form.