March 10, 2006

Free speech in the Jewish Chronicle?

Well not quite but here's a letter from Ian MacDonald titled Free Speech?
The only thing I agree with Melanie Phillips about is that it was right to jail David Irving. He purposefully and deliberately broke an Austrian law concerning Holocaust denial by refuting the known, racist and ethnic slaughter of millions.

However, Ken Livingstone would have been right to call a black reporter an Uncle Tom, and repeat it without apology, if that reporter worked for a BNP newspaper.

The whole point is that the Daily Mail (same owners as the Standard) supported Hitler in the 1930s when the Nazis were smashing Jewish shops, and sending Jews to concentration camps and ghettos.

I do not believe they have ever apologised unequivocally for their stance at that time. This is what motivated Ken.

In any case, the Standard has harassed him for 25 years over supporting gays, small “irrelevant” groups (which may well have included small, Jewish anti-fascist groups), reducing fares, introducing the congestion charge, and reducing the motorist’s “freedom to park and pollute wherever I want.”

Readers of the Mail and Standard — and their writers, including Melanie Phillips — appear to ignore the paper’s appalling, racist history.

The Danish cartoons were guaranteed to cause offence to the Muslim world. If the cartoons had been intended to show that all religions have their atrocity perpetrators (not easy in a single cartoon) then the response from Islamic communities would almost certainly have been more muted, and bearable, because — importantly — theirs would not be the only religion to have been depicted in this way as cruel.
Not bad, but Ken was being a tad hypocritical condemning the Mail group when he has worked for them and for the Sun.

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