Debate unwelcome – on the closing of the western mind

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Ex-Muslim, Maryam Namazie, has been banned from campus by the students’ union which is concerned she might “insult” Muslims and “incite hatred.”

This correspondent has fond memories of days allegedly spent studying law that somehow lapsed into long evenings bothering the bar staff at nearby pubs, bikini clad (female) students sunbaking on the campus lawn, and of “speakers day” in the union house, the latter of which often produced some nutter denouncing someone or something in decidedly unparliamentary language. In those middle years of the decade that thumbed its nose at fashion, the 1980s, one didn’t have to bother too much about serving pork rolls, the provision of ‘gender inclusive’ toileting, nor be too cautious about what one said or who one offended. The whole point of tertiary study, after all, was the acquisition of knowledge and the contest of ideas – although for the younger Boethius this pursuit did come in somewhere underneath boozy barbecues, listening to ear splitting live bands, and meeting members of the opposite sex, on the scale of matters important.

What a drag it must be for those unfortunates destined to grace the corridors of learning today, that their undergraduate years coincide with the closing of the western mind and the twilight of the Enlightenment itself. Today’s student unionists are more concerned about offence taking, about delicate types (mainly homosexuals, feminists and Muslims) proclaiming themselves insulted, and with silencing the voices of those who would disrupt and dispute the prevailing hegemony of the politically correct cultural elite. At one time, not all that long ago, when Duran Duran were still very big and the lipstick wearing front man of the Human League as chic as it got, university students were not such precious petals, and did not need to be sheltered from damaging oration, not even speech which might be critical of religion. In fact, religion was pretty fair game, and the Christians on campus were routinely insulted, although not so much as the tertiary Tories who were generally regarded as a manifestation of Satan, Prince of Darkness.

But according to the very fragile types who run the University of Warwick student union (among many others who have taken similar decisions), Islam is an especially fragile religion, needing special protection from insults, from fear inducing language, and, horror of horror, from “hate speech.” Not that any Mullahs, nor the gentle types now policing the streets of Mosul, or certain imams with beards reaching to their knees, would ever engage in “hate speech” now would they? Not in English anyway. So an Iranian woman representing the ‘Council of ex-Muslims’ must be banned from campus, in another metaphorical beheading of free speech in the suicidal west, whose union types and other assorted leftists seem hellbent on hastening the onset of Enlightenment rigor mortis, such is there disdain, if not open hatred, for the inheritance of their own history and tradition. The problem for this particular speaker is that she represents a council of ex-Muslims – I would bet any body part readers wanted to nominate as being regarded by my good self as non-expendable, that had she represented a council of ex-Catholics, or ex-Methodists, or ex-Anglicans, she would not have any such trouble being heard.

All in all, however, I expect the earnest student unionists of the University of Warwick will be very happy under sharia law, since they are so fond of protecting its advocates from criticism. They will almost certainly live to see the end of what was once rightly called great Britain, and the genesis of that which will replace it. The mad Mullahs in their madrassahs and desert “training camps” must be literally splitting the sides of their robes in fits of laughter. Uncontrolled immigration and escalating birth rates would get them there in due time anyway, but how helpful it is to have the useful idiots on the political left hastening the day by closing down debate, stifling free speech, and invoking on their behalf the gift that just keeps on giving (if you are keen on the Caliphate) – the single word that will cut down dialogue, ruin a dinner party, and even end an career, just about anywhere, anytime, in the increasingly closed corporate mind of the western world – “Islamophobia.”

Source: Speaker banned from Warwick University over fears of offending Islam – Coventry Telegraph