Political correctness is the worst kind of censorship, Ctd

On BBC Radio 4, Woman's Hour of March 26 2014, Julie Bindel, journalist and founder of Justice for Women, said:

"White liberals are terrified of being called Islamophobic or racist... [and they] capitulate to the religious patriarchs rather than stand with secular feminists. Those Muslim born feminists, Southall Black Sisters is one organisation that refuses to capitulate to religious patriarchy, but still fights racism and cultural imperialism; and that's the kind of feminism that I stand with."

More:

"I refuse to be one of those white liberals who ends up on the side of the religious patriarchs... I stand by my sisters in the global feminist movement."

Sara Khan, director of Muslim Human Rights organisation, Inspire, said of feminists on the right:

Glenn Greenwald - US violence is "noble" and "civilised" while Muslim violence is "primitive" and "without rational cause"

Following the murder of drummer Lee Rigby, bloggers Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan crossed keyboards and battled it out. The issue: Greenwald called it "a barbaric and horrendous act"; but fell short of calling it "terrorism". The premise being that Rigby was a soldier, not a citizen. Since America and Britain had declared the whole globe as a battlefield, the attack was a reaction to this. But as Glenn explained, by highlighting the cause, he does not seek to justify the act. As he said:

"People reflexively try to radically distort the argument beyond recognition in order to smear you as a Terror apologist, a Terrorist-lover or worse, all for the thought crime of raising these issues. To do so, they deceitfully conflate claims of causation (A is one of the causes of B) with justification (B is justified). Anyone operating with the most basic levels of rationality understands that these concepts are distinct. To discuss what motivates a person to engage in Action B is not remotely to justify Action B."

He then approached the related issue that the west has a boundless compulsion to depict others as the "Uniquely Primitive and Violent Evil." He said:

"Our violence is understandable, noble, well-intentioned, necessitated by their pure evil. By stark contrast, their violence is sub-human, senseless, and utterly unrelated to anything we do."

@Kenanmalik "on the importance of the right to offend"

Kenan Malik (@kenanmalik) is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster, including a presenter of BBC Radio 4's Analysis. His last book From Fatwa to Jihad was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. He recently wrote a piece on his blog, 'On the importance of the right to offend.' He said:

"There is something truly bizarre (and yet in keeping with the zeitgeist of our age) that someone should become the focus of death threats and an international campaign of vilification for suggesting that an inoffensive cartoon was, well, inoffensive. 

From the Rushdie affair to the controversy over the Danish cartoons, from the forcing offstage of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti to the attempt this week by members of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party to shut down the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s production of The Bible: The Complete Word Of God (a decision thankfully later reversed),  reactionaries have often used campaigns against ‘offence’ as a political weapon with which to harass opponents and as a means of bolstering their community support. The anti-Nawaz campaign is no different. Muhammad Shafiq and Muhammad Ansar both have had public spats with Nawaz, and both are cynically exploiting the claim of ‘offensiveness’ to reclaim political kudos."