The position that you have robustly staked out in this and other posts in this thread is perfectly respectable and I do understand your concerns.
So I am going to quote myself again here:
'In the case of free speech, the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill drew the line at incitement. He famously contrasted a newspaper article in which the author claimed that corn dealers were starvers of the poor, with the same view spoken (or communicated via a placard) right outside a corn dealer’s house. The first is a controversial opinion that should be allowed to enter the public debate, even if the view is false or immoral; the second is, in those circumstances, an act of incitement to violence and unacceptable.'
Times have changed since Mill was around. A lot now depends on whether a tweet on X or a Facebook post should be regarded as the equivalent of Mill's placard, given the speed at which modern social media operates.
The nature of incitement is also worth thinking about in this context. So let's take a look at a couple of tweets from 'resting' actor Laurence Fox. The first one was written in response to Bushra Shaikh.
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First of all, these tweets are quite typical. I see similar ones about Islam pretty much every day on X, posted by the likes of Fox, David Atherton, Darren Grimes, Mahyar Tousi, Kelvin Mackenzie, and others.
Secondly, their claims they make are almost invariably false. For example, there is actually a long queue of moderate Muslims lining up to condemn acts of terrorism, both online and in reputable, widely circulated publications. If I attempted to list and quote from these many sources, if I tried to summarise them, this reply would probably need to be about 10,000 words long.
Suffice it to say that, surprisingly, it is possible to find within Islam the equivalents of Gandhi, of Dr King, namely, prominent Muslim advocates of non-violence. It's just that most people won't have heard of figures like Abdul Ghaffar Khan (an ethnic Pashtun from the tribal regions of Pakistan whose 100,000 Muslim followers peacefully resisted British colonial rule in India), or be familiar with the blistering 600-pages long condemnation of suicide bombing authored by the influential Pakistani cleric Muhammad Tahrir ul-Qadri in 2010, simply because the relevant sources aren't written in English.
But that's another story. Let's get back to the subject of incitement.
Is there overt incitement here, like there was in the case of Wayne O'Rourke, Julie Sweeney, and Lucy Connolly?
Obviously not.
And should Islam be criticised in this manner?
Of course. After all, moderate Muslims do just the same thing in their books. Here are a couple of examples (taken from Tariq Ramadan's Pelican guide to Islam and Ziauddin Sardar's
Reading the Qur'an):
"Muslims have waged wars of expansion, have established colonial-type regimes, enforced religious conversion, upheld slavery, manipulated religion and exploited their fellow human beings."
"There are very few places in the Muslim world where one is genuinely free to express oneself, where open criticism of power is actually tolerated, or where criticism of obnoxious religious practices is not seen simply as an attack on Islam itself."
Fair enough. But here's what is currently bothering me.
I think that the unspoken, perlocutionary intent of the above tweets
is to incite, to provoke an animus a
gainst Muslims in general, including those who are as repulsed by Islamism and Salafi-Jihadism as the rest of us. Without specific instructions, these drip fed tweets direct emotions along a certain trajectory, leaving others to fill in the gaps, which the likes of O'Rourke, Sweeney and Connolly obviously have.
Given that Fox, Atherton, Grimes et al. are also 'blue tick wankers', and have acquired numerous followers on X, I have therefore been left wondering whether what they do is actually far worse than what O'Rourke, Sweeney and Connolly got up to.
To deploy an analogy from The Wire, they are the equivalents of Stringer Bell, of Avon Barksdale, whereas those presently languishing in jail are, with the exception of Yaxley-Lennon, like the low hanging fruit who reside on the corners of West Baltimore, the ones who do get arrested.
Of course, I can and do go on X to challenge their views. And my replies get read by almost nobody.
So what is to be done about this present state of affairs and these echo chambers with their pernicious effects?
In their book
The Devil's Long Tail: Religious And Other Radicals In The Internet Marketplace, David Stevens and Kieron O'Hara favour regulating social media with the lightest possible touch in the interests of free speech. It would take too long to summarise and critique their argument here (mainly because I've completely forgotten most of it). But it's an excellent book and I do recall that they make their case very persuasively.
The only problem is that it was published in 2015 and a lot has happened since. For example nowadays, under the stewardship of Musk, X arguably resembles an anarchic state of nature in need of a Hobbesian Leviathan. And there have also been instances of livestreamed acts of terror.
So in response to my own question, I really don't know. I wish I had Stevens and O'Hara's and your confidence about how to uphold free speech and where the line should be drawn in terms of what is and isn't acceptable. But at the moment I don't.
