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Mick Hume. Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Epigraph
Author’s note
‘Je Suis Charlie’ and the free-speech fraud
The silent war on free speech
A few things we forgot about free speech
The age of the reverse-Voltaires
A short history of free-speech heretics
The Internet Front: hunting for trolls down ‘memory holes’
The University Front: students fight for ‘freedom from speech’
The Entertainment Front: football – kicking free speech with impunity; comedy – no laughing matter
Five good excuses for restricting free speech – and why they’re all wrong
‘There is no right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre’
‘… but words will always hurt me’
‘Mind your Ps, Qs, Ns and Ys’
‘Liars and Holocaust deniers do not deserve to be heard’
‘Free speech is just a licence for the mass media to brainwash the public’
A short summation for the defence
The Trigger Warnings we need
Notes
About the Publisher
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Title Page
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In the two decades since, as the You-Can’t-Say-That culture has advanced, the fear of offending Islam has grown in the West. There has been a sustained effort to bury the issue post-Rushdie, to avoid discussing sensitive or difficult questions about what our society stands for and what unites or divides us. The result has been to suppress free speech and censor what is deemed potentially offensive. As the author Kenan Malik puts it in From Fatwa to Jihad, in recent years the liberal elite ‘internalised the fatwa’. There is now a quite lengthy list of plays, books and exhibitions that have been cancelled or cut in Europe and the US in order to avoid controversy or offence (and not just to Muslims) – often in acts of pre-emptive self-censorship without the need for protests beforehand.27
Having done their best to bury these issues and stymie debate for decades, our elites seem shocked when the tensions suddenly break through the surface of society and explode into view, as in the violent protests against the Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2011, and the murderous assault on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the Copenhagen debate in 2015.
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