As many readers of both this blog and alternative media will be aware, the counterjihad campaigner Tommy Robinson and others were recently banned from the Tik-Tok platform on the dubious grounds of ‘hate speech’. One of the seeming prime movers of this ban, and someone who appears to have used his office as an MP to push Tik-Tok to remove Mr Robinson, is the Labour Member of Parliament Afzal Khan.

According to an article written by Esmerelda Weatherwax in the New English Review, Afzal Khan along with a left wing agitprop group called Scram News, were behind Mr Robinson’s ban from Tik-Tok.

Ms Weatherwax said:

Tommy Robinson set up a Tik Tok account at the end of March. “Banned from all western social media, let’s give the Chinese a go” Tommy roughly gained 22,000 followers on TikTok, he had over one million views in the first week alone. His online following was growing in number every single day. 

The MP is Afzal Khan, member for Gorton in Manchester (remember Tommy’s hustings on the white estates of Manchester violently attacked by Islamic groups brought in from elsewhere in the north during the European elections last year?) and is Labour’s shadow Deputy Leader of the House of Commons. 

He told Al Jazeera it was worrying that far-right figures have been able to sign up to TikTok “when they have been banned on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook”.

What should send chills down the spine of anyone who is in favour of free speech is that Afzal Khan made the effort to press the Chinese government not on the subject of Coronavirus, which is what he should have been doing, but to silence a critic of the ideology of Islam. Khan could not be arsed to bother the Chinese about a virus that emanated from their shores but instead bothered the Chinese about a man from Luton who learned that Islam is not a religion of peace, even though there are many peaceful individual Muslims. The appalling Afzal Khan set aside genuine concerns among Muslims about the terrible treatment they get in China from the Chinese government, treatment that includes putting Muslims into concentration camps. This seems like a strange priority for Khan doesn’t it?

Ms Weatherwax went on to quote from a writer at Blitz who also remarked about Afzal Khan’s odd priorities. The Blitz writer said:

That atheist, pig-eating, Muslim-slaying government is what Muslim brother Azfal Khan appealed to deal with the counter-jihad upstart Tommy Robinson.

Well said there. Afzal Khan ignored the wholesale Muslim oppressing that the Chinese government is involved in and went bleating to the Chinese Communists to shut up Tommy Robinson. I can’t help thinking that maybe he should have pressed the Chinese on the subject of their treatment of his coreligionists, rather than a man who merely asks awkward questions about Islam.

Afzal Khan and those who support him and his censorship campaign have been crowing about the ban on Mr Robinson. However it seems as if Afzal Khan’s enthusiasm for censorship is not shared by others and Khan is starting to get a fair bit of pushback for his censorious position. It goes without saying that this particular censorious MP doesn’t like being called out for being censorious and has been whining about it on Twitter and running to the police with complaints about ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’.

Here’s Afzal Khan’s Tweet.

From: https://twitter.com/Afzal4Gorton/status/1255874327779479552

Now we only have Afzal Khan’s word that this is what he received, but if we assume for a moment that he’s telling the truth and not bullshitting for effect, then these are nasty words he’s received. But that’s the point, that’s all they are, just words. Now they are not, with the possible exception of ‘scumbag’, words that I would personally use, or counsel using and I try hard not to wish death and disease on my opponents, but they are not ‘crimes’, they are words. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now I’m a bit of a free speech fundamentalist in the Sargon of Akkad mould, I believe that everyone should be allowed to say anything short of a direct, immediate and credible threat to kill or destroy. Hell, I’m Jewish and I don’t even want to see Holocaust deniers silenced because I know the only way to beat these people is with evidence and debate and if such lunatics are allowed to lurk in inaccessible corners, then they will face no challenge from normal people. They will continue to fester in their little bubbles, all the time getting worse and worse, increasingly extreme.

The fact that an MP can reach out to a Chinese company and agitate for the removal of Mr Robinson, whilst ignoring gross human rights abuses against Muslims by the Chinese government, is completely astonishing. It says a lot about Afzal Khan that he wants to silence criticisms of Islam as a priority rather than deal with much more pressing problems.

This case also shows why Britain needs its own equivalent of the US First Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees US Citizens the right to speak freely on anything, including Islam, even if what the individual has to say is complete bollocks. In America, unlike in the UK, good and bad ideas, along with those who promote these ideas, can be pitted against one another. This means that ideally good ideas eventually drive out the bad. My view is that there are very few instances in which curtailment of freedom of speech is in any way morally justified, one example would be the aforementioned threat to kill, but the text that Afzal Khan has claimed to have recived would not meet that very strict standard.

Maybe Afzal Khan just doesn’t understand why freedom of speech is important, that it should not be superceded by concerns about ‘offence’ or being ‘offended’ or views that run counter to either an individual or a political grouping’s specific narrative. Maybe he should take the time to learn, I’m sure the House of Commons Library would be able to help him with a remedial course in freedom of speech.

Because I spend most of my time in those parts of the web that still preserve the free speech that decent Britons and Americans continue to revere, I see stuff that offends me every day. I see Holocaust denial, get called a ‘Kikeservative’, get called names for rejecting things like Flat Earth and see people saying stuff about Muslims that even I, as an opponent of Islam, would not agree with. However my sense of offence should not be a path to someone being silenced or losing their liberty following a criminal trial. I see it as being immoral and unBiblical for justice to be bent to the extent it has been, where what standard of justice you get and what rights you get depends on what ‘protected characteristic’ the complainant belongs to. Justice should never be sold or bartered but this is what a lack of free speech and the growth of ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’ laws has brought about.

I despise these laws even though I come under their purview. I find it utterly immoral for example that should I be mugged on the way back from the pub, that the offender would get a far harsher sentence for calling me a ‘dirty Yid’ during the attack than if he had not. After all my physical injuries would have been the same, yet the offender is overly harshly punished for the use of particular words. That to me goes against the Biblical admonishment to have fair and equitable justice.

Societies that do not have freedom of speech are often tyranical in one way or another. They are societies where certain subjects are off limits, where dissidents ‘disappear’, where justice is capricious, where equality doesn’t exist and have all the other characteristics of nations ruled by tyrants. By appealing to the tyranical Chinese government in order to achieve the digital disappearance of Mr Robinson, Afzal Khan has shown himself to be a petty tyrant himself, a man at ease with censorship and if he is at ease with censorship, what other nasties might he want to say ‘yes’ to?

Personally I thought it was right and proper for Afzal Khan to get some pushback for playing the censor in this case, even though I don’t condone or would mimic the sort of language that was allegedly used towards him. He’s behaved exactly like a censor in a tyrannical society would behave and it’s right that he’s been called out for it. But I hope that the pushback that he’s getting is more detailed, well argued and intelligently vehement than mere personal abuse and there are signs from Afzal Khan’s Twitter feed that this may be happening and connecting the abuse that Khan is getting with Khan’s woefully poor position on freedom of speech. Maybe it might have been better to have sent Khan some John Stuart Mill instead? In any event we should, as Mill did, start to become impatient with both the censors and censorship that we suffer from in the United Kingdom, especially about matters of religion and culture. This is because there should be no place for censors like Afzal Khan in any society that considers itself to be free.