Zack Polanski is fuming over the Home Secretary’s decision to ban two internet-famous Israel haters from the UK. It’s ‘really grim’, he says of the exclusion from our shores of the leftist blowhards Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur. It will drag us further down the ‘dangerous road’ of tyranny, he cries. Hold on. Is this the same Zack Polanski who supported the arrest of Graham Linehan by literal armed cops for the crime of cracking a joke?
The left paved the way for the exclusion of Piker and Uygur by so egregiously failing to defend the right to speak
Why, yes it is. Polanski’s love of the liberty to utter was nowhere to be seen in September. Back then he was waving his pom poms over the cornering of a funnyman by five armed officers at Heathrow Airport. ‘It was proportionate to arrest him’, he said of the despotic nabbing of Linehan over his mick-taking of the trans lunacy. So it’s tyranny to cancel the visas of two loudmouth Yanks but fine to send a modern-day Stasi to persecute our favourite Irishman?
The left’s bluster over the banning of Piker and Uygur has been maddening. It feels like a tsunami of cant. These are people who stared at their shoes when women had their collars felt for saying people with penises are male. And who whooped when McCarthyite mobs of silver-spoon students hounded ‘hard-right’ speakers off their campuses. And who either stayed silent or smirked when 11 non-Brits were barred from attending Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally just last month.
One of those barred from Britain was Dominik Tarczyński, an elected member of the European Parliament. The government’s justification for this savage blacklisting of foreigners with ‘far right’ views is that we must protect ‘the soul of [our] country’ from their ideological filth. I’m sorry, but if you did not raise hell about that brutish closure of our borders to supposed wrongthink, then your opinion on the Piker/Uygur situation is completely worthless.
Here’s my view on it: it is wrong. It is immoral and draconian. It doesn’t only deprive two law-abiding if highly irksome foreigners of the right to speak freely in our land – it also infantilises Britons. It reduces us to the level of children who must have our dainty ears blocked to the Israelophobic blather of two blokes from overseas. This is always the double crime of censorship. It silences those who wish to speak and steals from the rest of us our right to hear, think and decide for ourselves.
Uygur is a host on the left-wing media channel The Young Turks. Piker – his nephew – is a Twitch streamer (no, me neither) who apparently pumps out hours of lefty content every day. Both are anti-Israel. Piker recently said: ‘I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.’ Now, as someone whose moral compass has not been broken on the wheel of anti-Semitism, I find this moral elevation of the Islamofascist Jew-killers of Hamas over the democratic state of Israel to be repulsive – and indicative of the counter-Enlightenment cesspit into which the modern left has sunk. But bans are never the answer.
The Home Office says the presence of Piker and Uygur – who were due to speak at the SXSW conference in London – ‘may not be conducive to the public good’. For leftists to splutter into their matcha teas over this is ridiculous. Sidelining ‘problematic’ people in the jumped-up name of ‘social cohesion’ has been the bread and butter of their activism for years.
Indeed, almost identical wording was used by the cancel-culture mob that banned me from speaking at Oxford University 12 years ago. I bet my plummy tormentors, who’d be 30-odd now and no doubt have cushy media jobs, are wringing their hands over the barring of Piker and Uygur. I guess my moral plea to them all those years ago – that in order to enjoy freedom of speech for yourself, you must furiously defend it for those you hate – still hasn’t cut through.
Our greatest revolutionary – Thomas Paine – made this point more than 200 years ago. ‘He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression’, he said. ‘For if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.’ This is precisely what the left has done: established a precedent of cruel silencing that now threatens to consume even some of its own comrades. This is more than hypocrisy. The left paved the way for the exclusion of Piker and Uygur by so egregiously failing to defend the right to speak, think and write freely.
Naturally, their explanation for the barring of Piker and Uygur is that the government has been ‘got at’ by those wily Zionists. Social media is awash with conspiratorial drivel about our government doing the sinister bidding of the Jewish State. This is poisonous bunkum. Just last year the Home Office banned two Israeli ministers – Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich – from entering the UK. Even now, the left falls back on the vicious canard about the Jews being the puppetmasters of our politics rather than getting serious about the freedom to speak. They are too blinded by bigotry to fight for liberty.
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