Last week, the “welfare and diversity officer” at Goldsmiths College in London was charged with sending an offensive message. Bahar Mustafa, 28, had posted a Tweet with the hashtag #KillAllWhiteMen.
As so often, the police couldn’t tell the difference between between a repugnant remark and an incitement to violence, and Ms. Mustafa will appear before magistrates next month.
Now Ms. Mustafa comes across as a pretty unsympathetic character. She caused a fuss earlier this year when she banned men and white women from a student union event. “If you’ve been invited and you’re a man and/or white PLEASE DON’T COME,” she ordered. The declared purpose of the event? To discuss, er, diversity.
She also appears to be — I’m afraid there is no way of putting this gently — rather stupid. Here, for example, is her attempt to rebut the accusation of racism: “I, an ethnic minority woman, cannot be racist or sexist towards white men, because racism and sexism describe structures of privilege based on race and gender.”
Still, it is not a crime to be dumb, humorless or wrong. To Tweet #KillAllWhiteMen is obnoxious; but it is plainly not intended as a call to genocide.
This distinction used to be well understood in English common law. To be guilty of incitement you had to, you know, incite someone. In other words, a listener of sound mind might reasonably be expected to act on your words in a violent manner.
Not any more. In the past year, the police have investigated more than 300 cases caused by someone taking offense online. In a tiny handful of instances, tweets sounded specific enough to constitute a threat — though the people posting them turned out to be harmless inadequates. In most cases, though, it was the insult that was deemed criminal. One man was jailed for tweeting vile comments about a recently murdered teacher, another for posting that all UK troops “should die and go to hell” when six soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.
These cases were unusual in that they led to convictions; most come to nothing. But that’s not the point. The effect of launching a police investigation, even if nothing follows, is to chill the atmosphere. I have had constituents taken to court for distributing Bible verses deemed offensive to gay people, for saying rude things about Muslims and — in one case on the Isle of Wight — for playing “Kung Fu Fighting” on the piano in the presence of a Chinese couple.
The worst of it is that commentators who notionally support free speech tend to skulk in the shadows when these cases hit the news. Conservatives hang back from fear: They know that, if they defend free expression in the abstract, they will be accused of supporting whatever racist or sexist opinion has just been expressed. Liberals, for their part, hang back from hypocrisy: Yeah, they’re all for free speech, but it’s not their job to defend Christian fundamentalists or homophobes.
Well, then, here’s a case we can all get behind. If you’re too squeamish to get involved when a white man makes some half-witted racist joke, here’s a brown woman making a half-witted racist joke — a joke which, she assures us, is simply a way “that people in the queer feminist community express ourselves.” Ms. Mustafa may be stronger on self-righteousness than self-awareness. She may consider our Western liberties to be a sham, designed to prop up a racist patriarchy. She may, indeed, dislike the principle of unrestricted free speech. But she should benefit from that principle despite herself. That’s what living in a free country means.
Could such things happen in the United States? It’s true that the First Amendment has so far offered you better protection than pretty much anywhere else on Earth. But when I look at your universities, I see Bahar Mustafas on almost every campus. I see people losing their careers for making clumsy jokes. I see that plagiarizing your thesis is considered a lesser crime than offending a minority group.
The law is not insulated from the rest of American society. Its practitioners are products of this campus culture. How long before your courts start trying people who have said the wrong thing? Ms. Mustafa may be your future.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
