Speaking of the First Amendment: Ayaan Hirsi Ali on “Free Speech Is Dying in Britain”

​The ever-astute Ayaan Hirsi Ali details the decline of free speech in Britain in a way that perfectly delineates the American distinction between incitements to violence (“fighting words”) and speech that is merely ugly.
 
“After the recent [anti-Muslim] riots, people were given prison sentences for posting words and images on social media. In some cases, the illegal incitement to violence was obvious. Julie Sweeney, fifty-three, got a fifteen-month sentence for a Facebook comment: ‘Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.’ Lee Dunn, fifty-one, on the other hand, got eight weeks for sharing three images of Asian-looking men with captions such as ‘Coming to a town near you.’”
 
Ali writes in The Spectator that a “triple whammy” at the end of the century ended a long period of liberalization in the UK’s speech laws – the arrival of fundamentalist Islam in the West, the rise of far-left critical theories of social justice and the advent of the internet as the public square. The UK’s Online Safety Act, passed by the Tory government, could serve as a “censor’s charter” because of its “inclusion of the phrase ‘legal but harmful’ to characterize certain content.”
 
“The losers in all this are not the hapless fools languishing in jail because of their crude online posts,” Ali writes. “The losers are the millions of people who believe the government exists to protect us from foreign enemies and criminals, not to prohibit ideas, words or images that might offend.”