Julie Burchill and the Cult of Political Correctness

Let me start with putting the Burchill controversy into perspective.

In the past, the Guardian Media Group, of which the Observer is a member, has published articles by notorious anti-Semites, Islamic fundamentalists, 9/11 truthers, genocide deniers, and dictator apologists.

It is without question that these articles have caused deep distress and hurt to large numbers of people.

Noam Chomsky is a case in point. I despise every word of the anti-Semitic trash the man has ever written; find his pathological hate-mongering against America and his Srebrenica revisionism repulsive; and take strong objection to his glorification of the Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein regimes.

However, I would never call for Chomsky to be censored and banned from publishing.

The right to free speech is what separates us from closed, illiberal societies. The ability to absorb individuals and their views, even or especially if we do not like them, and to deal with them in a critical way – write counter-arguments, question the validity, rip it them into pieces – is what makes our societies great, healthy, and strong.

The context in which the Burchill controversy took place is important.

It all started with Suzanne Moore’s piece in the New Statesman about the challenges faced by modern women. Her reference to transsexuals caused a Twitter storm with the result that she was driven off the network by a mob of bullies, who insulted her in the strongest possible terms and accused her of transphobism.

Secondly, Julie Burchill is Julie Burchill. It is almost impossible to find a group of people she has not offended during her controversial career. While that might not be everyone’s idea of decent, responsible journalist, liberal societies must have a place for controversialists and polemics like her.

Thirdly, the central argument in Burchill’s piece, namely that transsexuals should not demand privileges over those who were born as women, is fair and legitimate.

Of course, the language used was inflammatory, insensitive, and insulting and caused hurt and anger among the transgender community.

But the point is that every day journalists write offensive material that puts individuals or groups in the line of fire. If we start banning everyone who offends one group or another, we will end up with little left to publish.

We must resist the temptation to answer  controversies, such as the Julie Burchill one, with censorship and deal with them with the weapons a free society provides us with. Shutting down journalists is not what 21st century Britain should look like.

John Mulholland’s decision to take down the Burchill piece from the Observer website was an act of 1984 Orwellianism. He might just as well join the thought police.

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I am now also under attack on Twitter  by members of the transgender community. According to them, I have failed to condemn the views expressed in the Burchill article, despite having stated repeatedly that I defend her right to free speech and not the article per se.

I will not allow a tiny group of people to spread lies about me, misrepresent my views, and bully me into an apology and clarification which I am not going to give, as I made my views perfectly clear in the first place.

Example below.

Yugoslavia, Mladić and the intelligentsia: Time to come clean

Last week, the man responsible for one of the worst crimes in modern history was arrested. Two of Serbia’s brutal trinity, Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić, have already faced the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, charged with crimes against humanity, genocide, complicity in genocide and persecution. The third however, Ratko Mladić, was on the run for over 15 years.

Many survivors and those who have lost loved ones in the massacre of Srebrenica are still waiting for answers. Any time, the phone could ring. His father, her brother, their child have been found.  A total of 7,789 names of people missing or known to be dead have been reported to the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP).

Yet, so called intellectuals like Diane Johnstone, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, continue to re-write history. According to the latter , “the evidence for a massacre, certainly of one in which 8,000 men and boys were executed, has always been problematic, to say the least.”

But how come that, if only roughly 1000 men and young boys lost their lives in April of 1995,  forensic experts have so far identified the remains of 6,186 victims?

Why has soldier Drazen Erdemovic testified in The Hague that he alone shot hundreds of innocent civilians?

What about Mr O., one of the survivors, who was buried alive for several hours under the mountain of dead bodies of his relatives and friends?

Neither Johnstone, Chomsky nor Herman have provided plausible explanations. Their so called evidence was torn to shreds by pathologist and eye witnesses, fatally undermining their academic credibility. Serbia now has the chance for a brighter future. It has finally broken with the ghosts of the bloody past. It is time for the world’s intelligentsia to come clean as well and forever ban the genocide relativists and denialists from their circles.

You couldn’t make it up: Chomsky on Osama Bin Laden’s death

Noam Chomsky is like a matrix of intellectual antimatter. When the man puts his poison-pen to work, it consistently produces a tidal wave of extreme left-wing propagandism, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and genocidal relativism.

One of my favourite Chomsky remarks ever was his reaction to the death of almost 3000 completely innocent people on September 11: “For the first time in history the victims are returning the blow to the motherland.”

It is impossible to expose moral bankruptcy more unambiguously.

None of us should thus be surprised by his obnoxious comments on Osama Bin Laden’s execution.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

What an accurate, precise and meticulous analogy, comparing the Navy Seals to Saddam’s Ba’athist henchmen and the former President of the United States to a fanatical, mass-murdering Islamic terrorist.

As one of my friends observed:  “If you’d set out to write a parody Chomsky reaction, this is kind of exactly what it would have looked like.”

Amen to that.