from the always excellent Snowmail, Jon Snow writes on the subject of Abu Hamza:
There’s no doubting the odious nature of the utterances captured on video tape, but I must also confess a very slight concern about the extend to which he and his hook may have been demonised . My editor tells me that it’s a typical wet liberal view (not for the first time).
which is pretty much how I feel. He’s been here for 25 years – if what he did, and said, was so heinous, why did nobody deal with it sooner. If he didn’t have a hook instead of a hand, and didn’t wear a headdress, would people be so frightened?
why aren’t we doing this with the Animal Liberation people, and the BNP?
I think, on balance, I’m not very happy with this verdict. But then I’m a woolly liberal too.
I’m as woolly a liberal as you can get, but I’m not unhappy with the Abu Hamza verdict. By all accounts (not just that in the tabloids), Hamza is a pretty vile character, well deserving of punishment for his activities. However, I would have been much happier if the BNP trial last week had generated a similar verdict (as I don’t see a lot of difference between the practices of the BNP or Hamza’s crowd). Now one suspects the Moslems will be up in arms about double standards in the British justice system.
Well, the BNP got prosecuted. Trouble is that they expect to get prosecuted, so they seem to have been careful to couch their speeches in terms that include black native-born Britons in “Us” and white immigrants in “Them”, so race-based prosecutions are harder. I don’t think Abu Hamza expected to wind up in court.
And 20 years ago the PNC had a separate application devoted to the ALF and their ilk; I don’t suppose there’s less effort going into that nowadays, for all we don’t seem to be seeing much in the way of results.
I join you in your woolly liberalism (and actually, I don’t think it’s particularly woolly).
Second attempt – LJ ate my first one.
Surprisingly, I agree with the ramtopped one. Hamza, while no doubt a deeply unpleasant piece of work and certainly an ungrateful parasite on the British taxpayer for years, was only shown to have broadcast an opinion and some calls for action.
Personally, I think it’s reprehensible to support the sort of direct action he clearly supports, but I’m not sure that the law as currently framed is particularly satisfactory. The verdict leaves something of a nasty taste in the mouth and I would share your suspicion that, had he not been such a scary looking piece of work and had his rhetoric not been so scary and offensive, he would have walked.
The BNP types, Griffin and whatever his mate is called, got the right verdict, to my mind. What they had to say is malevolent nonsense, much of it, but undoubtedly has an appeal to quite a large swathe of British society.
It’s no part of a government’s job, to my mind, to protect me, or anyone else, from what it considers dangerous ideas. The only way to destroy these ideas is to engage in debate about them; suppressing the ideas only drives them underground and, in an odd way, confers respectability on them. People who incline to the BNP point of view are hardly likely to see New Labour as people with a clear and sensible world view and will generally assume that any idea Hazel Blears doesn’t care for must, by definition, be a good one.