Robert Kilroy-Silk is a former Labour MP who has hosted a Donahue-style program on the BBC for many years now. He has, evidently, pretty trenchant views on the Middle East, some of which he vented in a recent polemic in a British newspaper. How intemperate was it? Well, it was strong – and not always well informed – stuff, and over the top in my view, but judge for yourself. You can find it here (just scroll down). For writing this article, he has been reported to the police by Britain’s ‘Commission for Racial Equality,’ and may now face criminal investigation. That’s no surprise, of course. When the demands of multiculturalism run up against the right of free speech, free speech tends to lose.
Needless to say, the BBC has chosen to suspend Kilroy-Silk. Well, that’s its right. Yes, yes it is. It’s not ‘censorship’ (fans of the Dixie Chicks please note) although the Beeb’s status as a public body, funded by an annual license fee extorted from anyone in the UK who owns a television (discounts for the blind!), complicates the argument. And so does this: Kilroy-Silk’s article was insulting about ‘Arabs’ (he should have focused on the regimes, not the people), but, two years ago another BBC regular, the poet Tom Paulin, was quoted in an Egyptian newspaper as saying that Jews living in the Israeli-occupied territories were “Nazis” who should be “shot dead”. The BBC took no action.
Now, free speech is free speech, however ugly, and I’m not necessarily saying that Paulin should have been thrown off the air, but the decision to take action against a man who is rude about Arabs, while doing nothing about a man who appeared to advocate killing Israelis, looks a little odd, doesn’t it?