Views On Islam and Free Speech
Trevor Phillips has spoken on the need for free speech to "allow people to offend each other." These comments came after the protests against the Danish cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad which sparked protests in the Muslim world. He stated in an ITV interview: "One point of Britishness is that people can say what they like about the way we should live, however absurd, however unpopular it is." While supporting free speech, Phillips has spoken out against providing the far right with a platform. Discussing the Oxford Union's invitation to BNP leader Nick Griffin and Holocaust denier David Irving, he told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show: "As a former president of the National Union of Students, I'm ashamed that this has happened. This is not a question of freedom of speech, this is a juvenile provocation. What I would say to students at Oxford is: You're supposed to be brilliant. Put your brains back in your head. People fought and died for freedom of expression and freedom of speech. They didn't fight and die for it so it could be used as a sort of silly parlour game. This is just a piece of silly pranksterism and the issues are too serious to be left to that." Griffin has since hit back at Phillips by declaring him a "black racist" in an interview given to Channel 4.
Read more about this topic: Trevor Phillips
Famous quotes containing the words views, islam, free and/or speech:
“It is even more grim and wild than you had anticipated, a damp and intricate wilderness, in the spring everywhere wet and miry. The aspect of the country, indeed, is universally stern and savage, excepting the distant views of the forest from hills, and the lake prospects, which are mild and civilizing in a degree.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with which it only later became involved. From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.”
—Bernard Lewis, U.S. Middle Eastern specialist. Islam and the West, ch. 8, Oxford University Press (1993)
“Children are potentially free and their life directly embodies nothing save potential freedom. Consequently they are not things and cannot be the property either of their parents or others.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Our speech has its weaknesses and its defects, like all the rest. Most of the occasions for the troubles of the world are grammatical.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)