Free speech – Blogs Don't Burn

May 21, 2024

Our universities are failing to tackle student antisemitism

This OpEd was published in CapX on 21st May, 2024

Earlier this month, university leaders from around the country were summoned to Downing Street to discuss the recent explosion of antisemitism on UK campuses, which has been so extreme that the Community Security Trust (CST) labelled it a ‘watershed moment for antisemitism in the UK’.

Unfortunately, despite strong statements from the government that this newest revival of the world’s oldest hatred will not be tolerated, many of the solutions being proposed lack real teeth. If policymakers really want to make an impact on campus antisemitism, they should start naming and shaming those universities which are doing the least to address the crisis.

March 6, 2022March 9, 2022

Dissecting a frog – is comedy dying in the West?

There’s a famous line by E.B. White which has been rattling around my head the last few weeks. It goes like this: “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process”. This is a brilliant line, of course, but lately I can’t help thinking that the inimitable White was slightly off-the-mark on this one. After all, can a joke really be understood better by analysing it to death? Or does the process of picking it apart not only kill its impact, but also compromise our ability to understand it?

You couldn’t truly ‘understand’ a painting by dividing it into separate heaps of coloured paint. In the same way, trying to reach some objective or rational understanding of a joke –usually attempted by shearing it from context and distilling its contents under a mental microscope – can only hope to give us the most simplistic and rudimentary of knowledge.

October 30, 2019January 9, 2021

“Let the Mad Dog Bark!” – On the Social Media Ban of Alex Jones and InfoWars

Backlog: this article was written August 23rd 2018

An issue which has been doing the rounds recently online, but which has so far failed to attract much mainstream media attention in the UK, is the decision by three major tech companies – YouTube, Apple and Facebook, to ban the controversial content of Alex Jones and his site InfoWars. Those unfamiliar with Alex Jones and his work should probably take a few moments to count themselves lucky.

InfoWars is an online hotbed of frenzied political rhetoric and elaborate conspiracy theories, which in the past have included claims such as that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, that Barack Obama is the global head of Al-Qaeda, that the U.S. Government is using juice boxes to “make children gay”, and that the U.S. Air Force has in the past created weaponized tornadoes in the Midwest as part of an enduring geo-war against the American people. Come to think of it there may just be a H.G. Wells-style short story in that last one…