Free speech is always doused in rank hypocrisy, red in tooth and claw with lies from those you have stabbed in the back.
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Recent arrests of activists, commentators and journalists who are tough on Israel should worry us all. But don’t worry. Elon Musk and Nigel Farage have their own brand of satire to replace those who were silenced.
In the space of just one week there has been a massive, almost Orwellian crackdown on free speech, with a number of arrests made. Not in North Korea or China but in the USA and UK. Barely days after former UN weapons inspector and social media tsar Scott Ritter had his house raided by FBI officers looking for evidence that he was actually working for America’s enemies we witnessed the arrest and detention of a young British journalist called Richard Medhurst who, when arriving at Heathrow airport from overseas, was escorted off a plane and held on terrorism charges. And then remarkably, Elon Musk, a billionaire who owns X and claims to be a champion of free speech shuts down the account of Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef – which is followed by rumours on social media that the next polemic commentator to get the chop will be the YouTube talk show hosted by Judge Andrew Napolitano.
What’s going on? What do these individuals all have in common? Clearly their uncompromised stance against Israel is the issue here and we have to assume that either the Zionist State has cracked the whip and wants this baptism of criticism and scorn to stop or the initiative comes exclusively from the deep state itself in the U.S., with London ever grateful to play the role of diminutive pooch in the handbag. But the crackdown is unprecedented and really bears witness to a fear many in the west have had for some time, which is that most of these countries are parodies of democracy. Some even go further and claim, like Youssef, that western countries’ governments are controlled by Israel. Far-fetched? Less so, given the arrests and cancels in recent days.
Yet if it is all about making the accusations against Israel more round-edged, one has to ask the questions whether the decision was wise or foolhardy and taken at what level?
The genocide Israel carries out can’t be covered up or extinguished by the history books, even if those tomes are written by the victors, as Churchill once said.
Britain and the U.S. are complicit in it and will have to face the consequences for it one day. Both the ICJ and the ICC tribunals in the Netherlands are collecting evidence on a daily basis leaving many stunned by the rank desperation and stupidity of this Kristallnacht stunt both by the deep state and by Elon Musk.
The three guilty were commentators and journalists who are hell-bent on saying or reporting the truth, no matter how unpalatable it may be. We can assume in the case of the young journalist Medhurst that instructions to scare him with the Heathrow stunt were probably instructions from Langley which UK cops happily obliged to execute.
But the shutting down of Bassem Yousef just confirms our worst suspicions about Elon Musk. That, rather than being a supporter and campaigner of freedom of speech, he is a hypocrite and like so many powerful, rich people he uses the free speech platform for his own agenda. Rarely if ever, do the rich who cry out for freedom of speech ever really want absolute freedom of speech. What they want in reality is freedom of speech within their own political prism with a definite cut-off point when a line is crossed. Yousef’s criticism of Israel was clearly hitting home and influencing huge numbers of people on X and for Musk the cut-off point had been reached.
One huge supporter of Musk in the UK is Nigel Farage, who, it should be mentioned, has also started banging on the drum of free speech and was very vocal in supporting Musk who has allowed a phalanx of right-wing groups and individuals to use X as their base and to rally racism in its ugliest form, often through lying to the greater public. Recently in the UK, three toddlers were murdered and riots broke out across the country, often with clashes with British Muslims, based on tweets which were factually incorrect – stating that the murderer was a Muslim. Is this the kind of free speech that Musk and Farage are happy with having a safe haven on X?
But others who simply hold an acerbic tone against Israel and its 21st century holocaust need to be silenced? How can Musk now be taken seriously when he rambles on about free speech?
And Farage for that matter? Since when did Farage care about free speech? For well over a decade when Farage was an MEP in Brussels he showed no interest whatsoever in free speech. In fact, he contributed towards the only free speech independent outlet which investigated scandal and graft, a magazine called The Sprout, shutting down in 2006. Farage poached one of the two founding editors for his own political media needs to promote himself, whilst allowing the same individual to shut down all avenues of cooperation with the same magazine. Whilst Farage spent millions of self-promotion using European Parliament funds allocated for media, the only investigative magazine in the history of the European Union folded before his eyes – without even a cry from the leader for a whip round in the pub to try and keep it going.
Perhaps the former UKIP leader also had his own petulant agenda there as the magazine exposed a number of UKIP MEPs for fiddling their expenses while using parliamentary assistants as modern-day sex slaves. Farage only ever cared about using his parliamentary position in Brussels to promote himself, almost nearly always with big media which the European parliament actually subsidized the productions costs of to operate in the building. Rather like his absurd statement recently that he thought Putin “was evil and bad” when his relationship with Moscow was put under the spotlight, one has to laugh off most of what Nigel says as lies. Presumably he thought Putin was evil and bad when he was making shows for RT and having appearances for the Kremlin’s channel for 500 pounds a pop. Nice work if you can get it.
Let’s be serious. Whether you are billionaire Elon Musk or Nigel Farage earning a miserly 100,000 quid a month through doing TV work, free speech is always bullshit. It’s always a platform to use to promote yourself, your political views or even boost your bank balance. Free speech is always doused in rank hypocrisy, red in tooth and claw with lies from those you have stabbed in the back. Next Farage will be giving us lessons on the virtues of fidelity in marriage, or Musk on the importance of a feral, active media and its role in a healthy democracy. Free speech is a lie. Nearly all of those who talk about it are using it to rake in the money and gain more political ground. If Farage believed in free speech so much, then he would give a percentage of his salary from GB News to a new media start-up in his own constituency and he would lobby for defamation laws to be reformed.
