In what Hope not Hate will undoubtedly see as a victory, news reaches us this afternoon that Home Secretary Theresa May has banned US anti-Islamic campaigners Pam Geller and Robert Spencer from entering the UK - read more
>here< - on the grounds that their presence is not conducive to the public good.
On the whole this is consistent with government policy, and the list of people banned on the same grounds includes significant numbers of what might be broadly termed 'Islamic hate preachers'. We disagree with the notion of banning people because they express views which are not widely shared, but that is not really the point of this article.
More interesting is the response to Hope not Hate's triumphalism on their Facebook page. While Lowles and Co celebrate the halting of free speech by foreigners - it's not as if there aren't already a multitude of people in the UK who express the same views - the views of those commenting are far from wholly supportive. Several comments regarding censorship have been removed from the comment string, but as Hope not Hate feel that too much democracy is not a good thing, this is not surprising.
For all the 'hurrah's on their post, they still resolutely refuse to address one burning issue: how can they justify running a campaign against the two Americans, while failing to address the issue of Mohammed al-Arefe or Yasser al-Habib mentioned earlier today? Their views are just as reprehensible in a democracy, so where is the petition campaign? Or would that be just too much democracy?
