i thought this was just going to be that old "his mouth is moving" joke.

Let me see if I understand the BBC Rules of Engagement correctly: if you're Robert Kilroy-Silk and you make some robust statements about the Arab penchant for suicide bombing, amputations, repression of women and a generally celebratory attitude to September 11 – none of which is factually in dispute – the BBC will yank you off the air and the Commission for Racial Equality will file a complaint to the police which could result in your serving seven years in gaol. Message: this behaviour is unacceptable in multicultural Britain.

But, if you're Tom Paulin and you incite murder, in a part of the world where folks need little incitement to murder, as part of a non-factual emotive rant about how "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers on the West Bank "should be shot dead" because "they are Nazis" and "I feel nothing but hatred for them", the BBC will keep you on the air, kibitzing (as the Zionists would say) with the crème de la crème of London's cultural arbiters each week. Message: this behaviour is completely acceptable.

So, while the BBC is "investigating" Kilroy, its only statement on Mr Paulin was an oblique but curiously worded allusion to the non-controversy on the Corporation website: "His polemical, knockabout style has ruffled feathers in the US, where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive." "The Jewish question"? "Notoriously sensitive"? Is this really how they talk at the BBC?

Mr Paulin's style is only metaphorically knockabout. But, a few days after his remarks were published in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, some doughty Palestinian "activists" rose to his challenge and knocked about some settlers more literally, murdering among others five-year-old Danielle Shefi. In a touch of symbolism the critic in Mr Paulin might have found a wee bit obvious, they left her Mickey Mouse sheets soaked in blood.

Evidently Kilroy's "polemical, knockabout style" is far more problematic. For what it's worth, I accept the BBC's right to axe his show. I haven't seen it in a decade and I thought they should have axed it then. I myself got fired by the BBC a while back and, although I had a couple of rough years sleeping in a rotting boxcar at the back of the freight yards, I crawled my way back to semi-insolvency. There's no doubt in my mind that, when the CRE, the BBC, the Metropolitan Police and the Muslim Council of Britain are through making an example of him, he'll still be able to find gainful employment, if not in TV then certainly in casual construction work or seasonal fruit-picking.

But it's not really about Kilroy or Paulin or Jews, or the Saudis beheading men for (alleged) homosexuality, or the inability of the "moderate" Jordanian parliament to ban honour killing, or the fact that (as Jonathan Kay of Canada's National Post memorably put it) if Robert Mugabe walked into an Arab League summit he'd be the most democratically legitimate leader in the room. It's not about any of that: it's about the future of your "multicultural" society.

One reason why the Arab world is in the state it's in is because one cannot raise certain subjects without it impacting severely on one's wellbeing. And if you can't discuss issues, they don't exist. According to Ibrahim Nawar of Arab Press Freedom Watch, in the last two years seven Saudi editors have been fired for criticising government policies. To fire a British talk-show host for criticising Saudi policies is surely over-reaching even for the notoriously super-sensitive Muslim lobby.

But apparently not. "What Robert could do," suggested the CRE's Trevor Phillips helpfully, "is issue a proper apology, not for the fact that people were offended, but for saying this stuff in the first place. Secondly he could learn something about Muslims and Arabs – they gave us maths and medicine – and thirdly he could use some of his vast earnings to support a Muslim charity. Then I would say he has been properly contrite."

Extravagant public contrition. Re-education camp. "Voluntary" surrender of assets. It's not unknown for officials at government agencies to lean on troublemaking citizens in this way, but not usually in functioning democracies.

When Catholic groups complain about things like Terrence McNally's Broadway play Corpus Christi (in which a gay Jesus enjoys anal sex with Judas), the arts crowd says a healthy society has to have "artists" with the "courage" to "explore" "transgressive" "ideas", etc. But, when Cincinnati Muslims complained about the local theatre's new play about a Palestinian suicide bomber, the production was immediately cancelled: the courageous transgressive arts guys folded like a Bedouin tent. The play was almost laughably pro-Palestinian, but that wasn't the point: the Muslim community leaders didn't care whether the play was pro- or anti-Islam: for them, Islam was beyond discussion. End of subject. And so it was.

Fifteen years ago, when the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was declared and both his defenders and detractors managed to miss what the business was really about, the Times's Clifford Longley nailed it very well. Surveying the threats from British Muslim groups, he wrote that certain Muslim beliefs "are not compatible with a plural society: Islam does not know how to exist as a minority culture. For it is not just a set of private individual principles and beliefs. Islam is a social creed above all, a radically different way of organising society as a whole."

Since then, societal organisation-wise, things seem to be going Islam's way swimmingly - literally in the case of the French municipal pool which bowed to Muslim requests to institute single-sex bathing, but also in more important ways. Thus, I see the French interior minister flew to Egypt to seek the blessing for his new religious legislation of the big-time imam at the al-Azhar theological institute. Rather odd, don't you think? After all, Egypt isn't in the French interior. But, if Egypt doesn't fall within the interior minister's jurisdiction, France apparently falls within the imam's.

And so, when free speech, artistic expression, feminism and other totems of western pluralism clash directly with the Islamic lobby, Islam more often than not wins – and all the noisy types who run around crying "Censorship!" if a Texas radio station refuses to play the Bush-bashing Dixie Chicks suddenly fall silent. I don't know about you, but this "multicultural Britain" business is beginning to feel like an interim phase.

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WE THE PEOPLE at IMC are just as incensed by racist egostists such as Kilroy spouting a load of ignorant sneering toss about Arab culture as we would be about some frothing Islamic fundamentalist claiming that all white people are cavemen whose forefathers fucked dogs.

Opposition to one form of racism is NOT support for another. And pathetically threadbare arguments about the Right's rather partial and selective take on "free speech" do not alter this one jot.

You tit.

Its not often I agree with bloated reactionary warmonger Cde Aaronovitch, but here you go...

It's nothing to do with free speech

David Aaronovitch
Tuesday January 13, 2004
The Guardian

Here, as I understand it, is the public train of thought of Robert Kilroy-Silk in the period since the BBC canned his show over the "Whoops, there it is again!" article in the Sunday Express nine days ago. One, he's sorry. Though, two, he was right anyway. Three, it was the wrong column faxed in error by a stupid secretary. Though, four, he was only saying what an awful lot of people really think, are too scared to say and didn't his own father die in the war to protect just this kind of free speech? But, five, it was all about Arab countries in any case, not yer actual Arabs, and you can't be racist about countries. So, six, please give me my job back. Seven, on second thoughts forget the "please".

Let's deal with the free speech canard first. Mr Kilroy-Silk is not being gagged; he is free to say what he likes. But the BBC is not under any obligation to use presenters who, in other guises, offend and insult a substantial section of its own licence-fee payers. Actually, the corporation is under quite an obligation not to. And since Kilroy-Silk raises the issue of his father himself, it seems unlikely that Churchill and the class of 1943 would have regarded the guaranteeing of jobs to controversialist talk-show hosts as being the very essence of liberty.

Was the repeating article about countries, not people? The unintentionally comical "what have they ever done for us?" section was indeed prefaced by a reference to Arab nations. (Historically, of course, this is moot, but may have resulted from a misunderstanding. Schoolboy Kilroy: "But name one thing that Mesopotamia was famous for, sir?" Schoolmaster: "Ur.")

But a lot of it was about Arabs. As in, "There could be few starker demonstrations of the difference between Britain and the United States and the Arabs than the manner in which they treat their civilians and their dead ... Who says that all cultures are morally equal?" In other words, the Arabs have a morally inferior culture. Or, "We're told that the Arabs loathe us ... What do they think we feel about them? ... That we admire them for being suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women repressors?"

The bit, though, that tells you what Kilroy-Silk the writer is all about, is this sentence: "We have thousands of asylum seekers from Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries living happily in this country on social security." This point is not actually an invalid one, though Iran is - famously - not an Arab country. But why the gratuitous mention of asylum seekers living happily on social security? What is the function of that phrase? We know what it is; it's code. They come over here, they take our money, they take advantage of us. You know who: the strangers, the outsiders, the grinning piccaninnies. The ones you feel resentful about - and you know what? You're right!

Three years ago. the City correspondent of the Sunday Express, David Hellier, issued a statement about what was going on at the paper under new owner Richard Desmond. "I'm sickened," said Hellier, "by the inflammatory hate-stirring headlines on asylum seekers."

The next year, though, was worse. An analysis of headlines in 2002 furnished these (among many others) from the Express titles: January 21 - Cut benefits and stem the asylum tide; January 25 - Refugees in under-age sex scandal; June 8 - Anger at 5-star migrant centre; Asylum luxury; June 19 - Asylum violence fear for villages; July 7 - Asylum law lets pervert stay in UK; July 11 - Neighbours' fear of asylum seeker held in ritual killing case; Voodoo lady terrified us. And so on. On his website, the old British Nazi leader, John Tyndall, particularly relished the splash from April 7: Got Aids? Welcome to Britain. "That heading," said Tyndall, "aptly described the sheer lunacy to which the present government's immigration policies have now descended."

Later on in the same year, the Sunday Express's star columnist, Kilroy-Silk, wrote about a school in Sandwell where children were "having all semblance of an education destroyed by politicians in faraway London swamping their schools with Russians, Romanians, Palestinians, Arabs, Albanians, Kurds - you name it, they've got it." He continued, "It's all right all the chestbeaters in Hampstead and Islington ranting on about the need for us to admit more immigrants, but it is the English kids in Cape Primary, not them, who shoulder the burden."

Kilroy-Silk obviously knows no more about Islington than he does about Iran, but forget that, because I want us to consider the use of the word "English" here. Again, it's a perfectly good argument that a great concentration of kids with language and other problems in one school is unfair. Unfair, that is, to all of the children - so why mention just the English ones? "English" is there, once again, to stress that it is the "us" who are being put upon by "them".

That's the problem. Kilroy-Silk the writer represents that growing strand of phallic, competitive journalism, which prides itself on its bluntness and mocks qualification or complexity. From his 13 acres in Amersham he stirs the nasty pot. And if I were his mirror-image, I would forget to mention that - among other things - he is actually quite a good broadcaster who has been a stalwart campaigner for prison reform, and simply describe him as a gobby, braised, semi-talented under-celebrity who specialises in exploiting the weak and attacking the vulnerable.